What I learned from making a movie with no money | Sev Ohanian | TEDxLittle Armenia

0:02 [music] >> What do you do when pursuing your passion feels too risky because of who you are and where you're from? I'm an immigrant. I'm a child of immigrants. I witnessed first hand my parents come to this country with nothing and build an incredible life for my sister and I through what I can only refer to as sheer immigrant hustle. I grew up in a tight-knit Armenian-American community here in LA. I have endless memories of backyard

0:47 barbecues, lots of family, and every now and then we would do a family vacation road trip to a city called Palm Springs. Palm Springs. In this childhood, my mother introduced to me a love of reading thanks to our regular trips to the library. And my father introduced to me a love of movies through our weekly trips to the ancient place of wisdom formerly known as Blockbuster Video. Rest in peace. Somewhere in there I fell in love with storytelling. And a thought started to bubble in me, what if I take this love, this passion,

1:34 and I made it my career? What if I became a filmmaker? The problem was that it was too risky because to make it in film, you kind of need to make a movie. And to make a movie, I knew that there was a couple of material things you needed to have. You need to have connections. You need real actors, professional crew members. You need to have resources. HD cameras, lighting equipment, budgets. And most importantly, you probably need knowledge. You need to know what you're even doing. Now look, you can argue, you can go to a film school to pick up on some of these ones. I know that there's a good one nearby. But even the chance of getting into a

2:19 good one, the the gamble it would be, so few ever actually make it. To me, it felt like too much of a risk. And my parents had sacrificed so much to bring me to this country so I could have a good life, chasing something so uncertain, I don't know if it was worth the gamble. But more importantly, there was another reason why I thought it was not doable. It was an emotional reason. I needed to know that it was even possible. This was the big one for me as an Armenian. Um these Hollywood connections, these resources, this passed down film knowledge, those were not things that we had as Armenians by the virtue that none of us had really done it before, especially as far as I knew. I found myself debating, what do I want

3:04 to do with my career and my life? Do I want to say yes to pursuing filmmaking? Or do I want to say no, that it's too risky? I thought long and hard about it, and I made up my mind. And I said no. It broke my heart, but I said bye to filmmaking and instead focused on journalism. It was a bit of a safer bet, but I really committed to it. I became the editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. I interned at the LA Times, and I went to college, and I majored in journalism. But at the same time, just for fun, I found myself making videos with my friends. Today, they would be the equivalent of TikTok videos that kids shoot on their phones. At the time, I had my dad's mini DV home video camera that we would use for our occasional vacations to

3:51 Palm Springs. One day, my friend Edmen and I put together a video where he'd be playing an Armenian dad, and our other friend Narbeh would play his son. And Narbeh would be coming home late one morning after a long night out only to find his Armenian dad sitting and waiting for him. What started as a lecture about where he was all night turned into his report card, that time he crashed the family car, and on and on and on. It may have been a little bit autobiographical. The video was in Armenian, a few minutes long, zero lighting, rough editing, awful sound, but it was funny. It was really, really funny.

4:36 I put this video on YouTube just for my 22 friends to watch, my Armenian friends. To my shock, Armenians all over the world found the video, and they started sharing it. It went viral. So, I thought of a second video. What if this time we uh we had an Armenian teenage boy come to a house to pick up his date, but he makes the fatal mistake of insisting on saying hi to her mom and dad? For this video, I had Edmen again play the dad, and I also had him play a dual role as the mom. He had blonde wig and fake boobs, and it was awesome. Um fun fact, this was the inspiration for Sinners, just so you guys know. Like

5:22 the the dual dual act. For the role of the teenage Armenian girl, I cast my sister Romela. No. Yeah, Romela. Let's go. Not because she was an actress, but because she was a teenage Armenian girl who happened to be free that Saturday I was going to shoot the video. We had a good time shooting this one. We also put it on the internet, and it went even more viral. People all over the world were really starting to even make their own versions of these videos. And my actors, my friends, they would go to the Americana in Glendale and get stopped by people. Something was happening here, and people started to ask me, "Are you going to be a filmmaker, right? That's ob- obviously what you're doing." And I said no, cuz it still felt like too much of a

6:09 risk. All of this was fun, but I didn't have the things that you would need to make a real movie. But I can make a fake movie, right? Cuz I didn't have the connections, didn't have the resources, I certainly didn't have the knowledge, but we can make a fake Armenian movie. So, we called it My Big Fat Armenian Family. And the story was about uh an Armenian-American family with old-fashioned traditional Armenian parents and the Americanized progressive teenage kids, and what happens over a weekend family vacation to Palm Springs. It was a zero-dollar production. I wrote the movie, I directed the movie, I shot the movie. Um I did everything except for makeup, and then the makeup artist quit, so I did the makeup, too. It's not great.

