Today we’d like to introduce you to Nikki Milan Houston.
Hi Nikki Milan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I woke up most mornings as little kid to my parents blasting some type of music. Whether it be funk or jazz, I never failed to be awoken by sound flowing throughout the house. This is something I have kept with me growing up. As I start to make a new film, I find that sound always pulls its way through to being the most important part — must be why I keep trying to make mini-musicals in my own twisted way.
I grew up in San Clemente, a really idyllic-looking place that I tended not to fit into. My Dad was born and raised in Baldwin Hills — a neighborhood in Los Angeles and worked as a fireman in 1980s West Hollywood. A tourist from Amsterdam, my Mom wanted a classic photo with the firetruck, and soon after they were thick as thieves. This impulsivity has also made its way into my upbringing and who I am now. Our home in this more conservative, uptight place was colorful and bright, and instead of leaning away from it, my brother and I leaned into the weird.
I take a lot of inspiration from the way I was raised and my entire family’s ability to embrace standing out. I went through my tutu phases, dyed hair phases, bad rebellious teen phases (thought I could skateboard? still don’t know why), and always found a way for art to make its way into that equation. I didn’t have many friends growing up due to a certain “eccentricity”, so my weekends were filled with creating a different world for myself where I finally felt comfortable and at home.
I lucked out and got into an arts high school that has definitely shaped me in many ways. More so than the art-making was the work ethic and somehow having a 9-5 school day at the age of 13. This gave me an ambition and ability to turn art into a habit rather than just a passion, and I’ve tried to look at it that way ever since — getting better at this skill. This one thing I knew I had to do even if I didn’t exactly know how to do it. My parents were not movie watchers or big book readers, but it felt oddly natural to dive into these fields as my main form of expression. Movies just seemed to stick.
I started shooting on film around the end of high school which solidified it all for me. Never before had I played with a format so organic and tangible, yet so unpredictable in its outcome. It did and still does fascinate me today. I moved to Chicago for school and a break from California and tried to hone in this trait of mine. I am constantly learning from film and its ability to give me back footage I thought I knew, but in the end really didn’t. It’s moving and it’s light and it’s everything I always wanted out of creating art.
Now back in LA, I continue to shoot on film. Over the course of quarantine and this whole mess of a year, I have started to practice shooting the format more and more myself for personal pieces and commercials. I will fight tooth and nail to use it, so get ready if you ever want to work together! That being said, my favorite collaboration will always be with a full film team rather than just myself, and I put that to the test earlier this year on my newest short — Cream Magec. It’s an Elvis Impersonator, musical, fever dream, incorporating all of my favorite things: The King, Super 16mm, and a hodgepodge of sound design that’s hard to swallow at times. It is the third 16mm short I’ve made since moving back here, and I don’t intend on stopping anytime soon. What’s next?
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?
It has definitely never been easy. Every time I set out to make a piece of my own, it takes a lot to even understand why anyone but me would join in the crazy mess that it is. I’ve had cars break down, money falls out, locations blow up in smoke, and cameras break in the middle of the desert with a full crew looking at me to figure out what to do next. It’s never easy. That being said, there’s nothing else I can do. If I have the chance to be so fortunate that I can be making films in the first place, I count my lucky stars and figure out how to solve what went wrong.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
The mixing of culture and feeling displaced within it has propelled me to make work with characters searching for a home, a person, a place where they don’t feel as alone. Born into a particularly charged world and experiencing it as both Black and White, my fight with identity and validity has been projected into my films. This struggle is the center of my newest short, Cream Magec, as our protagonist’s obsession to be Elvis leads him into a personal crisis — one that teeters on his very racial makeup.
Arts aids the journey to find myself while uncovering others. A person ought to feel unified.
What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I was a bit of an asshole! Obsessed with pretension and being jaded as a teenager, I so badly wanted to be cool. I have an older brother that was into these more “arty” things before I was, and he paved the way for me to learn. Funny enough, he’s the lead in my upcoming short now. When I was 13, he showed me the Godard film Vive Sa Vie, and I thought it changed my life. I started wearing berets, red/white/blue exclusively, and stuck my nose up at anything that was not Nouvelle Vague. Maybe I can give myself a bit more credit. I was not so much an asshole, but trying my best to figure out what brand of teenage-hood fit me the best.
This was an extremely formative time that was aided with an abundance of freedom from my parents. I took a 45-minute commute by train to get to high school, so once I got there I felt like I was in a different life already. These train rides were extremely solitary, and where I had my first chance to explore all these new ideas that were coming forth. I wrote, listened, and watched the world pass by day-after-day as I morphed into this human that tended to love the position of voyeur more than showboat. The pretension subsided and instead became an obsession with being behind the camera and watching. I started falling in love with the little things around me. I filmed my friends constantly. I still have an entire collection of shorts, music videos, and little movies I would make daily. I just could not stop watching, the need to record growing stronger and stronger. It gets hard to be jaded when you finally step back and look a the beauty of it all.
Contact Info:
- Email: nikkimilanhouston@gmail.com
- Website: nikkimilanhouston.com
- Instagram: @clear_image
- Other: https://vimeo.com/nikkimilanhouston
Image Credits:
Elliot Hans (Portrait photo) Mike Pham (Cream Magec BTS)
