Filmmaker Journey

How Breaking the Rules Helped Me Break the Ice with Martin Scorsese

How I Got My First Feature Film Made (Part 2) by Jeff Fisher You can read Part 1 of this story here. After a thousand “No’s,” a last-minute financing miracle, and some casting luck, I landed in Minneapolis ready to shoot my first feature film. There was just one problem: the snow — the entire reason we picked Minneapolis — was gone. “Dead of Winter” was going to need a new name. But that turned out to be the least of my production hurdles. TWENTY-TWO LOCATIONS, TWENTY DAYS Fi

Dead bodies, Paris Hilton, and a thousand No’s — this is how KILLER MOVIE happened. by Jeff Fisher They don’t cover this in film school: sometimes your first feature gets born in a frozen cabin in the woods, fueled by fear, a very good dog, and strangers who really want to tell you how their relatives died unbelievably brutal deaths. For me, it was February in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. 17 degrees below zero. No cell service. No internet. Just me, my dog, howling wind, a ren

by Jeff Fisher My living room looked like the inside of a UPS truck. Movers were coming Tuesday. I was leaving for a shoot in Chicago on Wednesday — a thriller that had its own set of complications, including the fact that until very recently, it had a different director. This job came in the middle of moving and I had a lot of packing to do. And at the moment, plenty of production hurdles I needed to help solve. Meanwhile, a friend of mine went out to dinner on a Friday nigh

THERE IS NO SHORT FILM JAIL. BUT THERE IS A DRY CLEANER IN WEST HOLLYWOOD WHO ALMOST ENDED MY EARLY CAREER. by Jeff Fisher There are moments in life when you look around at the favors you’ve called in, the credit cards you’ve maxed out, the Steadicam operator who showed up on a handshake — and think: How exactly are we going to pull this thing off? This is the story of one of those moments. ANSWERING OTHER PEOPLE’S PHONES I had already made one short film — a 30-minute romant