6:55 And this is how I shot it. Literally my dad's video camera. This time, however, the movie called for more scale. I needed a lot of locations, I needed extras, I needed a school classroom scene somehow. So, I turned to my own big fat Armenian family, my parents, my parents' friends, my friends' parents, my cousins. And there was this really cool Armenian teacher at my school who not only agreed to be in the movie, he turned a blind eye to us shooting it on the school campus. So, that was really nice. I did not have the connections, I didn't have the resources, I certainly didn't have the knowledge to know what I was doing. That's a good example. The very first day of filming, we were shooting the emotional climax of the movie where the Armenian family is

7:40 having a big fight outside their house. They're yelling and screaming at each other, and then they make up and hug, and it's supposed to be emotional. The problem was we were shooting this at 3:00 a.m. in a nice, quiet Santa Clarita neighborhood. Question for you guys. Do you think I had filed a filming permit for this? Yes or no? No. Question number two. Do you think I knew what a filming permit was? [laughter] No. So, to no one's surprise, cop car showed up. I started walking up to them ready to explain to them, "Officers, we're just making a student film." Instead, they screeched to a stop, pulled out their guns, and aimed them at us and said, "Get on the floor!" I was like, "Yo, that's a

8:26 massive overreaction to a bunch of kids making a movie." But then it occurred to me, how could they know we were kids making a movie? There was no real camera, there was no lights, there was no crew. The only thing that neighbors must have seen when they looked out their window that night was a group of Middle Eastern people screaming in a foreign language. That was us. That's literally right before disaster. Thankfully, nobody got hurt. We apologized to the cops, and they said they'll let us go under one condition, that we never come back. So, we came back the next day. But we but we we finished before night. I was afraid of of taking this as a real career because of all the risks involved, and now I had a gun pointed at me, so I was extra afraid, but we had to finish the movie.

9:12 Once we finished shooting it, I spent a whole year editing it by myself on my computer. Every day I would get home from my journalism classes, I would edit deep into the night until I finally finished it 12 months later. We'd worked so hard on it, and we just wanted to make sure people could see it. So, I went to our local high school, and I asked them, could we book your auditorium and and screen the movie for a couple of, you know, audiences? They said no problem, but we would have to bring our own projector and our own screen. For the projector, Best Buy was kind enough to let me borrow one for free through one of their policies, um their return policy. >> [laughter] >> Um Okay, but but that was a that was easy. The screen was impossible

9:58 until it wasn't. Cuz my mom literally sewed a movie screen out of fabric. >> [applause] >> And that's my dad coming up with a scaffolding to hold it up. >> [applause] >> So, we have our screen ready to go. We just had to get the word out. Luckily, I was able to call on my own journalism background and I hosted a press screening of the movie at the library. And >> [cheering] >> Why are you guys laughing, man? This is

10:44 real. >> [laughter] >> So, we invited every Armenian newspaper outlet, big, small, everything in between. We hoped that they would show up and we hoped that they would write about the movie and tell people to come see it. And they did. This is great. But what I wanted to do was find a way to actually connect to the audience directly. So, in the city that I live, there was a lot of Armenians at all the schools. What I did was I printed flyers of the movie. Lots and lots and lots and hundreds of flyers. And somehow magically these flyers ended up in all of the

11:30 lockers and all of the schools. I don't know how it happened. So then, there was a lot of Armenian cultural events um leading up to our premiere, uh church events and cultural centers and all these wonderful things that celebrate our heritage. We went to all of them. And when we got there, I had my cast in character and what we would do was I don't know how to describe it other than calling it we would just cause a ruckus. We would literally put on shows, get crazy, get all the kids excited about the movie, and it was great. And every single visit ended exactly the same way with us being escorted out of there. [laughter] Oh man, [snorts] by the way, that's my dad right there being an accomplice to

12:16 this. >> [laughter] >> Um [snorts] it was great. Another thing we did was all the local Armenian colleges, I would take the movie there and screen like the first 20 minutes of the movie. And and you know, talk about the movie and get people excited to show up as well. One day, an Armenian girl came up to me after screening and she said that she was a pre-law student and she was just curious who had done all the paperwork for my movie, the releases, the agreements, the contracts. I was like, "You are?" >> [laughter] >> And she did. She helped me out. How cool is that? So then, it came time for the actual premiere of the movie. We were at the school. My family was there early.

