Conversations with Lance Lindahl

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lance Lindahl.

Hi Lance, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Lance Lindahl & Polecat Productions: A Brief Appreciation

Lance Lindahl is a man of three professions, producer, writer, and director. This is, of course, the correct number of careers for any serious artist: one to pay the rent, one to ruin him, and one to flatter him in public.

He was born in Wisconsin, a state he has since left in the way that all men leave small towns: physically, and never entirely. He went west and learned the quiet trade of making rooms look lived in, having done set dressing for such films as Werewolf Women of the SS and Talladega Nights. There is no finer training for a director than arranging other people’s furniture in the service of other people’s fictions. Life is, after all, merely a poorly decorated set. The set is my world and you are just taking pictures of it.

Having furnished the dreams of others, he resolved to build his own. Big Highway (script in development) follows a man back home into a house heavy with grief. Lindahl wrote and directed a concept shoot, and he was cut a trailer to secure financing for the remainder, for an independent filmmaker must not only create beauty but also persuade others to get on board. This film has still not been made but momentum is building.

Then there is Polecat Productions, the banner under which he operates. The polecat, one notes, is a creature of formidable character and uncertain reputation, which is ideal for a film company. Under it Lindahl has made music videos for Duluth’s finest, including Charlie Parr’s “On Marrying a Woman with an Uncontrollable Temper,” in which he both directed and acted, and videos for the band Boxcar, whose album For Madmen Only needed only a director who understood the title. Why feed an actor when you yourself are hungry?

He remains one of those rare filmmakers who treats the low-budget picture as an act of faith rather than an act of necessity. Most men in his position complain of having too little money. Lindahl simply proceeds, which is far more dangerous.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
They tell you there’s a balance, like a scale in a doctor’s office, and if you just stand still and hold your breath the needle will settle in the middle. It never does. The needle is bolted to the wall on the side that says work.

You get up at six because the alarm is a small mechanical bastard that hates you. You drive in with the other sleepwalkers, all of us holding coffee like it’s a hand grenade we’re afraid to pull the pin on. You sit under the fluorescent lights for eight hours, which is really ten, which is really eleven if you count the email you answer in the bathroom like a man confessing to a priest.

Then you go home, and the life part is supposed to start. But you’re too tired to live. You stare at a plate of something, and the evening burns away like a cigarette left in an ashtray. You swear tomorrow you’ll call your friend, write the thing, take a walk, love somebody properly. Tomorrow is a rumor.

The bosses talk about “work-life balance” the way a butcher talks about animal welfare. It’s a poster in the break room. Meanwhile the rent gets paid first, and the soul takes whatever’s left, which is usually Sunday afternoon and a mild feeling of dread.

The trick, if there is one, is small and a little ugly. You steal your life back in pieces: a lunch hour with the door shut, a night you say no, a few lines written on a napkin before the world gets its teeth in you. Nobody hands it over. You take it, like a drink off a crowded bar, and you don’t apologize.

It’s not balance. It’s a fight. You lose most rounds, but you keep showing up, and that counts for something.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Polecat Productions: Music Videos for Bands With Something to Say

Your songs have a look. We’ll find it.

Polecat Productions makes music videos for artists who’d rather be remembered than merely streamed. Director Lance Lindahl comes up through film sets, with set dressing and art department work behind him and a feature he wrote and directed. That means your video gets a filmmaker’s eye for story, texture, and place rather than a stack of stock shots and a lyric overlay.

We’ve worked with Minnesota’s own, including Charlie Parr, BoxCar and Erik Koskinen, on videos that range from a visual story to a straight-ahead record. Whether your sound is a lonesome acoustic stomp or a full-volume racket, we build the video around the song, not the other way around.

What you get:

A concept built from your music, not a template
A director who also acts, edits with trusted collaborators, and doesn’t need a committee to make a decision
Independent-film craft at independent-band prices
A finished video that looks like it belongs on a screen larger than a phone

How it works: Send us the song or album. We’ll listen, talk through ideas with you, and propose a treatment that fits your sound and your budget. Then we shoot it, cut it, and hand you something you’ll be proud to release.

Great songs deserve better than a lyric video and a prayer. Film and Video is forever. Until it isn’t or the grid goes down….

What does success mean to you?
Success: A Definition

Success (n.): the temporary condition of having arranged the universe in such a way that it appears to cooperate.

It is measured, as all things should be, in objective terms: the number of takes required, the budget exceeded, the studio executive who has stopped returning calls out of something that resembles reverence and something that resembles fear. A man achieves success when he has been proven right by a process so exhausting that no one remains to hear him say so.

It is symmetrical, in the way a long corridor is symmetrical. One walks toward it at a steady, unhurried pace, and it recedes at exactly the same rate. Those who reach the end find a ballroom, a mirror, and a photograph from 1921 in which they are already smiling.

Success demands control. Every light, every lens, every gesture must be accounted for, because chance is simply failure that has not yet been scheduled. And yet the most enduring victories are those in which control quietly slips, and a machine begins to sing in a fading voice, or a bone becomes a satellite, and one realizes that the plan was never the point.

It is also, one should note, a matter of perspective. From a great distance, the distance of a camera drifting slowly away from a planet, success and failure are indistinguishable. Both are small, both are brief, and both are accompanied by a waltz.

The practical definition, then: success is finishing the work you could not stop thinking about, while remaining calm, polite, and entirely unmoved by whether anyone understands it.

They will understand it later. They always do. It is merely a question of how many years the audience requires to catch up.

Pricing:

• TRY ME

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/polecat_prod/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/polecat.prod/
• Twitter: https://x.com/polecat_prod
• Youtube: https://l.instagram.com/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fyoutube.com%2F%40polecatprod&e=AUA7HyjyLnhc_6pF9V3oTGplH7Fj-iweddOKgfnCpXL3fmDdXPeOODzeiIICFff4gJcXPMoBJztEBFcWDG7h7PTlwl7rfOOQeEJfqnXoar1xSFFEDBIZZncDGdgMaOr1dhejDYHmMho

Image Credits
#polecatprod