Today we’d like to introduce you to Matan Hamam
Hi Matan, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I started off as a magician. I don’t think you could call me a professional one in the traditional sense, but I certainly thought I was. I told my parents often that I planned to drop out of middle school (for age context) and join the magic castle or a magic… something. I didn’t really have a well-thought-out plan, but I had faith in my ability to figure it out.
I was given a book on movie magic by my aunt a few years later and began to film my magic tricks, adding some editing trickery to make them more impressive. As I got more into editing, I started filming little intros and outros for my magic videos, and pretty soon, I was making short films every weekend on my mom’s Handycam.
I still wanted to be a magician and had started seriously thinking about a career as musician, which had been a lifelong hobby of mine. In the mess of all three, I was accepted into a study-away program in Italy during my sophomore year of high school, where I lived with a host family and attended a drum conservatory. I made a few movies while I was there and came back to the U.S. with a renewed sense of purpose—I wanted to be a filmmaker.
I graduated high school a year early and started doing stand-up and filming sketches for comedians in San Francisco. Along the way, I got involved with a few people in the Bay Area rap scene and directed music videos for some friends and artists. Each project really cemented my belief, and I planned on trucking it out to LA to figure out my plan from there.
When COVID hit and productions shut down, my buddy and I met up in his apartment in North Hollywood to figure out our next steps. He had been slowly booking parts, and I had been slowly getting odd commercials and music videos, but we wanted to take the next step. That summer, we made a small film based on our friends’ experiences in the Middle East as young kids living in a war zone. The film did okay and inspired a larger project we wanted to make the following year.
The first film we made, which we shot for nothing with my sister shooting it and mom doing our makeup and making sure we said the right words on the script, got seen by a producer at Showtime who helped us draft up a pitch for a larger film. We shopped it around to friends in LA and across the country and were able to scrape together just enough to shoot the film GEVER the following summer. It was one of the most grueling shoots of my life—shooting in the desert in 102-degree heat for a week—but also one of the most rewarding. We’ve gotten to play it around the country and even out of it (we just had a wonderful screening in Armenia). If the kid editing magic trick videos in his room could have seen where it would go, I think he would have lost his mind.
Now, I’m working on trying to keep the momentum going, taking on commercials and music videos as they come and gearing up for a horror feature called NightFlirt, which I wrote with my good friend Case Avron who will be directing it later this year. It’s still very early in what I hope will be a long career in this industry, but I love it more than anything and am so grateful for the opportunity to pursue it for as long as I can.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
This is a problem I had in the beginning—and still have now—which is saying yes to too many things.
I remember one summer when I was brought on by some friends to shoot and help produce a TV pilot called Minor Inconvenience. It was a fantastic script written by my friend Ellena Eshraghi, and I felt a lot of pressure to make sure I could execute the project at the level it required.
A few weeks before the shoot, I was asked if I could write a pilot for a Russian TV show called Mr. Tony about cryptocurrency. The pilot absolutely had to be completed within two weeks—and, mistakenly, I said: Yes, no problem.
A week before the pilot was due and a week before the shoot, I was asked to help shoot a short film for a friend, and again, I said yes. A day later, I also realized I had to move out of my apartment and would be leaving the city with nowhere to go, meaning I needed to find a new apartment in the next two days.
That week was the single most stressful week of my entire life. Situations like that somehow ended up happening over and over—and you would think I’d get better at handling them, or even better, avoiding them. But I’ve come to terms with the fact that this is just a big part of what working in this industry looks like.
Thankfully, the Pilot shoot went smoothly, someone helped me take over the second half of the short film shoot, the TV show went nowhere (unsurprisingly—it was a TV show about crypto called Mr. Tony), and I found an apartment a few weeks later.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I’m mostly a filmmaker. I’ve made six short films of my own and have been hired to write or produce about ten more. Last summer, I directed an off-Broadway production of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which opened me up to an incredibly exciting world of theater directing that I can’t wait to pursue more.
I spent so many nights as a 14-year-old making movies completely alone in my room—filming puppets, balancing cameras on books to film myself goofing off, and then staying up until 6 in the morning editing them to show my mom and a few uninterested friends. Four years of that every weekend doesn’t make many good movies, but it does build an extremely strong moral compass.
Making movies is brutal, embarrassing, and scary—but I’ve never had to question, even in the worst shoot or biggest mess-up, is this what I want to be doing? All those movies I made by myself, for no one but me to watch, just because I loved it—placed this seed in my heart. It’s very firm and hard to shake.
Picking up a pen, writing some lines and action, and then capturing it—that’s what it’s always been about. I can’t do anything else. Now that people watch what I film? And some even pay me? All of that’s a bonus.
Making movies, or plays, or music… it’s one of the most enjoyable things I have found in life. I think about it like surfing. I’m a terrible surfer. For me, 90% of the surf experience is being pummeled by waves, desperately paddling out into the water, only to drink more ocean for three hours—shivering and holding onto my board to keep from sliding.
But when you catch a wave… even for five seconds, all those hours in the cold become worth it. It’s immediate. And if you catch a wave and don’t feel that—don’t even bother surfing, because the ratio will never be in your favor. Even for the best surfers—and definitely not in the beginning.
Like I said, I’m a terrible surfer, so I almost never catch waves. But I’ve been lucky enough to catch some films and work with some really magical people, and that’s been enough to keep me coming back to the sea day after day.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
Loving people, loving music, loving passion, being passionate, being friendly, being curious, being easily inspired, being calm, being naive, and laughing easily.
Pricing:
- Don’t know what this means! People can hire me though for work I direct/write/and produce films, music videos, and commercials!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gevershortfilm.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matanhamam/?hl=en
Image Credits
Bryn Kelly, Chen Bentov
