Meet Billy Hanson

Billy, so great to have you with us today. There are so many topics we want to ask you about, but perhaps the one we can start with is burnout. How have you overcome or avoided burnout?
When I first moved to Los Angeles, I received two pieces of advice from a film producer: 1. Always have a lot of irons in the fire.
2. Strike while the iron’s hot.

As good as that advice is, following both at once can only lead someone to what we call burnout.

Following that advice, I’ve been able to chase several great opportunities for employment while creating my own work at the same time. I’ve already had a long career filled with several different jobs across nearly all mediums of storytelling. I’ve worked in TV Post Production, written comics, produced web series and shorts, written and directed features and authored books. While I’m proud of everything I’ve accomplished, I spent nearly fifteen years pushing myself to extremes. Fifteen hour days, high-stress, unshakeable deadlines with high stakes. Not to mention raising two little boys through a pandemic with my wife, who has her own stresses, goals and deadlines as a TV writer.

At the most difficult time, I was working as a Post Supervisor on a tough show for at least twelve-hours a day, scrambling to finish the film I’d shot a few years earlier, working my way through a second collection of stories, and splitting the housekeeping/child care duties with my wife. It wasn’t until 2021 that I heard the term “burnout”. It helped me understand why I was growing more and more miserable, why my life outside of work felt like it was falling apart, why I would fly off the handle at anything that pulled me away from my own work, why I was suddenly punching holes into walls and throwing laptops across the room. I was burned out. Had been burned out for years. Was continuing to burn out. I was no longer performing at the job and I could tell that my own work had become sub-par. I desperately needed to break from the cycle of non-stop, inescapable stress.

I’d set aside most of the things I love to do, like reading books, watching movies, playing video games, playing music, and given all of that time to the job that I hated. The only way to overcome that kind of lifestyle is to start cutting things out of your daily routine and try to get some kind of control back to the day-to-day. The first moment I could, I left the post job. That was terrifying, because for ten years that had been my lifeline, a rare staff position at a good company in the TV world. But as soon as I left it behind, I felt an overwhelming relief and there was an immediate physical change in my body. A massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I found focus, and I was able to finish my book and finish my film, which lifted even more weight from my shoulders.

Too many people view leaving a job as lazy, or an unwillingness to put in hard work. I actually see it as the opposite. Burnout is something that people with serious passions are susceptible to, because we will continue to push ourselves beyond a normal workload to realize these dreams we all have. There’s no way I would have been able to do anything I’ve done if I wasn’t able to sit down and write after a fifteen-hour work day. But having an understanding of your own limitations will help navigate that kind of lifestyle and keep you from drowning.

If you can cut those stresses out of your life, do it. If you can’t, then learn to take it easy on yourself. You’re not a failure if you can’t finish a script in a month. Think long-term. Keep chipping away at things and you will get to the end of it. And the moment you have the opportunity to sit and focus on the things that make you happy, don’t hesitate. Don’t feel guilty about not being more productive with every second of time. And certainly don’t think that leaving a bad job will be the end of things for you. Learn to take the time for yourself, and if there’s none to take, then learn to make it.

There will always be hard days, busy weeks, and tough times. But if the overwhelming stress and fatigue have worked their way into your entire lifestyle, you owe it to yourself and your own work to find a way to balance things out.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
More than anything, I consider myself a storyteller. But before I became any kind of writer or filmmaker, I was trained as a musician.

I remember the day I had to tell my high school band director that I’d decided to go to college for film instead of music. I assumed he would be upset, having just taught me music for four years. To my surprise, he was thrilled. When I asked if he was disappointed that I wouldn’t be pursuing a music career, he shook his head and said, “It’s all the same thing.” And it’s only now that I realize how right he was. There is music in every bit of work that I do, even the writing. A strong sense of rhythm underlines pacing, dialogue, and helps me craft performances.

There’s a reason stories are measured in beats.

I like to think that it makes my work feel like an emotional symphony. While that’s most applicable to film, I’ve tried to bring that musicality into work that I’ve done across several different storytelling mediums.

My biggest and most recent project is a feature film that I produced, wrote, and directed, BONE COLD, a psychological action, thriller, filmed primarily in my home state of Maine. It was a difficult, frustrating, exhausting, thrilling journey to push an indie film through the pandemic, but I’m now in the rare position of being a first-time feature director who’s actually satisfied with their work. There’s a lot to be proud of, not the least of which is finishing an indie feature at all, especially given our shoestring budget and limited support. Even so, the film was acquired for distribution and will be released domestically on June 13th on TVOD and DVD/Blu-Ray.

Last year, I was hired as a writer/story producer for a fantastic horror series, Eli Roth’s THE LEGION OF EXORCISTS, about group of real-world exorcists who spend their lives fighting demons on Earth. It’s a fascinating combination of scripted and unscripted that creates an absorbing and terrifying show. I spent several months on set and in post for that series and I’m excited that it will finally have its premiere on June 1st, 2023, on Travel Channel, Discovery+ and Max.

Most recently, I served as a Story Producer on the new Food Network series, Summer Baking Championship, which is the latest installment of the hugely popular Baking Championship series. I’m really excited for people to see the show, it was a blast to work on and the episode I worked on is really fun. The series premieres on Food Network on May 15th at 9pm/8pm Central. I believe my episode airs on June 5th

In the last ten years or so, most of my work has been in the horror/suspense space. It started with a short film that I wrote and directed back in 2012, an adaptation of the Stephen King story, SURVIVOR TYPE. It’s a shocking, gruesome story about a drug-smuggling surgeon shipwrecked on a tiny island, who goes through terrifying lengths to keep himself alive for a rescue that may never come. Even Stephen King himself says that story goes a bit too far. But the adaptation was a huge success at festivals around the world and won a handful of awards, including several Best Short Film and Best Actor awards for the film’s incredible lead, Gideon Emery.

In 2017, I started writing for Zenescope comics, specifically their anthology horror series GRIMM TALES OF TERROR. That series is a lot of fun and I loved writing those issues. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to do some more with them in the future. I also wrote an issue of their high-tech spy series, RED AGENT, which was an absolute blast.

At the same time I was writing comics, I began working on a collection of short stories. Most of these were ideas that didn’t work as feature scripts or TV pilots, but when I sat down to write them in long-form, they came together just as I’d hoped. It was a different kind of storytelling for me, but I charged ahead until I had written about 65,000 words. I put all the stories together into one volume and published the book SPIDER SEASON in October of 2018. That project found more success than I’d anticipated, winning the Gold Medal in Anthology Fiction at the 2019 Readers’ Favorite Book Awards and was listed on Book Authority’s “Best New Horror Books To Read in 2019”.

I took one story from that collection, EVERYONE ELSE IS ASLEEP, and adapted it into a hypnotic and creepy animated web series for the Rizzle app. That series won “Best Vertical Drama Series” at the 2022 IAWTV Awards, which is sort of the Emmys for the internet.

I’ve got another book in the final stages of editing, another collection of dark stories, called LONG TERM DAMAGE. I’m hoping that one will be published later this year and follow SPIDER SEASON’s path of success.

Looking at my work as a whole, I’ve noticed some common themes and subjects that I tend to write about; toxic masculinity, corruption of authority, mental fragility, coupled with the inevitable self-reflection that no writer can escape. It’s built an interesting body of work, and I suspect my readers/viewers know more about me than they might think.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I’ll start with the most eye-rolling, heavy sigh-inducing bit of advice that everyone’s heard a million times: You can’t quit. You’re going to get hit with a barrage of reasons why you shouldn’t write a certain story, or go out for a job, or be in this business at all, but it’s absolutely true that the only people who truly fail are the ones who stop trying. You can and will carve out a unique career path for yourself, but only if you’re pushing for it every single day. I’m not saying it’ll be an easy, satisfying, or rewarding process, but as long as you’re out here doing the work, it’s still possible to land that break-thru gig.

