Meet Sonny Newman

We were lucky to catch up with Sonny Newman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sonny , thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?
My hope is that I’m not naively romanticizing mental illness here, but a major part of my work ethic, both artistic and pragmatic, comes from being an extremely anxious person by nature. I’m pathologically attuned to the uncertainty that underlies every second of our lives, and the only way I can keep myself from curling up into a fetal position and reciting my ABCs is to plan, organize, and keep track of what’s in my control. I make very detailed check-lists everyday, which is perhaps an indication of something not-quite-right with my noggin generally speaking? But it’s also an indispensable habit as an underground filmmaker! Check-lists help me stay on top of my tasks (and remind me to, like, eat and go outside). When you’re making films on your own, responsibilities that ought to be delegated among many rest on you alone. The only way I know to keep track of these responsibilities is to stay compulsively organized, or else overthink everything, drown in uncertainty, and shut-down.
I don’t mean to promote anxiety — if you can choose between having anxiety and having slightly less obsessive works habits, don’t choose anxiety! The anxiety isn’t what gives me good work ethic. Anxiety is a problem that I have, and my work ethic is a product of coping with this problem.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
My name is Sonny Newman (they/them)! I write, direct, produce, edit, photograph, and score independent films, but in an effort to avoid being an insufferable multi-hyphenate, I tend to refer to myself as a filmmaker. I come from a family of musicians and neurotics, and many of my relatives are experts in both fields. After a childhood of ping-ponging between creative passions I decided to pursue filmmaking because it could incorporate all art forms. I fell deeply in love with cinema at the beginning of High School, and I haven’t looked back since (just kidding: every time something goes wrong on set or I can’t find people to execute an idea, I think, “Why couldn’t I have written books? Painted? Yodeled?” Filmmaking is an impractical passion. But there’s nothing else I want to do).
Not to turn this interview into one long trauma dump, but I struggled a lot with depression and anxiety throughout High School. It was difficult to make myself go to class and keep up my grades, and I felt pretty locked up in my interior self. I think I saw movies and literature as reconciliations between the internal and external, a way of accessing the consciousness of others, so I spent most of the time I should have been in classes writing, watching, reading, and discussing.
I dropped out of High School dizzy with stories of people like Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino (give me a break, we all go through our film bro phase) who skipped film school and went straight to making movies on their own terms. I decided I would make a film that would become a massive hit on the festival circuit and turn me into an indie darling. The film in question? An experimental meditation on desire as it relates to Aristotlean dramatics, focussing on a stagnant character in a cinematic environment that flows around them. With queer subtext. And fries. Sounds like a hit, right?
Needless to say, the film didn’t become a festival success. It didn’t get made. I had taught myself a lot of valuable information about film theory/poetics/history, but I knew nothing about the technique of filmmaking, and I had no collaborators I could rely on. So when the production fell apart, and after a few months of wallowing, I signed up for the Los Angeles Film School. Since then I’ve been active making short films, web series, and writing.
I’m currently in post-production on Tempo Rubato, a surreal comedy/horror short film that I wrote, directed, produced, photographed, filmed, edited, and am in the process of scoring. It follows an overworked and profoundly untalented pianist who is desperate to please her parents, both of whom are world class musicians. The night before her eighteenth birthday recital she is abducted by three ghoulish aliens who whisk her into a realm of chaos to use her (lack of) musical abilities for their own sinister purposes.
This is my favorite film that I’ve made so far, and it gave me the opportunity to pull from some of my favorite cinematic obsessions: silent film, Looney Tunes absurdity, gothic horror, the Marx Brothers, and mid-20th century avant-garde film. I was especially excited to create two distinct ways of presenting time: one rigid, edited strictly to the tempo of the metronome, with hard cuts and camera angles that always keep us at a distance; and the other fluid, with shots that blend into one another to disrupt time and space continuities. Grounding all this theoretical BS is lots of clowning, fantasy, and a story that channels my deep fear of not living up to expectations. I’ll be submitting the films to festivals this year, which means it should be playing in those festivals at the end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 — but I’ll also be posting an unlisted link of the film to YouTube once it’s done, so anyone who wants to see it before the end of next year can shoot me a message on Instagram!

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 most important quality is communication, and as a sub-quality I’ll say compassion. Film is and always will be a collaborative medium. You have to listen to the people around you. This is especially true when you’re spearheading a no-budget passion project: the folks working with you are doing it out of some swirl of friendship, love for filmmaking, need for experience, and charity — you have to stay attuned to their boundaries and limits. Perseverance is also of the utmost importance. When you’re making movies, you’re attempting to shape reality to your vision, and reality as a rule doesn’t care about your vision. Cinema is fundamentally about the meeting point between the world in our minds and the world that is empirically there. When things go well, those two combine to create something greater than either — but on your way there you’re going to deal with a lot of unpredictable weather, flakey PAs, and general nonsense. Sometimes these problems will be a blessing in disguise, and sometimes they’ll just genuinely hurt your film. But you’ll never get anywhere if you don’t push through, even when you end up with a bad movie. Which leads me to my last quality:
Humor. Don’t get me wrong, I think art and filmmaking is deeply meaningful. I take it very seriously: it’s the closest I get to mysticism. But it’s also a deeply silly, unconscionably stupid thing to do with your life. You will go through so much grief for absolutely no reason. Your films will be terrible at first, and you will have to share them with other people because they worked on them: you don’t get to keep your failures to yourself. You will be Sisyphus, Job, and Icarus rolled up in one. The only way I can get through it is to remember that, on some level, it’s all a joke that I’m choosing to take seriously.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
The single most important book to my art practice is “Essential Deren,” a collection of theoretical writings by film pioneer Maya Deren. To my mind Deren is the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, and she completely transformed my notion of cinema (she also transformed cinema itself — please, please, please, look her up!!!). Most of her essays are pretty dense, but the one I would recommend to anyone is “Amateur Versus Professional.” Across two succinct pages, she argues that the extravagance of Hollywood and professional filmmaking is far from the best way to make films, and that the true cinematic visionaries are those who do it as “amateurs,” i.e. for the love of it. She encourages the readers to stop worrying about having the best equipment, the fanciest sets, the greatest actors, or the juciest stories, and to instead focus on motion and images. “Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves,” she writes, “use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc., as a poem might celebrate these things. And use your freedom to experiment with visual ideas; your mistakes will not get you fired.” This essay was my bible when I made Tempo Rubato. A project that seemed huge and unwieldy suddenly became approachable. I decided to shoot it on the iPhone for maximum mobility. I used a very basic lighting kit and avoided extravagant, painterly lighting, focussing instead on making striking compositions and creating meaning through camera movement. My co-producers both questioned this decision early on, begging me to use a professional movie camera and a larger crew — but I stuck to my guns, and I truly believe it’s a better film for it. In lieu of extravagance, I went with imagination.
“Cameras do not make films,” Deren asserts in the closing paragraph. “Filmmakers make films. Improve your films not by adding more equipment and personnel but by using what you have to its fullest capacity. The most important part of your equipment is yourself: your mobile body, your imaginative mind, and your freedom to use both. Make sure you do use them.”

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