Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Pico
Hi Daniel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was obsessed with movies from an early age, and it’s hard to think of a time when they didn’t hold a special place in my life. When I was about four years old I was watching a movie and something was off. I started inspecting the TV for damage on its sides, I pulled the tape out of the VCR and inspected the magnetic strip. When my mother asked me what I was doing, I replied, “Not all the movie is on the TV.” My mother, now very confused, asked me to explain. I put the movie back on and pointed to the side of the screen, “It’s cut off.” I complained. After a few more minutes of me inarticulately trying to convey my grievance, my mother realized what I was saying. “Oh, movies when they show in a theater are wider than a TV screen.” she informed me, “And when they put them on a VHS tape they have to squeeze the movie into your TV cutting the sides off.” This answer was unsatisfactory to a four year old, “That’s stupid, we should get a bigger TV.” I proclaimed. My mother rolled her eyes and went about her routine. For the first time I began to understand that somewhere in my brain I was becoming aware of composition for cinema and taking my first steps towards filmmaking, or I would be an internet troll of the early 2000’s complaining about the lack of letterboxed editions on VHS tapes, and writing essays about why DiVX was a superior format to DVD.
Like most kids of the 80’s who hated sports and physical activity I was an introverted slob-goblin looking for stimuli that didn’t require human interaction. Movies were that escape from the doldrums of suburban Chicago, and I could immerse myself in a world for ninety minutes at a time far more fantastical than one I inhabited. I loved the magic trick that was cinema, the worlds I visited were not real, they were manufactured by other humans. The process fascinated me, and when they released the documentary “From Star Wars to Jedi” to promote the home release of Return of the Jedi in 1983, my father who was also a cinephile picked up a copy. It was a behind the scenes look at the making of the Star Wars trilogy, the costumes, the Makeup fx, the model work, everything. I frankly liked watching that more than the actual Star Wars movies. A few years later my parents sensing that my brother and I were in need of an excuse to leave the house during the summers, gave us the greatest gift two unsocialized movie obsessed children could have gotten, a Fisher Price PXL 2000 Camcorder. Part toy, part video camera, all trouble; the PXL 2000 was a black and white camcorder that recorded grainy images and sound onto high bias audio cassette tapes. Whatever bright futures my brother and I had as doctors or lawyers ended that day, and it seemed all our energy was spent now making movies with the other kids in the neighborhood, at least we left the house. My brother, being five years older, assigned himself the role of director, as telling his little brother what to do came very natural to him. I ended up as the actor which as a precocious eight year old worked out well for me, until I would rewrite dialogue mid scene and my brother would stop the camera furious I was ruining his vision. Most of our films were horror and sci fi rip offs of popular movies, you right now may be envisioning a child wandering out of a closet wrapped in toilet paper acting like a mummy… We were doing our versions of Nightmare on Elm St., Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even Hellraiser (the obvious leather daddy influences of the costuming went over our heads since we had yet to hit puberty). During this time I was really interested in becoming a makeup fx artist, Fangoria magazine was my bible and the horror artists of the day my heroes. I learned a hard lesson about my chosen path though, I could not draw, I could not sculpt, and lacked any patience to paint even model figurines. I was no fine artist, all skills you need to be a great monster maker.
But as a teenager my brother went on to other life things and I stayed very focused on perhaps working in movies one day. When I was fifteen a friend of mine needed to film a script he’d written for a creative writing class, and since I was taking AV classes and filming the football games for the high school I had access to the school’s camera, and of course he asked if I could film it. We ended up filming at my parent’s house, they were used to it at this point, and none of the other kids’ parents were interested in a dozen unruly teenagers invading their home even if it was for extra credit. I ended up that night directing my first original movie, this was almost 30 years ago now so the details of the plot are murky, but I do recall that I didn’t know if I was going to be able to edit the movie in time for class so I staged all of it as a series of elaborate one-rs, and edited in camera. When we finished I hit the fade button on the camera in the last shot of a car pulling away down the street and I got to say, “That’s a wrap!” for the first time. When everyone left I was a little beside myself, what had just happened? Was I a movie director? Maybe that girl I like might be more interested in me? More on that girl later.
My obsessive nature took over and I began an odyssey into all things cinema. For a broke teenager the best source for movies is the public library, where you can find everything from Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai” to Milcho Manchevski’s “Before The Rain”. I consumed every movie I could at the library and in my parents home collection and began building my mental rolodex of directors, writers, actors, cinematographers. If I was going to be competitive in the film industry I better know my stuff and wouldn’t let myself be out-nerded by another filmmaker. I enrolled in a summer filmmaking workshop when I was 17 and met my first mentor, a director and cinematographer named Ron Pitts who was a legend in Chicago filmmaking, for his work filming civil rights marches for Martin Luther King, including the 1965 Selma march, and traveling with Mohammed Ali to Zaire to document his training to fight George Foreman, some of his footage ultimately was used in the Oscar winning documentary, “When We Were Kings”. He was the first real filmmaker I met in person and he freely dispersed his wisdom to us in every class.
