Daily Inspiration: Meet Eli Dettlaff

Today we’d like to introduce you to Eli Dettlaff

Hi Eli, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Women have always had a strong influence on who I am and how I perceive the world.

As a man raised by a single mom, the community of her friends, my grandmothers, and her partners, the strongest and most reliable people I have known have always been women.

Growing up impoverished gave me an experience which is unfortunately not unique.

Growing up impoverished with a single mother studying psychology, however, was more so.

As I got older, my interest in psychology increased, as did my class awareness as I encountered friends whose families were better off than anyone in my family’s history, or than I could ever imagine being on the trajectory of.

Movies had always been a hidden cornerstone of my life.

I didn’t realize the importance and impact of films in my own life until I really became committed to understanding the form, a commitment made during an experience on mushrooms and one I have remained committed to since.

I used to have insomnia as a child. I wouldn’t be able to sleep or would awake shortly after going to bed and I would watch TV in my room with the volume low or silent but after my mom caught me watching TV after my bed time she took away the TV. So I’d wait until it got really late and I would sneak downstairs to watch infomercials late at night until I got tired enough to go back upstairs and go to sleep. I think I was only caught once or twice in bouts of insomnia months long that spanned years. Now I can sleep on command.

We mostly had basic cable through my childhood so we watched a lot of VHS’s and I would watch my favorite movies on repeat, *Princess Bride*, *James and the Giant Peach*, the first *Land Before Time*, *What About Bob*, *Patch Adams*, *The Birdcage*. Sometimes I’d spend entire evenings rewatching the same movie again and again, often watching them late at night when insomnia struck.

I was a very active child. I played in my neighborhood for many hours daily. Most winter days were spent almost entirely outside or playing with several kids at a friend’s house in the subsidized living townhouses in East Lansing, MI off Raindrop road.

Movies meant a lot to me as a child, especially when I was allowed to see another of my mom’s VHS’s after she would screen them again to make sure she was okay with the content. As I got a bit older and was able to see the film *What Dreams May Come*, starring Robin Williams (a favorite actor of mine by the time), we discussed more philosophical and metaphysical ideas of what could be after this. My mom was never really a Christian and didn’t put effort into conveying that ideology to me, though it was heavily enforced by my grandmother throughout the years. I value this of her as it shortened the cycle of disillusionment I experienced when I realized the god my grandmother and her congregation were speaking to was not the same experience I would ever have with its foundations.

I was an atheist for some years until considerable experiences with mushrooms expanded my spiritual experiences, both under the influence and sober. It was through my experiences with shrooms that I came to the deepest understandings of myself, the decisions my mother made through my life for us, what I believe spiritually and artistically, and truly was cured of my suicidal ideations through deeper philosophical resignations.

It took many years, conversations, studies, and perspectives to convince my mother that what I was doing and had done was not only spiritually healing, but scientifically proven to help process and heal in ways not otherwise experienced.

It was on an acid trip in my friend’s basement watching the final ~20 minutes of Deathproof at 19 years old that I realized I wanted to be a filmmaker. That if I devoted my life to a singular thing, genuinely devoted to understanding, creating, and bettering myself in this field that I could, at the very least, create things I wanted to see in the world.

When I was 20, shoveling the driveway in South Bend, IN, and my eyes began to freeze because it was so cold outside, I decided, beyond anything else, I would get the fuck out of the cold. I would not be experiencing winter again, and shortly thereafter I met someone who, after getting to know deeper while trimming weed with family in MI, invited me to stay in his van for a couple weeks on Venice Beach when he returned to LA.

So, with $700 dollars to my name, I came to LA. I filmed him busking on the beach playing funk punk, slapping a bass as the lead and singing, backed up by our unhoused friends on the beach. Shortly thereafter I got a place trading work for rent in Bellflower, did the same in SFV staying in a hostel full of meth addicts who would hotbox the garage, got a job at a restaurant, bounced around the valley, and ended up getting a place in West Hollywood where I still reside.

Every job and place I’ve lived almost without exception has been from Craigslist. I cannot vouch for the platform enough, it has literally saved my life and I continue to field work from there when work slows down from regular clients that I’ve established through those gigs or word of mouth.

During the pandemic I truly committed myself to filling my blindspots in film. For over a full year I watched at least 2 films a day, primarily from the Criterion Channel/Collection, and took part in several film festivals where I would watch every single short film, some upwards of 75 in 3 days, and wrote brief analysis and reviews on each one. Many films I would watch more than once, and when heavily studying them I would watch them 4+ times in a week. When I was heavily studying The Shining, I watched the film ~10 times, and still frequently watch it to this day.

This obsessive study of film has proven overwhlemingly valuable and has been explicitly cited as a reason I have been brought on to projects. If you are looking to direct, shoot, or write films, I cannot recommend highly enough that you similarly develop your visual lexicon. When you can approach almost any project and cite relevant shots, sequences, or entire projects people have never heard of it adds significant value to your role and to the overall cohesion of the project’s vision. Watch different kinds of films from different eras and regions of the world and investigate that which you don’t understand. It will prove valuable to you and those you work with.

