When I was studying Acting in college, there was a kind of thrill that came with the grind of the work. I could simultaneously feel myself getting closer to the craft and further away all in the same breath. It was this duality of experience that drew me in; the challenge, the inconsistency of really nailing a scene or a monologue or a performance met with the desire to jump back into the work and do it all again. The issue was that, at least for me, I never controlled when my acting would come alive— in fact, it required quite the opposite: to surrender.

As I transitioned into the world of film, a somewhat Wagnerian mix of multimedia and storytelling, I learned that in this craft more control led to better performances— but there’s still a balance. As an actor, I learned to trust my instincts, to depend on them when I didn’t know where else to turn. I was taught that times of uncertainty often lead to the most creative—and markedly human—choices. I learned to deconstruct hierarchies and wear them, lose them, or reconstruct them. I learned that nobody really knows what they’re doing despite how much they try to tell or show you otherwise but that there’s still an infinite you can learn from them. Everyone has something to offer.

None of this is really lost in how I approach filming a story. Even in the most literal of settings cinema is actually quite theatrical. Intention drives drama because of how we process the world. To me, filmmaking is still all about preserving and expanding the details that make us human, but doing so by constructing either fragments or whole parts of the world around people. Instead of embodying the inner life of a person and walking a mile in their shoes, what you have with film is essentially embodying the life of an entire world, an ecosystem of experiences, relationships, trauma, hope. Of course, most projects don’t demand the construction of the heavens and the hells, but we as people project ourselves onto our environments and therefore can use the world around us as a means to talk about our inner life, to reach for metaphors, or share our secrets. In film, sometimes the world is a soliloquy.

As I come into year 4 of embracing filmmaking as a career and life path, I want to honor both the history of where this passion evolved from and return to the origins of how I approach this work. Every day life is drama, that news shouldn’t feel new to anyone at this point. But how can we re-learn to open up to each other in such a hostile space? How can we take all this anger, exhaustion, despair, confusion that we’ve lived in for the past two years and make something with it that inspires hope, honesty and solidarity? Those are the questions I’m leading with. I don’t have the answers and perhaps I never will.

But alas, we’ve got work to do.