Riding the euphoria of my summer workshop I embarked the next school year with a goal to make my first feature film (on video) before I left high school. I gathered a group of friends together and came up with a script called “Month of the Harvest Moon”. It was drama filled with things that you would think a group of high school kids would be worried about, drugs, parental abuse, teen pregnancy, suicide, you know a real feel-good movie. From day one I was in over my head, trying to do every job on set from camera, sound, and lighting which left me little time actually directing actors who had even less experience with acting. Needless to say soon it was if they could say the lines it was a print. The production came to a head when the climatic school dance scene ended in a debacle. First nearly no one showed up to be background, despite my desperate pleas to the student body over the morning announcements for two weeks straight. Then when we did get a few shots off and it seemed like I could maybe pull a rabbit out of my ass, some fuckface pulled a fire alarm, and we had to clear the gym, and the school shut us down. Needless to say the cast and crew lost their veal for the project after that, and the movie went unfinished. Failure can be a good thing sometimes, it teaches you about yourself in how you handle drawing the short straw or not measuring up when opportunity presents itself. Luck is not random fortune falling on the unexpecting, rather Luck is when opportunity meets preparation, and I was simply not yet ready. This event would hang over me like a spector for years.
If there was one thing that all my teachers could say about my time in grades K-12 is I was a shitty student. My grades were so poor I didn’t even bother to take a SAT or ACT as I knew I had zero chance at getting into college. But film school at the time thankfully accepted you if your check cleared, and I attended Columbia College Chicago to learn the craft of filmmaking. I won’t dissuade anyone looking to go to film school from going, it had its uses, I was exposed to professionals who were teaching at the school, and learned from them what I could, I had access to equipment that usually didn’t break mid-shoot, and I connected with a group of fellow nerds some of which I still work with to this day. But to be honest I learned more about making movies from reading Sydney Lumet’s book “Making Movies” than I did from four years of undergrad. But if there was a learning experience I could point to that I walked away from knowing more than when I went in, well it was more like limping away from, it was the production of my thesis film, “Two Days in Limbo”. My advisor for my project told me a great piece of advice, “Be ambitious, and don’t fail.” which at the time I mistook the don’t fail part as “Do everything you can not to fail.”, but no he meant it as it was. When you assemble the resources to make a film, it means people are investing in you, whether it be their time or financially and you have to deliver on your promises. I look back now at what I had proposed for my senior project, and my only excuse was the ignorance of youth that got me into it, and the memory of past failures that got me out.
“Two Days in Limbo” had what the fuck are you thinking written all over it from the beginning. My script was a World War Two period piece about a medic who is wounded and left for dead in a bomb crater just feet from a German machine gun nest that had just wiped out his squad in an ambush. Although I’d have the support of the school 16mm equipment and lights, I had to procure all the costumes, props, sets, filmstock, makeup supplies, and beg film students and professional actors to go into a forest preserve for eight days in the summer heat in Illinois with no proper bathroom. But my powers of persuasion over local actors proved strong and I was able to put together a cast of volunteers that were both skilled and motivated, the crew made up of fellow students, who mostly I didn’t know, I suspected wanted to join up to see if I’d fall on my ass, and for the first two days of the production they saw just that.
Scheduling a movie is usually based on hopes and prayers when you don’t have experience, and my overestimation of my abilities lead to an unforced error in our planning for the “Limbo” shoot. We’d scheduled a night shoot the second day of our production and an early calltime the next day, thinking the night shoot would only take a few hours and we’d be safely able to come early the next day. Well, that’s not what happened and the scene not only took hours longer to light and shoot but it also wasn’t turning out to be a very good scene, and everyone saw the disaster happening and I was unable to get the time I needed to work it out with the actors and there was a near revolt from the crew when I asked for another set up to get some coverage. Who could blame them, not wanting to lose another hour of sleep to get something that was clearly going to end up on the cutting room floor. The scent of “Month of the Harvest Moon” was creeping into my nostrils as we packed up cars that night, and I was unsure if my crew would return the next day.
That night in the few minutes before I crawled into bed I sat thinking about what had gone down over the last few days. The crew wasn’t the problem, they were working as hard as they could for no money, and were looking to me for leadership. It was up to me to right the ship, or it was me explaining how I’d taken on something huge and bought a one way ticket to a life in food service. I was going to have to change my approach, first true or not I had to accept responsibility for everything that went on on set. My stress levels were so high I was beginning to have delusions of grips and production assistants plotting a mutiny, and I had to put that out of my mind. Next I needed to pick up the pace and make decisions, indecision costs more time than a bad decision. Sets are mostly about momentum where everyone gets in a rhythm and starts forward one shot at a time, you stop everything to scratch your chin for 10 minutes while everyone watches and kills the morale and the crew’s confidence in you. It was easier to go back to pick up something you need if you’re moving quickly, than to be precious about every little thing. Lastly, no more than three takes on anything, I had to “like” the take to move on, not “love” it, that would have to wait for a different phase in my career that frankly I’m still waiting for.