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?
The fundamental obstacle is and will always be capitalism. From Chaplin to Kubrick to Scorsese, creatives have battled corporations to make the art they desire and that will always be the greatest hurdle. To survive and to create that which we desire is the fundamental battle.

Mental health has been an obstacle as money has but all things come and go, both money and sanity. Do what you can to hold on to both.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I primarily work on music videos, scripts, shorts, brand films and adjacent content.

I’ve been shooting film for the last year and that is the primary focus of my instagram material.

I’m currently in pre-production on a short film comprised of music videos which will cover the entirety of the debut album Cycle Breaker by Overdreaming (AKA Hunter Richkind). It is a 60’s poetics inspired piece which heavily draws from films such as Daisies, Color of Pomegranates, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The sensibilities of pieces like M (1931), Mind Game (2005), Possessor (2020), and Everything Everywhere All At Once are fundamental to our process and inform the technical and creative decisions we make.

I’ve written over 30 short scripts with a handful produced and am currently shopping around pilot material with an established playwright.

I’m also working on an interview series with established creatives to highlight the work they do, the paths they have taken to get where they are, and to show others how one may do what they do.

Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
Aside from what I listed above, I have come to understand that the foundations of any medium are applicable to any other. That as you develop your skills in one field, you will find their usefulness in any creative field. While the dexterity of weaving yarn may not be applicable to conceptualizing narrative structure, it is applicable to pulling focus, and in a more fluid way, the mental effort involved in discerning the physical material before you is akin to discerning the conceptual material before you.

Everything is valuable and very few things are ever truly a waste of one’s time.

That said, saturating yourself in what you desire to do is the fastest way to doing it.

Want to make music like Kurt Cobain? Saturate yourself in his work, hang his posters up, listen to what he listened to, watch his interviews, research breakdowns of his material and structure, drown yourself in the artist’s material and you will be unable to create material not influenced by their work.

Say you are what you want to do and do that thing. Develop your skills, take criticism, and evolve.

As well, take your time to learn things. Truly learn them. Variations of this phrase have been told for many years but I first learned it in martial arts as “Fast is Slow, Slow is Fast.” Study slowly, learn quickly. Study quickly, learn slowly. The same is applicable to moving around a set. If you move fast and break things, it’s slower than if you had moved slowly with intention.

In my time I have come to understand that film, the visual moving medium, is the most powerful medium in history. That the ideas, whether true or not, cement themselves in the cultural zeitgeist to become, at the very least, a point of cultural fact. That, as Charlie Kaufman conveys in *I’m Thinking of Ending Things*, we often communicate and most deeply connect through the media we experience. We speak to each other in our most vulnerable moments as we have seen it done on the screen. That many of the most connective moments of our lives, of our relationships with our parents, our partners, our friends and strangers is through lines as seemingly insignificant as “I’ll be back,” or the exchange “I love you.” “I know.”

The moments we experience with others become our films and our films become the moments we experience with others. This, especially in contemporary society, is the very fabric that we are made of. You are what you eat and *All That Jazz.*

I have shared my knowledge of psychology, my experiences, and my philosophies with others. I have been called to mediate disagreements, oversee negotiations, give life advice, and hold space for others to vent, and time and time again when I see the impact that the relevant knowledge I have has when applied or internalized, I am reminded of the overwhelming fact that knowledge is power.

The visual moving medium disseminates knowledge faster and more potently than any other and the ways that it does so and the messages that are conveyed must be scrutinized to the nth degree because that which is normalized in our most popular media is that which is internalized deepest throughout our culture.

The knowledge, the lessons we have, empower others. They save lives. They keep us from pain and our own short-sightedness. They open the world to us and show us that there is more to our experience than we can comprehend and that through knowledge, effort, and luck, many of us can make better lives for ourselves together.

Do whatever you can to keep empowering yourself and others.

For this is the cursed knowledge I will pass on to you:

It is your responsibility to do so.

If you truly believe, if you genuinely are of the cause of raising all up, of bettering humanity, of building a future (at this point, any one at all), then it is your responsibility to pass on your knowledge and to keep developing yourself for the future to come.

It is cursed knowledge because purely by the virtue of knowing it, it also becomes your responsibility to pass it on to others. To curse them. To burden them, as you now are, with the responsibility of gaining knowledge and passing it on. To do so for all those who are no longer with us. For those we will lose. For those with us and lost who can be found. For there to come a time when the knowledge we have is as ingrained in our consciousness as the need to breathe.

You have knowledge that others need. You have perspectives and ideas that others need to see and hear and feel that have never been conveyed before and never will until you do so, and it is your responsibility to keep growing, to keep fighting, to keep educating, and to keep loving despite all there is to hate in this world.

Share the knowledge, keep developing yourself, and encourage others to do the same.

Feel free to reach out to me on insta if you ever have questions, want to collab, or discuss film. I will try my best to respond as soon as possible.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefocuspuller/