Meet Mike Lombardo

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mike Lombardo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Mike with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

I think my work ethic was borne out of equal parts passion and necessity. When I am working on a project I have a tendency to turn into a machine. I won’t sleep, I won’t eat, I just keep pushing forward on whatever it is I’m doing until its done. This can be a good thing and bad thing as history has taught me, haha. For me nothing is as intoxicating a feeling as seeing something come together. Watching the little pieces start to gel and form the bigger picture is so exciting that it keeps me going. Creating something, making things from nothing is such a cool thing. I could sit and watch people make stuff for hours, and I often do. Watching videos of people sculpting, making molds, even seeing how everyday products like plastic bins or candy is made is fascinating to me. I just love process, and that curiosity and excitement fuels my drive to create.

The other part of it is that in a lot of cases, I don’t really have a choice. Being an independent filmmaker, you learn very quickly that if you don’t learn how to wear a variety of hats, you won’t have a movie.

An actor friend of mine used to always say about potential future projects that, “The cavalry ain’t coming.” Meaning that you need to make your own opportunities rather than sit around and wait for something to drop into your lap, and he absolutely nailed it. If you want something to happen, you need to get out there and make it happen yourself.

Another thing I think about often when working is something a painter friend of mine once told me that has stuck with me to this day. He said it always annoys him when people say that creativity and talent is a gift you are born with. He said, “Yes, talent IS a gift. It’s the gift of a shovel. Talent is just the tool, learning how to use it and developing the discipline is the real art.”

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I run an independent film company called Reel Splatter Productions. I write, direct, produce, and do FX work, and write prose.

I was a video store kid. I would roam the aisles of every video store I could convince my parents to take me to for hours and stare at the beautiful cover art, grabbing as many weirdo horror tapes as I could. There was never a time in my life that I wasn’t obsessed with horror and making things. A lot of my creativity came from my mom. She was always making things, like crafts and pictures.

A big turning point for me as a child was getting a Creepy Crawler Oven for Christmas one year. You would pour different colored goop into metal molds of bugs and creatures and then put them in this light bulb powered oven to bake. When they were done and cooled off, you de-molded your own rubber bugs. This kicked off my love of mold making which paired with my love of cheesy horror movies, turned into a passion for special fx. I would save up all of my money to go to the Halloween store the day after Halloween and buy all the liquid latex, prosthetics, and fake blood on clearance so I could experiment.

Looking back at my earliest school reports, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always say a “horror movie maker” and I spent a lot of my time as a kid writing my own horror stories and scripts inspired by the movies and video games I was watching and playing at the time. I got my first VHS camera when I was around 11 years old and would take my toys and fake blood and make little stop motion movies and practice doing gore fx on my friends for little short films.

Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark were also huge parts of my life and largely responsible for my wanting to be a writer.

I eventually started making an actual short films with friends and started Reel Splatter in high school. We mainly did gory horror comedy shorts but as my prose writing started to gain some traction, and I became more confident and brave enough to start expressing myself in a more serious fashion, things started to go a more dramatic and personal route.

I made my first feature length film, I’m Dreaming of a White Doomsday in 2017, based off a short story I had published a few years prior. Its the story of a young mother who is trapped in a bomb shelter with her 7 year old son after an unnamed apocalypse. With supplies and hope dwindling, she decides to give her child one last christmas. Its a very dark and heavy story, but one that was based on the lengths my own mother went to provide for me and my three brothers and shield us from the reality of how bad things were when I was growing up.

White Doomsday took 4 years to shoot with a $10,000 budget that was mostly comprised of my salary from the pizza shop I was managing during the production. It was the most grueling and difficult thing I had ever attempted in my life, but thanks to the dedication of the cast and crew, and the support of friends and fans, we made it through. It ended up playing film festivals all over the world and won 7 awards with over a dozen nominations. It was picked up by Scream Team Releasing for a blu ray, dvd, and vhs release and in also currently streaming.

