Meet Jerry Lee

We recently connected with Jerry Lee and have shared our conversation below.

Jerry, appreciate you making time for us and sharing your wisdom with the community. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others overcame obstacles can be helpful. One of those struggles is keeping creativity alive despite all the stresses, challenges and problems we might be dealing with. How do you keep your creativity alive?

The simple answer for me is to just live life and immerse myself in new art. I am young, and so I understand that there is a lot of room for me to grow as a person, and for me, personal growth is the spark of creativity. Being an artist is to be a sponge for the world around you, and so immersing myself in unfamiliar art, in any medium, is another way for me to keep my creativity going because whenever I experience great art, I am reminded of why I do what I do, and what to strive for as an artist. A lot of my most creative moments as a film editor comes from not just pulling inspiration from another film, but rather pulling more abstract ideas from unlikely sources, like the shape of a piece of music, or the tone of my neighbor’s conversation I overheard a few weeks ago.
Another way that I manage to keep my creativity alive is to accept the fact that I can’t always be creative all the time. Creativity is a fickle thing, and it can come and go in waves, and I found that putting pressure on myself to be creative when I cannot be is only counterproductive. Understanding where I am in my cycle of creativity has been very helpful for me, because if I recognize that I am not in a good creative state, I will make an effort to watch more movies or listen to more music to rejuvenate myself. Having this self-awareness has helped me a lot not just as an editor, but as a creative person in general.

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

I am a Chinese-Australian film editor based in Los Angeles, and I specialize in editing narrative genre films and music videos. As a graduate from USC School of Cinematic Arts, I am trained as an editor to prioritize storytelling and character; however, I am also a very stylized editor, and I love working with directors who have distinct styles which I can explore and commit to, which is why I enjoy working in genre films and music videos, as they both have much room for stylistic flair. I’ve edited films that have been awarded at the Austin Film Festival, and have been selected for Screamfest Horror Festival, Chattanooga Festival, FilmQuest, and KCET’s Fine Cut Festival. This year, I had the opportunity to edit my first feature length narrative film, as well as my first documentary project, both of which are set to be released next year.

Editing is the art of reconstruction, and I’ve come to realize that I’ve always been drawn to recontextualization in many different artistic mediums. Outside of film, I love hip-hop and street photography. The common thread between hip-hop, street photography and film editing is that they all repurpose existing things to create new things. A huge part of hip-hop is the idea of sampling; taking an existing piece of sound and repurposing it into a beat. I love seeing the artistry of how a producer recontextualizes a piece of music or sound to create their own unique art. Street photography operates in a similar way, as street photographers take whatever they see on the street and reframe it to create images unique to them.
I think that’s why I am so drawn to film editing, because it is an inherently reactive medium, much like street photography and hip-hop. As a film editor, you must react and respond to the footage and sound given to you and reconstructing them in creative ways to tell a story is the craft of editing. When I decided to first pursue editing, I did not make the connection between hip-hop, street photography and editing, but in retrospect, my interest in film editing is a natural progression of these hobbies.

Besides editing, I am also a music video director, who primarily directs hip-pop music videos. I am influenced by East Asian cinema like Hong Kong cinema and Taiwanese New Wave, and I like to incorporate their visual styles of capturing urban environments into my music video work. My music video directorial debut, “Hold, My Head”, which won “Best First-Time Director” at the 2022 Fall Music Video Awards”, is a recreation of a sequence from Wong Kar Wai’s “Fallen Angels”. I love working with new musical artists and I am currently a part of a catalog of music video directors at Live2, which is a company that connects music artists with music video directors.

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?

The three most impactful qualities for me are curiosity, outsider mentality and communication.

I think being genuinely curious about other people and cultivating that curiosity is a really important quality to have for young filmmakers like me.
Being curious and open-minded has been pivotal to my development as an artist, because it has exposed me to perspectives and ideas that I would have never experienced by myself. Like many other artists, I am very opinionated about the medium that I care about, but much of my artistic growth has come from me opening myself up to the people around me and attempting to understand and absorb their perspective, even if I am instinctively averse to them. The more strongly I disagree with a collaborator, the more I am curious about why we are at opposite ends of the spectrum, even if I don’t end up agreeing with them.
I always enjoy learning more about my collaborators, even if it doesn’t directly relate to the story we’re telling, because learning and trying to figure out what makes other people tick is one of the joys of being a storyteller.

