By Andrew Neel

Justin Lerner is a graduate of UCLA’s prestigious film school (M.F.A. in Directing) whose thesis filmThe Replacement Child screened at more than 40 film festivals internationally and garnered him two Student Emmy awards, including Best Student Director of 2008. Find out more and get a copy of The Replacement Child at twelve34films.com.

Filmmaker Justin Lerner, winner of two 2008 Student Emmys.

Q&A with filmmaker Justin Lerner. 

When you sit down to write do you begin with a genre or a plot in mind for your film?

I try to start with a character. A character is usually the reason that we go to see movies. I’d like to think that we like stories not because of some message or theme, but because of memorable characters, or the visceral experience the film gave us.

My love for other films always makes me interested in finding ways to use that knowledge in my own work.  For The Replacement Child, I found my lead character was most similar to the archetypal Western hero than any other type of film character. I thought the story presented a great opportunity to make my version of a Western, but instead of using a Clint Eastwood gunslinger, with an 18-year-old kid. Because I also love coming-of-age films like Harold and Maude, and The Graduate.

Because what is a Western or a “Coming-of-Age” if not a tale centered around some wayward character? I realized that The Replacement Child was was one of those movies that could straddle both genres.

I think I owe a lot of my storytelling ability to my love for other films — I’m constantly stealing from, or I guess some people call it “referencing,” things I’ve seen.  It’s not about copying and pasting things into your film from others’. It’s about using what works in another film in order to strengthen the narrative you have already built, which takes a very analytical, and sometimes even a masochistic, approach to your work.

You have taken the academic route to begin your filmmaking career. How important do you think a knowledge base about the theory behind and history of film is for aspiring filmmakers?

In the current filmmaking environment, if you’re serious about being a filmmaker professionally, it’s not suggested, I think it’s almost required. Would you let an architect build your house if he hasn’t studied, at least briefly, the history of architecture that came before him?

As someone who wants to do this as a career, I feel it’s almost my duty to at least try to stay aware of the history of the art, in the same way painters from different eras would study painters that came before them, for example.

But look, I’m sure there are artists who will prove me wrong. There are people who innocently picked up a paint brush for the first time and were able to create something that connected with people emotionally and viscerally.

I don’t discount those people with my comment. However, for anyone looking to get involved in film, it’s a great help, at least it was for me, to learn about the history of the medium. And aside from that, it’s fun to go back and learn about where film and storytelling and photography came from – it can only help.

If, in your journey towards becoming a filmmaker, you don’t also become a student of film, I think you’re denying yourself a great richness of inspiration and joy.

What do you think the historical knowledge of film is in Hollywood today?

Sadly, I’ve had the experience once or twice of going to a meeting with an executive, and I’ll reference a film made before the ’80s, maybe from another country, and they might not have even heard of the film, much less seen it.

And there are also filmmakers out there who don’t watch movies.  There are filmmakers whose primary goal is to become a working artist, it’s their life’s passion. And, for others, it’s just a job to make money.  And as long as heaps and heaps of money can be made in film, there will always be directors out there making easily digestible, forgettable, commercial garbage. But I think that’s okay, I see no problem in film-goers having choices in the types of things they want to see. I guess it just comes down to a director’s intentions. And sometimes I wish more film audiences would venture to use cinema to challenge themselves — to see a film that makes them think, makes them provoked, makes them uncomfortable — rather than just go see a film in order to escape for two hours.

To make a very basic example, I don’t think Michael Bay, if he were to watch an Ingmar Bergman film, say, would apply or use any of what he saw to his making of Transformers. But Bay is hugely successful. And that’s my point — for me, those types of films are part of a  different sport, with completely different goals than, say, a film from Scorsese or Soderbergh, whose work is often simultaneously commercially successful AND critically praised as “art-cinema.”   

So if your goal is to make big-budgeted, studio-driven action films, you might not need to know your film history. However, I will still defend that no matter how many old films you’ve seen and studied, whether you’ve seen thousands or none, you still need to have skill in storytelling. That never changes. I will just say that my goal to always be studying cinema, no matter how busy I am or how old I get, has personally paid off for me in my own work.

What about directors like Christopher Nolan who have been able to make thought-provoking and commercially successful films?

Nolan’s a great example of the commercially successful artist. He’s seen all the great films and I do feel from seeing his work that he loves cinema more than he loves money. I think it’s less about the KIND of movie you make, and more about the care and precision with which you make the movie, if that makes sense. You can make a film in any genre badly, or well, and Nolan’s films are less about style and more about story and character. He certainly has a style, but it helps tell his story, unlike some directors like Guy Ritchie, whose style is electric, frenetic, and sometimes very exciting, but it exists as an end in itself, or in place of the story. If the explosions and chases exist in Nolan’s film – they’re always embedded in a really good narrative.

And again, the storyteller that Christopher Nolan is, or Scorsese or Soderbergh, comes not from a desire to make something quick, flashy and consumable, but from a love of film, some may even say an obsession with it.

All three directors I mentioned make very difficult, clever and poignant movies. Give any of them a $500,000 indie melodrama or a $50 million comic-book epic, and you’ll still have a great storyteller behind the wheel. You could take Soderbergh (who did Sex, Lies, and Videotape) out of the indie world and put him into a studio film (the “Ocean’s” movies), but I think it would be more difficult to do the reverse and take the flashy, action studio guy and give him in an indie film to direct and have it come out to anything meaningful.

This is because, for my taste, not all, but a good majority of the big-budget American filmmakers aren’t real storytellers. Their films are more akin to fast food. I’ll admit that they are often visually stunning, highly technical spectacles that excite the senses for a few brief moments, but then, almost immediately after they’re over, I usually feel empty, or hungry for something more meaningful. Nolan, Scorsese, Soderbergh, Van Sant,Lynch, Fincher, PT Anderson – no matter how large scale or small their work is, they make intelligent films with care for character and story, ones that I’m thinking about, digesting, and processing for days, sometimes weeks or months, after I’ve seen them.

Complete bio for Justin Lerner: 

Lerner is the son of two developmental psychologists, one Catholic and one Jewish, who compromised by sending him to Quaker school in Pennsylvania until the age of eleven.  He got his BA in Theatre Arts/Film at Cornell University, where he graduated cum laude for his honors thesis on the films and philosophy of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.  After graduation, Justin spent a year in La Coruña, Spain teaching English and freelancing as a writer. He recently received his M.F.A. in Directing at UCLA’s Graduate Film School, where his thesis film The Replacement Child, screened at Telluride Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival and over 40 others internationally, winning 15 of them. In March of 2008, Justin was awarded with two Student Emmys awards for The Replacement Child, one for Best Drama and the other for Best Student Director of 2008. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is in pre-production on his first feature film, The Irresistible Vincent Chang. Find out more about Justin Lerner’s films attwelve34films.com and thereplacementchild.com

This interview is a part of the “Film Industry Insiders” Series, where I present interviews with and advice from individuals entrenched in or breaking into the world of filmmaking