Check Out Jack Bennett’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jack Bennett.

Hi Jack, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Born in New Jersey and grew up in Virginia, first outside the Washington D.C. area and then in Southwest Virginia. I lived there after graduating college and worked for my alma-mater, Virginia Tech. I worked in the police department for eight years. As a civilian, but I still had to get state-licensed and trained in non-lethal self-defense (which meant getting pepper-sprayed voluntarily so I’d take it seriously as a weapon. It worked!). While living in Blacksburg, VA I also worked at the college town record store/video store and used my spare time to make DIY movies, recruiting theatre students from Tech as well as interesting locals for my casts. I also grew a reputation as a visual media creator-for-hire, doing everything from covering news stories to directing commercials. By 2007 my third film as director had made it into a regional film festival. By 2010 my films had played international film festivals. By 2011 I had won awards at international film festivals, and in September of that year I moved to Los Angeles. I wasn’t getting into Sundance or getting offers from afar, I just felt like I had two choices; stay put and see how far I get as an underground filmmaker or find out what happens when I throw my hat in the big ring. Since relocating to LA I’ve become a hybrid of the filmmaker I was back east and the new niche I found out west; putting together casts and crews of like-minded collaborators and self-producing narrative films, while freelance producing and directing for hire, often with those same collaborators!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I don’t know anyone who moved here from a remote location in rural America, without any family connections or money in the bank, and then had an easy road in the movie business. It has felt like an uphill climb but I have to recognize advantages I had, especially that I moved to LA in my thirties with an already strong sense of who I was and what I wanted to do. I don’t know if I would have been eaten alive moving out here in my twenties. I got my first paid directing gig in LA almost accidentally, after living here about eight months. Common wisdom says that doesn’t happen but it happened for me… albeit in that case I netted $2,500 for what amounted to five months of work. How did I live on that for five straight months? I think you figure it out when you’re focused on a professional goal rather than a personal lifestyle. I was consistently broke and in a constant state of processing my circumstances. I kept putting myself out there and then something or someone would come along and grab me for a gig that would keep me going for a while, then the cycle would repeat! Eventually the gigs got bigger and the windows between them shorter, but it’s never a straight line; we all end up swerving and weaving. Work always made sense. Even when it felt like my life or the outside world was falling apart I could look at an editing job or a directing gig and say “At least I know what to do with this.” The only hard part has been the unpredictable nature of the business! That’s sometimes due to chaotic and occasionally toxic people but more often than not it’s just these industry-wide rough waters we all end up swimming in. You never know where anything is going to lead or who is going to lead you there. That taught me quickly to not beat myself up for the aspects of my career that aren’t in my control. I can only control my choices. I think I always got through uncertainty about the future by being really focused on the present; the most pressing problem, the task at hand, standing at A and figuring out the path to B. That approach is particularly suited to making movies. I also try to just be true to myself and be honest about what I can do and what genuinely interests me. That probably began as a way to keep my bearings but the result has been that people who like me like the real me, not some facade I concocted and maintained to ingratiate myself to people in the business. If you fake it until you make it that can mean that you didn’t make it at all, it was the fake you!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I direct! I produce! I write! I guess I’m even an actor, virtually by accident. I edit because nobody needs another damn director but everybody needs an editor. On most productions I wind up with multiple jobs. I’ve produced a lot of music videos, documentaries, a couple of concert films and live events… I wear a lot of hats but directing is what I’m most passionate about and accustomed to. It’s the job that allows you to work with every department and set the tone. A lot of it is just working with people, each with their own approach, and providing whatever you can to get their best. My sets are focused and professional, and that has more to do with who is on the crew than anything, but they’re fun too, most of all for me. We work hard but there’s a reason why we don’t want to go work in an office and punch the clock. Making movies is fun! On a production day directing is all about getting the job done while getting the best footage possible, it’s the push and pull of “We want this to be perfect but we only have so much time” and every day is finding the sweet spot in the middle. The feedback I’ve gotten is that I’m someone who increases the quality of the footage beyond the budget. Again, that has everything to do with your collaborators but it also comes from how you bring it all together. When I made the music video ANTHRAX: BLOOD EAGLE WINGS, my first official gig with the band after years of working with Scott Ian, the challenge was taking less than $50K and turning it into GAME OF THRONES-level production value. I’m proud of how close we got! Rolling Stone called that video “chilling and epic.” Anything else I bring to the table is a mystery to me. All the interviews that I conducted for my documentary about GALAXY QUEST started with me cold-calling each person’s management and just telling them about the project. No talent booker, no stipend to offer, no big name to drop. Who knows why they said yes? A lot of it was goodwill passed along, having advocates, people we had already interviewed saying “This guy’s cool, you’re in good hands.” That goodwill comes with a responsibility too, if someone recommends me for a job I only want to reward the confidence they have in me and do them proud. Scott suggested me to direct and produce MR. BUNGLE: THE NIGHT THEY CAME HOME and everybody on that project went above-and-beyond. It’s a contender for my proudest moment, capturing an all-time favorite band giving this explosive, euphoric performance while juggling guest stars with COVID restrictions, a compressed schedule, a limited budget… the record label would have been happy with less than what we gave them but my DP Mike Moghaddam had this incredible creativity to bring and the sound department were these wizards led by Jay Ruston and we took what could have been a typical livestream and turned it into a concert film. My crew were all laughs during filming and the band members kept telling me how special this one was. We did it again the next year with ANTHRAX XL, an anniversary concert with a lot of the same crew. The energy dipped for a second while we were filming and then Chuck D came in and blew the roof off the place. I have those kinds of experiences frequently when it’s a film we’re all doing for the sake of creativity, when it’s just talented people who want to make something together, but to have that joy happen on what’s essentially work for hire is particularly sweet.

We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
…that I never went to film school? That sometimes comes as a surprise to people. I’m not exactly self-taught, but my film classes were all analysis and theory until one production class my junior year of college. I learned what worked from making movies on my own and putting them in front of an audience, I’ve been doing that now since I was 20 years old. Every time I made a movie I made mistakes and learned lessons that I couldn’t wait to apply to the next one. Then on the next one I made all new mistakes and had to make another movie to fix those. If you do that enough times you’ll look back and realize you’ve created a body of work! That was my education, at this point I’ve taught more film classes than I’ve taken. That’s another thing people maybe don’t know about me; I taught film to international high school students for about four summers over at UCLA. Teenagers who came to Los Angeles from all over the world; France, Spain, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine, South America, Turkey, Chilé. I taught them production and post-production techniques and helped them create their first short films. I went from running around campus stealing shots in Virginia to doing the same thing a decade later with a class in Westwood! I got to relive a little of that process of discovery through their experiences, when you get taught in a classroom but really learn by doing. They all took it seriously and got into their roles. That was long enough ago that some of them might be full-time filmmakers by now!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://vimeo.com/864235415/1cc2ff2e33
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/notherealguy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JackDanielBennett
• Twitter: twitter.com@thatjackbennett
• Other: http://www.imdb.me/jackbennett

Image Credits
Sigourney Weaver, Dan Kavanaugh, Justin Cruse, John Humphrey, Mike Patton, Liesel Hanson, Elise Howard, Sophia Cacciola, Anthrax (Joey Belladonna, Frank Bello, Charlie Benante, Jon Donais, Scott Ian), Marquis Bell, Mike Moghaddam, Fayna Sanchez, Meg Wachter