13:02 That's my mom managing the tickets. And as we were waiting for everyone to show up, the clock kept ticking and no one was showing up. And I started to get really nervous. And I started asking myself, when did this thing go from something I was doing just for fun to having so many stakes? Do you guys remember I told you about that emotional reason why I didn't want to do this for real in the first place? That I needed to know that it was possible? In this moment with the movie about to start and hardly anyone there, I felt like I had the answer to that question. That it was a no. Luckily for me, Armenians are never on time.

13:48 >> [applause] >> Because right as the movie was about to start, they came. A lot of them came. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. As for how the movie played, I was pretty sure that they were going to be laughing all throughout because my actors are so good and it was so funny. And I had a feeling that they would clap at the end out of politeness. But to my shock, they were applauding throughout the movie. There's a There's a scene where

14:34 the daughter stands up to her father. The audience exploded in applause around me. You guys remember that time that the Santa Clarita PD almost shot me over shooting that one scene? That scene I watched people cry watching. The movie was a success. We had sold out screenings for weeks, put the DVD on the internet and it sold out instantly around the world. More than the financial success, it was the fact that my community showed up and they embraced the film and they embraced me. This empowerment finally gave me the courage to stop doing this for fun and to actually try and do it for real. So, I said bye to journalism and not long after, I got into USC to do my graduate degree in filmmaking.

15:20 At USC, it was for real now. No more home video cameras. We had HD cameras and I was committed to understanding and doing this thing for real. I didn't talk a lot about my Armenian movie because one, I was the only Armenian in the program at the time. But I was also a little bit self-conscious. It's It's in in Armenian. It's not HD. My friend's wearing a bra the whole movie. It's kind of weird. Um A couple of years into the program, one of my classmates came to my house. His name is Ryan Coogler. And he asked to see the movie. I started showing him the movie with subtitles, of course, and I got very nervous cuz this is the first time that a non-Armenian was going to watch this movie. I wasn't sure if he would get it. I don't know what was going to happen.

16:07 Something beautiful happened. He started laughing. He not only got it, he related to it. He told me that he saw members of his own family reflected in those silly characters. And that was an incredible early lesson in for me that when you share your specific culture, it has the real ability to connect with others on a human level. >> [applause] >> That night, Ryan asked me a question. He asked me, "Why are you in film school? The idea is that we all go to film school to learn how to make movies. You'd already made one before you even got here." I was confused cuz I'm like, "I didn't make a real movie. That's a fake movie.

16:53 I didn't have the connections or the resources or the knowledge to make a real movie." And then it occurred to me. My family, my parents, my parents' friends, my friends' parents, that cool Armenian teacher, that one pre-law student. And I thought about my my dad's mini DV camera, my mom's ability to sew a screen, the Armenian newspapers that showed up. And most importantly, having spent my entire life surrounded by a community that embodies the idea of sheer immigrant hustle.

17:40 >> [applause] >> Those connections and resources and and knowledge that I thought were so far out of my grasp as a member of the Armenian-American community, they were there all along. This is not a story about somebody who had nothing and made it work despite that. It's a story about somebody who had it the whole was never a disadvantage. It was a support to me the entire time. And in my career since, it's been a support to me in both big ways and small. My first movie, Fruitvale Station, that Ryan directed that I helped produce, when we got into the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and I needed a tuxedo, an

18:26 Armenian tuxedo shop gave it to me to help represent. That That pre-law student that asked me about releases, when I went to film school, she went to law school and she's my entertainment attorney to this day. I was her first client. >> [applause] >> And when this film thing started getting too hard to do alone, it was at an Armenian event that I met a fellow film [snorts] lover named Natalie Kassabian >> [applause] >> who would go on to be my girlfriend, my wife, and the best damn producing partner I've ever had.

19:11 >> [applause] >> And through Natalie, I met her mom, Linda, who's been an enormous support to us on every movie we made near and afar. >> [applause] >> My most recent film, Sinners, when it was going to have >> [cheering] [applause] >> When it was going to have its LA premiere, it was co-hosted by the Armenian Film Society. >> [applause] >> And when that movie was hitting theaters, Armenians all over the world organized screenings to help represent.

19:58 >> [applause] >> But this isn't just about me, and it's not just about Armenians. A lot of us who grow up in smaller communities, whether it's cultural, ethnic religious we take on the belief that we're not a part of the establishment or the mainstream. And it's easy to take that personally. I know this firsthand, that you can talk yourself out of taking big risks before you even give it a shot. But what I've now learned is when you come from a smaller community that's outside of the mainstream, it's not a weakness, it's a massive strength. Because you can build with your people

20:44 who know you, who trust you, and want you to win. And when you win, when you succeed, it's not just you succeeding, it's your entire community succeeding. >> [applause] [applause] >> And when your community succeeds, that success is what gives everybody the belief to know that it is possible. >> [applause] >> Thank you very much. >> [applause]