Meet Cece Wheeler

We were lucky to catch up with Cece Wheeler recently and have shared our conversation below.

Cece, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I’ve really been all over the map in terms of interests; prior to film school, I studied Biology at Middlebury College in Vermont and ended up doing a thesis in octopus camouflage. But I also studied studio art for years, played guitar in a garage band in middle school (we learned one Radiohead cover and then disbanded), attended the Iowa Young Writers Program as a teen for short-story writing, and was at one point expelled from high school. I can’t even remember what I wrote my personal statement about when I applied to college, which is in theory when you’re supposed to be narrowing down what your life is going to be all about. When I graduated, I still had no idea what I wanted to do, so I moved back home to Seattle with my boyfriend.

That summer I was working at a vet’s office and taking a physics class – the only remaining credit I needed if I wanted to apply to medical school. I would work ten hours and then drive an hour to a community college the next city over. I used to make my boyfriend do my worksheets for me because he’d already taken physics; I’d sit in my car outside the class and copy over his answers onto a fresh sheet so they’d be in my handwriting. One of the other students was probably forty-five and a doctor already, but he didn’t have a U.S. medical license, so to practice in the states he was stuck there with me at 9pm, taking turns putting a toy car at the top of a ramp and watching it go down.

Did he also have that sort of out of body awareness that maybe this was not how his life was supposed to be? Or was it just an effect of being twenty-two and out of school and back in the same place where I’d grown up. I had an English teacher, Rob Cohen, who used to stand at the front of the classroom quietly talking about “capital T Truth” and the importance of living your life consciously. I would think about him while I sat in my car in my scrubs in the empty parking lot watching the clock tick, trying to summon the motivation to go in.

A few months later I took the eight hundred dollars that the Biology Department had awarded me when I graduated (given to an individual to further their pursuit of Biology), rented a camera, drove down to Portland, and made a short film starring my thirteen year old cousin. Behind the scenes photos reveal my brother crouching behind a table holding a microphone and my boyfriend shining a lamp on the actors from atop a chair. I was very very nervous to make my small and unimportant film that hardly anyone would see; this alone tipped me off to the fact that I might finally be doing something I really cared about.

My film didn’t get into any festivals, but it got me into film school at Columbia, and since then I’ve made two more short films, each one (I like to think) better than the one that came before. I wrote a feature screenplay that won a Sloan Screenplay award, and received the Indian Paintbrush production grant for a short that I’ll be directing in November. When I’m writing or directing, I’m not thinking about anything else – what I’m doing feels essential. And I think that’s how you know you’ve found what you should keep doing; the things that should feel basic and tedious – the film-equivalent to dropping a car down a ramp over and over to prove that gravity is a constant – don’t feel that way, instead you feel like you’re finally getting somewhere.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I’m a writer and director, originally from Seattle, Washington, currently pursuing my masters in film at Columbia University in NYC. As part of my degree, I’ve written and directed two short films, and will make two more in the coming year. My last film, Coasting, is in post-production; right now I’m working with a sound designer and composer, Alana DeVito – to create the soundscape for the film. It’s been really cool to delve into someone else’s creative process for the last couple of weeks, and also a good exercise in figuring out how to communicate my own vision for the film. When we first met to discuss the project, I remember they mentioned that I could really use any language that made sense to me to talk about sound – if I wanted to have a scene sound “more blue,” or “more jagged,” for example, those were directions they could work with, and that was really exciting to me.

I’m also prepping for my upcoming film, Winners & Losers, which received a grant from Indian Paintbrush that allows us to shoot this upcoming November. We’re trying to lock our location right now, which I find is always kind of the tipping point of prep, because once you can see where you’re filming everything else begins to fall into place and become easier to conceptualize – if anyone has a great lead on an apartment building with a pool, drop me a line! This will be my third short with cinematographer Gus Aronson, which is exciting because we’ve both grown so much as filmmakers over the last few years, not just individually but in terms of our collaboration, so I feel really confident going into this project that we can execute something a little more ambitious and expressive.

Essentially I’d say what is most exciting and special about filmmaking as a field is that it draws so much from different disciplines – you’re incorporating sound design, music, photography, graphic design, etc., so you have such a deep well of knowledge you can draw from when you work with people who are really devoted to their own area of expertise. And recently I had the experience of working with someone way outside the arts – a veterinary pathologist – on a screenplay I wrote that received a grant from the Sloan Foundation, an institution that supports artists who incorporate science into their work. As someone who did my undergraduate degree in Biology and then worked at a vet office for two years before applying to film school, it was a very cool full circle moment. Overall I think I just feel lucky to be in a field where I get to collaborate with so many talented people, and I’m always looking to learn from them.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The last few years saw a major transition in my life from a post-grad veterinary assistant to a filmmaker and a student at one of the best film schools in America, and the skills I leaned on the most during that time were persistence, optimism, and communication.

