Life & Work with Ricky Rhodes

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ricky Rhodes.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My life changed forever on a Tuesday afternoon in the spring of 2018 when I got a call from Hans Zimmer’s team… but we’ll get to that later. Looking back, I was a creative kid who was obsessed with dinosaurs, Legos, and stories. I loved building imaginary worlds and dreaming up scenes that starred my toys and pet lizards, Speedy and Gex. I had an insatiable desire to draw made-up characters that were always on some kind of epic quest. When I was 10 years old, I watched The Matrix and though I didn’t fully understand it, I knew it was a big deal and that I wanted to make something like it. In middle school, my sisters and I wielded a digital handycam to make short movies. With a tripod we managed to do a basic cut that created the effect of my sister morphing into the family cat, fulfilling our fantasy of escaping bedtime to freely roam the night. My Mother, Catherine Rhodes, would excitedly sit me down on Sundays (culture day) to watch classic movies like The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, and 2001 A Space Odyssey. Certain movies were important to her and she passed that down to me. To this day my Mom’s annual Oscars party is a family ritual that is as meaningful as Christmas.

I graduated with a bachelor of arts in film production with emphasis in cinematography at California State University, Northridge. Through my classes, I was able to direct many small projects, which gave me the opportunity to experiment, fail, and learn what it takes to make a good film. Comedy improv class, an elective outside of my major, was pivotal for getting me out of my comfort zone and experimenting with acting. In that class, I met some friends who were the missing puzzle pieces to starting the youtube sketch comedy group Planet Froth. With our small but mighty team assembled, we participated in the 48-Hour Film Festival in Los Angeles, which required us to write, shoot and edit a short film in 48 hours. After a sleepless weekend, we produced the film “Timeless,” which made it to the “best of” screening and won an award. That early validation empowered us to dive deeper into our filmmaking, setting the stage for something much bigger to come.

My aunt, Kathy Rhodes, is a legendary commercial producer who forged her own path through the male-dominated film industry in the early 80s. She hired me as a production assistant on the set of a BMW commercial with the world-famous director, John Hillcoat. Some of his movies are The Road and The Proposition. Anticipating the shoot, I sent John my latest short film, “Lucid,” but he did not respond, which I should have expected. John arrived on set in slow motion with an entourage of cool creatives. He walked up to me and said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your shorts. It’s ingrained in my memory. All of those primitive artifacts, growing and changing shapes; almost primeval. It’s one of the most genuinely surreal cinematic experiences I’ve had. Were you on anything?” We laughed and chatted a bit then got back to work. John hired me as his assistant for the next two years after that day. He knew that my goal was to direct so he would drop nuggets of wisdom as we were working. Once John spoke about film endings, “never be one hundred percent clear on any ending, because life has no clear ending.” John is a brilliant director and I am grateful to have learned so much from him.

One day in the spring of 2018, I was working on the set of a Walmart commercial at Hans Zimmer’s studio. A curious man in a black t-shirt started a conversation with me about film production. He had a vague idea for a project and asked me many rapid-fire questions about how I would produce it. That job ended and I moved on to the next one. The following Tuesday, I was laying in a sunny spot on the carpet of my casita in Highland Park, listening to Kendrick Lamar. My phone rang and an unknown number appeared on the screen. I took a stale breath and answered. It was Hans Zimmer’s team and they were interested in collaborating on a production. After I hung up the phone, my heart was racing. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime big break moments that you only hear about in stories. I immediately called my film partner, Jordan Henderson, and a couple of weeks later we produced the music video for Hans Zimmer’s song “Time” that he composed for the Christopher Nolan movie, “Inception.” Hans is a deeply creative and soulful human and working with him is fluid. On one occasion I asked Hans what the character motivation in our film is and he answered, “love.” That’s how Planet Froth Productions, our message first media company, was born. Now it is a full-service production company, working with clients from development through production. We have made narrative and documentary films, commercials, music videos and will be producing a new feature film and episodic content in 2023. Some of our work was for Warner Bros., Hans Zimmer, Truist Mobile Banking, Prudential, Signal, Attawalpa, and Bob’s Dance Shop.

In 2020, I directed “Not Just Another Day,” a social justice documentary about the racial disparities of cannabis possession arrests. It hits the nerve on a deeply systemic contradiction of criminalizing Black people for cannabis possession at a rate of four times greater to that of White people, all while cannabis is legally being sold. This injustice was my pilot light, motivating me to work on the project every day. The film won multiple awards for best documentary short at film festivals and was featured in a Forbes article. You can watch “Not Just Another Day” on the Planet Froth website right now, so go check it out! In 2022, I directed “Yellow Wallpaper,” a period drama and psychological thriller, which I adapted from the pivotal feminist short story from the 1890s. Hysteria was a blanket diagnosis that men used for anything that they found unmanageable or mysterious in women. This diagnosis was one of the many tools for controlling women. In The Yellow Wallpaper short story, the lead character suffers from postpartum depression, but her physician husband diagnoses her with hysteria and performs an experimental treatment on her, which drives her to madness. Women’s rights are still in jeopardy even in the U.S., as we saw in 2022 with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. We had a preview screening of the “Yellow Wallpaper” short film at the Coronado Island Film Festival in November of 2022. The world premiere and full festival run will happen in 2023. “Yellow Wallpaper” is the pilot episode of our American Gothic Mini-Series that is in development. We are adapting exceptional short stories that have relevant messages to present-day.

That’s a bit of my story thus far, and the rest is still being written.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Below is a short letter to my past self:

Dear aspiring film director,

Directing is one of the hardest games in town, so it is not wise to expect a smooth road to the top. The journey requires clever creativity, a talented crew, insane grit, and relentless resourcefulness.

Studying auteur cinema, art, and great books cultivates taste and intuition for making decisions about what is creatively good, from the thousands of small decisions on set to the larger context of cinema as a whole.

Directors direct. The only way to make a film is with a crew. Inspire them with the uniquely creative elements and profound message that your story is going to deliver. Your crew becomes your family. Take care of them and encourage an open creative dialogue. You will rise together.

You need capital to make movies. Write a treatment, script, budget and financial plan to pitch to investors and distributors. Pitch, pitch, pitch!

Every shot has the potential to push the boundaries of cinema and capture a unique human truth. Cultivate your garden, rally your team, do the hard work, trust your intuition, and direct.

With love, A growing director

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
People often ask me what kind of films I make. I am not tied to one genre, style, or medium. My niche is directing films with powerful messages. I am motivated by important stories that ultimately help progress society forward. I believe in pushing the boundaries of cinema for a story with the right message.

A film is an excellent vehicle for delivering a message, but it is often misused purely for profit. A bad film with no message can be profitable but will have no resonance and eventually be regarded as a waste of people’s time. A great film is a deeply human experience that delicately lands the viewer into new thoughts, feelings and ideas, expanding their consciousness and empathy, and reconnecting them to the fleeting beauty of life on earth. A great film becomes something that society cherishes.

Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Cre·a·tive grit /krēˈādiv ɡrit/

Sustaining imagination and original solutions to develop and produce a project.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.planetfroth.space
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therickyrhodes/