Second, you’ve got to learn to be honest with yourself. Believe me, you’re going to get criticism from every direction when your work goes out into the world. It can be difficult, but you have to know for certain that your idea works for you before anyone else reads or sees it. I know too many people who work hard on a first draft of a script and immediately start submitting it to contests, to managers and agents, to producers. I’ve done this myself. But the more you write, the more you begin to understand that writing is re-writing. It’s about finding the story in the mess of words and ideas. A sculptor wouldn’t be happy with their first pile of clay. Until you can justify every single decision you’ve made on the page, in an edit, in a pitch, then it’s not ready to send. You must be sure that what you’re presenting says what it’s meant to say, and that kind of clarity takes time. So if it’s not ready, if the idea is not working, if you don’t feel great about it, be honest with yourself. Don’t send it. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. Just set it aside. Move on. Come back to it later. Because if you know it doesn’t work, so will the people you send it to. You often get one chance to have somebody look at your work, so you don’t want to squander it.

Lastly, you cannot be afraid of not knowing something or looking stupid. I have always said, and I maintain to this day, that I am an idiot. I always have been. I embrace my idiocy. I wield it like a dumb sword. I find it to be very useful as I work my way through a business that nobody can really make sense of. If there’s something I don’t know, or don’t understand, I always ask for an explanation, or admit that I’ve never done something before and need to be walked through it. I have such a better understanding of the entire filmmaking process because of that attitude. Each movie has its own set of requirements, challenges and curve balls, so there’s no question that you’ll be dealing with a sticky situation at some point, or be out of your element for a stretch of time. If you approach these situations with any kind of know-it-all, fake-it-til-you-make-it attitude, you will quickly find things more frustrating for you and everyone around you. Nobody will think you’re stupid or incapable if you simply ask the question. Remember, I am an absolute moron and I managed to work my way through the legal side of a feature film. My lawyer did lots of explaining along the way, of course.

So to boil it down: Don’t quit, be honest with yourself, and don’t be afraid to sound stupid. Those three things have always served me well.

Before we go, maybe you can tell us a bit about your parents and what you feel was the most impactful thing they did for you?
I could speak for days about my parents and never say a bad word about them.

My mother is French-Canadian, raised by a logger who once killed a bear with a hatchet and a glamorous woman who founded a network of beauty pageants. My father was raised in the rural areas of central Maine in a strict household run by a WWII Navy vet and an artistic homemaker. There was no guarantee that they would be okay with my film aspirations, but not only were they encouraging, they’ve actively supported my work over the years. They both had on-screen roles in my feature film, BONE COLD, as well as multiple behind the scenes duties. The whole cast and crew crashed in my mother’s house for our Maine shoot and my father became a one-man grip team, by my side every day of filming.

In a world of parents who don’t understand why their kids would ever choose a life in the arts, or who plainly hate the idea of Hollywood, I credit my parents with stoking the flame under my butt to keep me moving forward and take my dreams seriously. They offered assurances when I was down, loaned me money while I was desperate between gigs, and they’re always excited to hear about what I’m working on, convinced that I’ll win an Oscar someday soon (despite my intense disagreements with them on that point). I have friends in their forties who still haven’t told their parents that they work in film. It’s heartbreaking. I cannot overstate the impact of my parents’ unwavering support.

As I write this, my mother is helping me organize screenings of my film back home, and she’s pushing harder than anyone to make the event a big deal in the community.

My father passed away in 2020, shortly after we finished filming BONE COLD. With all of the things that I miss about him, the most common reminder of his loss is at the end of any new story I’ve written or project that I’ve worked on, because I won’t get to hear his praise, see the joy in his face when the credits roll. And with BONE COLD’s release set for this June, I know it will be a bittersweet experience, because my father worked so hard for so long, and won’t be here to celebrate with us. But the film was dedicated to him even before his passing, and the fact that his face is on camera will be cause for celebration for a very long time.

So to all parents out there, I hope you realize that your understanding, encouragement, and support can make all the difference in the world. A life in the arts does not guarantee poverty, struggle and hardships, but your support will certainly give your kids the tools they need to face those challenges head-on.