The next day the crew to my surprise came back, and we did a half day to get everyone back on a normal sleep schedule, but the real test was coming on day four. The centerpiece of the whole movie was the ambush scene, and it was filled with pyrotechnics, squibs (mini explosive charges that you place on an actor to simulate a bullet hit), practical makeup fx, and stunts galore. All things I’d never done before, and was budgeted to happen all on the same day, and if we didn’t get it, we couldn’t afford to bring all the technicians back for another day of shooting. If we made our day, the rest was downhill, if I wasn’t prepared, the movie would have been severely compromised. But I knew my assignment, don’t be precious, make decisions quickly, adjust to problems, find creative solutions, and most importantly delegate. You see I haven’t talked at all here about all the amazing crew and cast that took part, and when day four came off without any major problems, it was because of the team I had in place. Everyone was prepared, and worked quickly, and knew the stakes, and when problems came up we all worked together to find a quick fix that got the shot good enough to keep moving. The crew revealed to me towards the end of the day that most of them signed up because they had read this ambush scene in the script and were shocked we even were attempting such a thing. As we counted down to the final shot of the evening, our big explosion, we all were smiling, we had accomplished something not many thought we could pull off for virtually no money. Then over the bull horn the assistant director called out THREE, TWO, ONE and BANG! The pyrotechnic guy hit the button and blew up an entire garbage bag filled with bloody rags and body parts fifty feet into the air. The crew applauded the show we put on and I called, wrap.
Four days later we completed the film with a small intimate scene where our medic discovers the bodies of dozens of GIs rotting in the forest and decides to burn them. After dousing them in gasoline he tosses a cigarette onto the pile and the flames provided by our pyrotechnics guy rose in the foreground, illuminating the tear streaked face of our main character. I did it once I was about to say to go again, but the first take was so good, I asked the camera operator to check the gate for any hairs. I heard the gate was clean, and I called for the last time. There is a video of me waiting to hear the gate’s clean and my emotions were so high I was smiling and fighting back tears all at once. I had survived what had been the hardest thing I had ever attempted and honestly at the time I don’t think anyone had attempted anything like it at my college. The movie of course wasn’t finished and we did pick ups long into winter on a soundstage. When the film finally premiered on the festival circuit we won awards and it opened doors for the rest of my career which has now spanned 22 years and counting. Sure I’ve done things way harder since, but it was necessary to challenge myself that first time, to be ambitious and not accept failure as an option.
Oh about that girl, I’d hoped I was impressed by that first film I made. Well, during the pandemic she and I reconnected and after being friends in highschool began dating 18 years later and were married in 2023. As it turns out she had been following my career from a far, and yes she was impressed with that first film, and every one since as my biggest fan.
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?
I have faced many struggles over the years, some professional, some personal. You gotta take the hits as they come, and get back up and keep moving forward. After I made my first feature “Farewell Darkness” in 2007 I thought the sheer scale and ambitions of the project made on such a low budget would propel my career to the next level and instead most of the time I’ve moved sideways though the low budget indie world as an Editor and Assistant Director. You spend all month working on a movie just to pay all your bills and your account would be empty, you gotta really love the process to stick with it until something breaks. In the last two years things changed for me, a TV show I co-wrote “RZR” was produced and I got to direct an episode which turned out really great. It was later nominated for a Primetime Emmy, and at the same time I made a short film that played at the Cannes Film Festival, which I attended for the first time. It was a sea change for my career, and I’m still seeing the ripples as new opportunities arise.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Daniel J. Pico Is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a BA in directing and screenwriting. He has been shooting films his entire life having made his first movie at the age of 8.
Daniel has directed two theatrically released feature films “Common Senses”, and “Farewell Darkness” which won three best feature film awards in the international film festival circuit. Additionally, Daniel has directed more than 85 short films, music videos, commercials and documentaries, including 11 episodes of several popular TV and web series, garnering over 40 independent film awards and nominations for his work.
Daniel is the founder of Pico Blvd Entertainment, a production company who’s core is focused on independent cinema. Not only is Dan a maverick director, he is an accomplished editor and has worked in several major capacities in film, from producing multiple feature films, to first assistant directing several multi-million dollar features films around the world. His short film “Reasonable Doubt” recently debuted at the short film corner at the Cannes Film Festival – Marche Du Film 2024.
He also co-wrote the Gala Films/Exertion3 series “RZR” and served as a Co-Producer, Editor, and Director of Episode 6 “The Blood Dimmed tide” the show is streaming in the Gala Film Network and is nominated for a 2024 Primetime Emmy Award.
What matters most to you?
Staying grounded is what matters most to me personally and professionally. It’s very easy to feel like the ride isn’t going to end when things are up, and when you’re down feeling like you might never stand back up again. The two greatest words in the English language are, “things change”.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.danieljpico.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/picoblvdent/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daniel.j.pico
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/picoblvdent/
- Twitter: https://x.com/DanielJPico
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DanielPicoblvdent