During that that time I was also being followed and interviewed by Paul Hunt & Julie Kauffman, a husband and wife documentary filmmaking duo for a doc called The Brilliant Terror. It’s about the grassroots horror film making scene and the lengths filmmakers will go to get their projects made. I was honored to be featured as one of the main stars of the film and it also played festivals all over the world and won numerous awards, which was really awesome to see.

I took a hiatus from film making after the stress of White Doomsday to get my regular life in order and get a big people job, which ended up nearly killing my creative drive for four years after I became a manager in retail. The itch started to slowly come back and after being pushed and prodded by my author and artist friends, released my first short story collection, Please Don’t Tap on The Glass & Other Tales of The Melancholy and Grotesque. It was 10 years worth of short fiction and story notes and was very well received. It put the original short story version of White Doomsday back in print for the first time in years and the book opened with what became the fan favorite of the collection, a short story called Dead Format, about a vhs collector dealing with grief and coming across a haunted tape.

That story is now in the process of becoming my second feature film, and we just ended our crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo where we raised just over $66K for our budget which I am amazingly grateful for. Having an actual budget to make a film has opened so many new doors and avenues and I am beyond excited to start shooting the film. It is intensely personal and very melancholy like White Doomsday, but also has a little streak of the off kilter humor that I was known for in my old short films.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The biggest things that were most impactful for me were passion, creativity, and bravery.

Pursuing art, especially filmmaking is a foolish thing to do if you are looking to make money. Creativity is a compulsion not a choice. You do this because you don’t know how NOT to, not because you want to be rich. Passion should be the first reason you jump into this.

Creativity and drive are essential to get you to the finish line when you are working on a project. Its so easy to get discouraged and give up. Everything that can go wrong on set will go wrong, you just have to be like Macgyver and think on your feet. Sometimes you have to make a slashed throat out of toilet paper, maple syrup, and cinnamon powder you found in a cabinet on set, because the prosthetic didn’t work. that’s fine, don’t let it stop you from being creative. So many of the most memorable moments in films were complete accidents or a course rerouting because something went wrong or they lost a location or actor. You just have to roll with the punches and get it done.

And finally being brave enough to try new things and to fail. Making a movie or writing a story and showing it to people is like standing on a stage, ripping open your chest and letting strangers see your guts. Its terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Its a bizarre masochistic exhibitionism that can only come from being an artist. If something you make doesn’t work, well you just learned how not to do it the next time. Even the best filmmakers and artists out there mess stuff up, you just gotta get back up and try again. Getting rejected from film festivals is part of the process. Build up a thick skin and celebrate your wins when you have them.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

Imposter Syndrome is my nemesis. It doesn’t matter how many times I hear that someone loved a story or movie I made, I never believe them and will always secretly think they are just being polite. When we launched the crowdfunder for Dead Format I was thoroughly convinced that it would be a colossal failure and that no would care that I was trying to make a new film.

We raised nearly $7K over our goal.

I have a lot of very talented and well known author and filmmaker friends and it always blows my mind when they tell me that they secretly think that whatever they are working on is going to flop. Its a strange comfort knowing that EVERYONE, no matter how big they become, has the same insecurities. Its just a normal part of the creative process. You can write or shoot something that you think is absolutely brilliant, then go to sleep and wake up the next morning and decide its absolute shit and needs to be thrown away or redone. In those moments, I find its helpful to step away and take a little break. Work on a different part or watch a movie or read a book then come back to it with fresh eyes. I can’t even count the number of times I’ll condemn something I made and then revisit it years later and think, “Wow, that was actually pretty good!”

Imposter Syndrome is like grief, it never goes away, you just learn how to live with it.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Brilliant Terror poster by Julie Kauffman (Lonfall Films)

I’m Dreaming of a White Doomsday poster by Marc Shoenbach (Sadist Art Designs)

Dead Format poster by Chris Barnes (Brutal Posters)

Mike Lombardo holding VHS photo by Randy Rock

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