I’ve always been an outsider for most of my life and so my outsider mentality is a defining quality of my artistic journey. My life so far has been split between 3 countries: China, Australia and the US. I was born in China and moved to Australia at the age 8, before coming to the US for college when I was 18. Having to completely up-root myself and learn to live in new places is a constant in my life and so I always feel like I exist in between places and communities. Over the years, I’ve learnt to embrace my outsider identity. Being an outsider has made me more aware of where the boundaries lie and so as an artist, I naturally gravitate towards the boundaries. Having studied filmmaking in the US, I am often taught that many rules of film are universal, but my outsider perspective allows me to recognise the Ameri-centrism of such rules, and that the rules of Hollywood, while valid in many respects, are not the be-all and end-all of filmmaking. I think it’s important for young artists to carry this reminder with them, so that they can learn the rules with a healthy dose of skepticism, and break the things they are taught.

Finally, learning to be a more articulate and communicative collaborator has also helped me a lot in my journey, especially in a medium that is as collaborative as filmmaking. At the beginning of my film journey, I was not very articulate at all; I had a hard time clearly describing the ideas that were in my head. The more I think I have a grasp on what film is, the more I’ve become aware of how impossible it is to describe the aesthetic experience of a film – the soundscape, the colours, the feeling of watching an actor’s eyes move a certain way at a specific moment. It’s very difficult to use words to capture one’s feelings towards a film, and so knowing how to concisely articulate your feelings to your collaborator is the key to successful creative relationships. Expanding my taste to watch movies with a range of styles, and reflecting on why I like and dislike things has greatly helped me in becoming a better communicator. Over the years, I’ve also learnt to avoid overintelletualizing films because talking about films as academic ideas, rather than aesthetic experiences, can overcomplicate my communication with collaborators, making myself a less articulate collaborator. For young filmmakers, I think it’s important to know how to best communicate your thoughts to those around you, and always remember that you are creating an aesthetic and emotional experience, not an academic essay. Although I’ve gotten better at articulating myself, I know that communication is a lifelong skill to master and I hope to continue to grow as a collaborator.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

As an editor, I am always looking for new directors to work with. I like working with narrative and documentary directors with a strong sense of aesthetics and style, and helping them to achieve their vision. I also enjoy working with directors who like to ask questions, instead of preaching a point to the audience. As a director, I love working with up-and-coming musical artists and direct music videos for them. My most listened genres of music are hip-hop and dance-pop, but I am open to working with artists of any genre.

As an Asian filmmaker in the US, I am looking to push the boundaries of what Asian-American cinema can be. I sense that the new generation of Asian-American audiences and filmmakers alike are looking for a change in Asian-American cinema, because the current genre has reached a point of stagnation, where most Asian-American films can only deal with its Asian identity. I believe that Asian-American cinema needs to transcend itself by examining Asian characters as more their Asianness, while not ignoring their cultural and racial roots. Asian-Americans don’t just think about being Asian all the time; their identity does affect their daily lives a lot, but they are also much more complicated than their identities, and I believe that Asian-American cinema needs to reflect this complexity. Some of my favourite pieces of Asian-American cinema in recent years, such as Past Lives and Everything Everywhere All At Once, have been able to transcend their Asian identity, as the films respectively deal with grand themes of fate, romance and existentialism, while commenting on its Asian-American identity. I want to be a part of the next generation of Asian-American filmmakers that push the boundaries of what Asian-American cinema can be and I hope to work with filmmakers who want to do the same.

If anything I said speaks to you, you can connect with me on Instagram @jezm9, or visit my website jerryxlee.squarespace.com.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jerryxlee.squarespace.com
• Instagram: @jezm9

Image Credits

Portrait photos by Stephanie Bell, Alexander J. Milne and Sunset Dream Photography Studio
Film stills from “Hold, My Head – Pei Wesley” (directed & edited by Jerry X. Lee), “Seraphim” (directed by Oscar Ramos, co-editing by Jerry X. Lee) and “Neither Donkey Nor Horse” (directed by Robin Wang, post-supervision by Jerry X. Lee), “Padlock” (edited & colored by Jerry X. Lee)
Street photography by Jerry X. Lee