Today we’d like to introduce you to Leo Nussenzveig.
Hi Leo, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
It all started with a love of movies. Every Friday after school, my dad would take me to the local Blockbuster to rent a couple of movies to watch over the weekend. These usually the newest release of animated/kid’s movies but on occasion, I would rent a very formative movie, like Jurassic Park or Star Wars. There was a kind of magic that captured me early on. There was a huge focus on world-building and a plethora of characters to learn about. In one of the bonus DVDs of the Star Wars re-release was the documentary Empire of Dreams. This was a feature-length “making-of” doc about the first three movies (IV-V-VI). It really peeled back the curtain for me and put into perspective the amount of work and care that goes into making a movie. From that point on, I knew I wanted to work in film.
In high school, I took a short-lived but very formative photography class, where I learned the basics of how cameras and lighting work. I found out that I had a knack for it. After the class got canceled, I spent a lot of my spare time just taking pictures. I think at this point in my life, I really wanted to be a cinematographer, so I played a lot with the resources I was given. Every family vacation, I would just lug around an extra bag which consisted of a bulky SLR (D7000) and a huge 20-85mm zoom lens. My mom wanted to foster my love for movies and interest in production so she told me to apply for the USC Beginning Directing Summer program (2013). This was the first time I was exposed to the resources and manpower to actually make something other than a still image. I also learned the basics on how to craft a compelling story here. I absolutely loved it. I ended up directing a project that was voted to represent the class in the final program-wide showcase. The next year I did a very similar program at NYU.
I ended up attending NYU for Film and TV production and eventually shifted my focus into directing once I studied abroad in the Czech Republic. The program was in collaboration with FAMU, a revered European film school whose alums include Jiri Menzel and Milos Forman. While there was a heavy cinematographic component (we were shooting on 35mm), I took to finding and writing a story that works with Prague’s deeply influential place in history. I looked to more specifically their film history and tried my hand at writing a movie that would feel at home in the Czech New Wave. A movie called ‘Landscape’, an experimental short about two boys working on an infinite field as a power struggle between a land owner and his son play out in the background, came out of that endeavor. This was the turning point into wanting to be a director. I sent the short out to festivals later that year. It picked up a couple of laurels and won an award for writing. However, that summer, I started work on a feature script that eventually became my first feature film called ‘The Doldrums.’
Writing The Doldrums took the entire last year of college. The film is about three high school friends and how their friendship deteriorates over the years as one goes off to college and the other two stay behind. The events in the film were based off of my memories, experiences, and stories my friends would tell me. I decided that I didn’t want to make a thesis film but dive directly into a feature. The film took a little over 4 years to complete (from script to final cut) and as of this time, it is currently in festivals!
This is also around the time where I started studying Latin music and jazz in an academic capacity. This resulted in me spending a month in Cuba attending a jazz festival in Havana where every performance became the best concert I had ever been to. There, I met an anthropologist/jazz guitarist who would become a future collaborator and a close friend. He convinced me to help him write a grant to study the music of Cape Verde, which is an archipelago off the coast of Senegal, and use my skills as a filmmaker to make a documentary. We got the funding for the trip but we had to delay it for a number of years because of the pandemic. During this time I wanted to study anthropology in a more official capacity, so I enrolled in a master’s program at USC called MVA (Masters of Visual Anthropology), which uses documentary as a means of presenting data and field findings. I pitched the Cape Verdean documentary as my thesis. In 2022, we finally got to go. We went to three islands, attended festivals, met a lot of important people, and shot a good amount of footage. The documentary is currently being edited together. I’m in my final year of the program.
Throughout my life, I have always managed to keep myself busy with projects and I am just glad I can align that interest with my professional aspirations. I am very much at the beginning of my career, but I hope that I can keep doing these creative projects for the rest of my life.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No matter what you do, there are always hiccups. I mean, choosing to go down a writer-director path, especially when I don’t have family in the industry, is one big obstacle after another. Film is a business in the United States, and all businesses are risk-averse. It can feel like a Catch 22 at times where: to prove yourself, you have to do something, but to do something you have to prove yourself, while that on the surface is true, there are small things you can do to eventually have things fall in your favor (be in the way of luck). I always like to be working on something. Projects have their own set of problems, especially feature films. When making The Doldrums, it was like putting out one fire after another (that being said, it was a smoothly operating set, that is just the nature of filmmaking), but if you don’t have the budget for a lot of personnel, you end up, as the director, dealing with a lot of the problems yourself. My point is, through my little experience, the first challenge is to get to do the work and then the second challenge is to do the work, after which you just rinse and repeat. There are very few points where it isn’t hard, at least in independent filmmaking. It’s kind of making a career out of obstacles, but I love it. It is the only thing I want to do. Maybe the only thing I can do.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
So I specialize in writing and directing. Since I am at the very beginning of my career, I make movies on a small scale, mostly self-funded. Usually, my work focuses a lot on memory and how images and emotions can get skewed over time. The Doldrums, the work I am most proud of, has a dream-like quality and is fully derived from people’s accounts of their adolescence. There is an editorial position that I have to take to craft these stories into a cohesive narrative. There is where it breaks from perceived reality and turns into fiction. However, if I experienced these things, oftentimes, through adapting my memories to narrative, the fictional account replaces the once original memory. Sometimes it gets very weird. One time I almost forgot the name of a friend from my past because I had been thinking of him as the character in one of my works for the past couple of years and when someone brought him up to me, it drew a blank for a good while. It can create issues at times, but I like to think of it as dedication, that my experiences are worth something.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I’m always down to collaborate with people. Usually if we share the same vision, there can be an endless amount of places we can take an idea. Other than that, there is financial support for projects or networking. Either way, any small help in the creation of something is very appreciated. All I can say is making a living from directing and writing is my goal.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.leonardonussenzveig.com/
- Instagram: @leo_of_apple
Image Credits
Photographs taken by Alex Wohlin and Audrey S. Lin Painted Poster by Nicolette Sloan
