'There was never a thought in my house that money was a reasonable motivation for doing anything. I think that that certainly gave me a lot of the courage to take huge chances.'
Phillip Youmans is having his breakout moment. While he was still a film student at NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, he scraped together funding for his feature film debut,a raw and lyrical portrait of the effects of addiction on a religious community in Louisiana.
We would be at Chinese operas, we would be at Gospel concerts, all these really different cultures. My parents have this incredible love for eccentric storytelling, and that certainly all finds its way into my films in huge ways. I t’s almost pointless to try to separate ourselves from our writing. It already happened, you know? Our writing is infused with us, no matter what.was inspired by stories that my mother told me, her growing up in Lowcountry, South Carolina.
YOUMANS: Initially, my first walk into art came as a painter, actually. I was a painter when I was a kid, and then after that I sort of fell out of love with visual art and then fell in love with acting and performing. At least I thought I was in love with it, you know. ZEITLIN: I think for me it was always a reality. My mom was actually writing a book about children. My mom and dad wrote this book calledMy mom would sit there with a notepad and just let us do whatever we want and let us sort of go. We’d play in this alleyway where all the kids would gather. From that moment, we were inventing stories, turning cardboard boxes into pirate ships. I never remember that changing.
I think what led me to film was actually that it was an art form where I could continue basically every single other art form that I love, which was writing music, writing stories, creating characters, directing, photography. It was an art form that I felt like encompassed them all. That’s what really got me to just make the decision that I would be a filmmaker as opposed to anything else.
The shots were great, the acting was great, obviously all that I could see. I just saw that you were visually fluent in this way that is really rare. At this point I had no idea how young you were. I always want to feel like I’m making art for the sake of art and then not making it for my career or any sort of external success. I do it for its own sake. I think I felt that when I was 12, when I came for the first time. Then when I came down and started making the first short that I made in New Orleans, it was a story about people building a boat out of garbage that they found around.ZEITLIN: Yeah. It just started happening. It was crazy.
ZEITLIN: Yeah, it’s funny you talk about that. I feel the same. I feel indebted. It’s weird, but not in a bad way. I feel like it’s like I have like a duty. I don’t know how to describe it, but it is that feeling because the city gives you so much.YOUMANS: Dude, that’s so dope, bro. The city will love you forever, bro. I’m about to tear up, straight up, dude. I
Sort of similar to you, also. I didn’t go to film school and so I didn’t know… You know a whole lot more than I did when I went to the labs. I was trying not to get caught not knowing what a gaffer was, you know what I mean? For me it was both this incredibly intense and illuminating artistic experience. Then also it was just basic Film 101 for me where I actually learned how a set works and how to be a director on a basic level, so.
ZEITLIN: I remember having the exact opposite experience. I had not used a screenwriting program. I came to writing scripts from writing songs, essentially, lyrics and stuff and short stories.
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