Persistence I think is kind of a given, but figuring out what that looks like for you can be hard. Speaking to screenwriting specifically, you hear the advice a lot that you should have a writing routine – maybe this means getting up at seven and writing for a dedicated three hours every morning, and people will be pretty adamant that without this type of self-discipline you’ll never get anywhere. I’m not saying this is wrong, but I think it’s easy to try that and feel defeated, and end up in a cycle of beating yourself up (and still not writing). What persistence has looked like in my life is constantly creating the conditions for success. Sometimes that means going to a movie by yourself in the afternoon, or a rec softball game in central park, or just keeping your ears open on the bus. It’s the active work of being receptive to the world, being attuned to what resonates with you as a storyteller, and then remembering to go home and write it down. That’s still the hard part – there’s always going to be a moment where it’s easier to simply not open your notebook or laptop, and that’s where the self-discipline comes in, but personally I think you can trick yourself into a kind of reactive creativity by just constantly exposing yourself to art and people and interesting things, and if you’re a person who experiences the world with that kind of conscious intensity, it will elicit the need to write.

This brings me to optimism, which I think is so overlooked and so essential. And I don’t mean you have to walk around being happy and hopeful all the time – certainly don’t do that openly on the subway – but I’ve started to notice that people who rely on jadedness, cynicism, and bitterness as central tenets of their personality are usually just deeply insecure. Real optimism for me isn’t synonymous with naiveté; I usually find it to be a sign of courage and maturity. It’s not believing things will magically work out, but choosing to have some faith in yourself and other people. And it’s a muscle that I have to remember to strengthen, because otherwise it’s so easy to fall into boredom and despair. If you watch a really great actor, you’ll see that the basis of their performance is usually a willingness to totally put themselves out there and be vulnerable; they’re trusting themselves and you, the audience, enough to do that. Optimism is a choice about how you want to engage with the world, and I’ve just found in my experience that being excited, being vulnerable, making plans, hoping for things – these qualities draw other people in, they create a kind of positive gravitational field that you need in order to make films.

My third essential quality is one listed on job applications across the country, but the ability to communicate effectively really is that important. Some of that is truly learning how to send a nice e-mail, how to make other people feel appreciated, and how to get your point across. There’s another level to communication that ties in with vulnerability, and it’s admitting to yourself what you want. If you can’t articulate what you’re trying to accomplish inside your own head, it’s going to be hard to get other people on board with your vision. I mentioned before that I love working with my cinematographer, Gus, partly because he is wildly talented, but also because he’s a kind person who’s easy to talk to. When we first met, I was nervous to say how I wanted a shot to look or feel because I was worried about sounding dumb. Partly this was because I didn’t have a huge set of references, so it was a lot of me going “well maybe we’re kind of low down here, and then I want to come around her face and get some of the sky in.” And it was even more nerve-wracking if he asked “why?” because it’s terrifying to be forthcoming about your own work, but if you can be brave enough to answer those questions honestly, you get to lean on other people’s talent and expertise. Once as I was trying to walk him through a shot, Gus took a few minutes to pull up a short film he’d seen a couple years back and asked “something like this?” and suddenly I had a reference. Granted, all this is for people like me who tend to be a little too apologetic, or make their boyfriends proofread their e-mails before they send them. If you suspect you’re on the other end of that spectrum, my advice is wholly different, and is the following: it doesn’t kill you to be nice! Especially to service-workers! Especially to teen girls working the front desk!

What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?

I remember when I was maybe seven I went with my mom to this art store to buy my first set of watercolors. And I know we all love the stories of famous people and the fact that they learned how to play guitar on a box with plastic strings or whatever: there’s a separate lesson on dedication and determination there. But for me it mattered that my mom took time out of her day after working a full shift at the hospital and wanted to bring me to a real art store (in the basement below a Petco, incidentally – there were always escaped crickets hopping around), and she asked the guy working there what a good brand of paint was, and she didn’t buy me the dirt-cheapest for-kids brand, she spent like six more dollars to get the one he recommended. She also didn’t make a huge deal about it – that kind of parental performance about how I “better use it” because she was getting me something special. I’m not trying to say that parents need to spend more money on their kids’ hobbies in order to care about them, but having parents who took my interests as seriously as I did, who let me try things in earnest, is such a huge part of learning to be creative, which necessarily involves a lot of waste and failure. And it creates a different mindset about what it means to succeed: one of my proudest creations in middle school was this giant castle that my dad and I made for a unit on medieval times. We literally spent a month researching historically accurate turrets, and a whole afternoon at Lowe’s picking out grout for the walls. And I got a B- on it because it was too big – I hadn’t read the assignment closely enough and it wasn’t supposed to be more than two by two feet. My dad still brings it up. All this to say that the most impactful thing my parents did for me was to be excited about the things I was excited about. It’s helped me learn to enjoy the process of getting better at something; to make the attempt without knowing whether I’ll succeed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cecewheelerfilm.com/