Nicole Solomon is a film maker, writer, and nanny based in Brooklyn.  She is currently an MFA candidate at CCNY in writing and directing narrative fiction. She is currently teaching filmmaking skills to girls at Ma’yan in our Filmmaking Intensive workshop. The final film will be screened at What to Wear: Women, Clothing, Religion, a public event at the Jewish Theological Seminary on March 11, 2012.

(still image taken from Nicole's fim "Out of the Shadows") 

Ma’yan: How did you get interested in film?  

Nicole Solomon: I've been very taken by film and wanted to be a part of it ever since I was very young. The first film to have an enormous impact on me was Star Wars, which I saw in the mall movie theater during one of its many rereleases when I was four. It made me feel a lot of different things and it stimulated my imagination—it was a very powerful, visceral experience!  

I was very into acting and writing as a child, and was trying to write screenplays and make small video projects by middle school. My high school offered video production and post-production classes, which I took and loved. I did not go to film school as an undergrad, and once I went to college my video and film work fell by the wayside. I missed it, though, a lot. I started taking workshops to learn the new tech through a wonderful organization called Downtown Community Television (DCTV). This lead to an internship with DCTV which allowed me to take A LOT of workshops and learn a ton. After that I spent a few years doing many solo and collaborative projects and freelance work, and now I'm in the graduate Media Arts program at CCNY, working towards an MFA in writing and directing fiction film. (I will always continue doing documentary work, which I love, but fiction was what I felt I really needed to learn.)

You've directed a couple of music videos. Music videos have are interesting as one of the very few (perhaps the only) form of popular film that can be both widely accessible and non-narrative. What are the differences in your process between making a documentary and making music video? What are some of your favorite music videos / directors? 

I love music videos. I hope to make more in the near future. They are a particularly compelling format for people like me, who are kind of frustrated wannabe musicians. I love music, but I'm not especially good at making it, so videos allow me to be a part of that world and participate in making music-things happen. I also love that, as you said, they're a form that's both accessible and is often non-narrative. There's all kinds of interesting artistic potential there, especially if you have an abstract/impressionistic/weird/artsy side that doesn't always fit into doc work (though there are exceptions! Docs CAN be all of those things!) I've also made (silent) video collages for bands to be screened while they play live, which is similar in some ways to making a music video. I absolutely love this sort of thing.

For me, music videos are very different from documentaries process-wise in that the subject (the band) is much more involved in the creative process. Bands tend to have more input regarding the style and content of the video. It is rare for me to consult with people appearing in documentaries about such things (though there are exceptions). Obviously the pre-production and shooting is different—videos are scripted and story boarded, you're generally directing the people onscreen in a more direct way. The specifics of a music video are more planned in advance, whereas with a doc I often find that the specifics of the story I want to tell shift dramatically over the course of shooting and editing.

I love a lot of the big 1980s/90s music video directors—Spike Jonze, Tamra Davis (who made a great documentary about Jean-Michel Basquiat recently, btw) Michel Gondry, Samuel Bayer, and Anton Corbijn all made a lot of fantastic videos. I'm also a huge fan of John Landis' groundbreaking video for "Thriller", of course.

I'm very struck today by Romain Garvas' music video work with MIA. I loved the "Born Free" video off MAYA, which was somewhat polarizing. That video messed me up, I was genuinely shaken after watching it, but in a good way which is rare for me, and I watch a lot of very violent, gory movies. I'm going to pay attention to anything that moves me that strongly, and I just think it's a fantastic, brilliant piece of short film making that transcends its format. and I love this format! I don't see their videos together as being built on shock value or courting controversy for the sake of publicity or anything like that, they're serious attempts at subversive film making, and they're so well executed. 

You are a documentary filmmaker in a time when reality TV is overwhelmingly popular. Does our cultural appetite for reality TV affect the way we understand what documentary films should be like now? Does it help or hurt our relationship to documentary film in any way(s)?

I haven't seen that much reality TV…I do suspect that the cultural appetite is largely created by what is provided—reality TV is cheaper to produce, which is why we have so much of it now. People obviously watch it, but I think with some notable exceptions, they'd often be just as happy watching a drama or sitcom or more traditional game show or whatever. This is a theory that I just made up now, but I wonder if the popularity of reality TV is beneficial to documentary film making in some ways...1) It has made viewers more used to "nonfiction" entertainment, which may have something to do with what seems like a concurrent increase in interest in documentary films. 2) Reality TV has made at least many viewers savvier about what is portrayed as "nonfiction". A lot of viewers get that reality TV is often staged and misleadingly edited. I personally am thrilled by the idea that viewers might be coming to nonfiction film from a more critical angle, not just accepting everything they see at face value as some kind of objective truth. I think it's good for the genre.

The mainstream film industry upholds a lot of conventional values and norms. Much of your work is subversive. Do you think there is a place for progressive, or even radical, political in the wider film world? 

Oh yeah, of course. The whole industry is evolving so fast, for better and worse, there are increasing outlets for lower budget films. There also sometimes can be room to inject subversion and good politics into mainstream, big budget studio films. In a lot of ways I look to John Sayles as a role model for how to negotiate an awesome career in the film industry—he does often uncredited work on big budget scripts for income and then can afford to go make the movies he wants. He's not paying his mortgage with Men With Guns, but he's getting it made and it's getting seen.

The film industry is by many accounts a male-dominated field. Has this been your experience? Do you have advice for young women who want to be filmmakers? 

Yeah, but it's getting less male dominated, come be a part of it. Seek out other girls and women who are doing film stuff and collaborate and support each other. There are organizations (Women Make Movies comes to mind) that help network and support women filmmakers.

When I first took a video class in high school, I was literally the only girl in it. It was difficult because in addition to going outside my comfort zone and trying to learn these new, intimidating tech skills, I felt this extra burden of being the female representative in the program. Even though the guys in the program were very nice and I didn't have to deal with some of the really nasty, blatantly misogynistic and sexist aspects of many male-dominated spaces, it still felt like an extra layer of pressure I wish I hadn't had to deal with. I didn't really have female mentors or role models, there were very few women making movies that I was aware of at all. Now I'm in a program that's fairly evenly split between men and women, most of my core crew on my thesis film will likely be women. I'm so grateful for this shift. It makes it easier to breathe.

You are currently teaching young women at Ma'yan film-related skills. What's it like to work with them? 

It's just great. I love it. They're super smart and engaged and I hope I'm sharing some useful skills that they'll be able to apply beyond this project, whether they go deeper into film/video in particular or not. It is extremely gratifying for me to be able to share some of the skills and lessons I've learned over the years. I've also never tried to teach this stuff this intensively to such a young group before, so I'm really excited that it seems to be working! 

What's the best movie you've seen recently?

I just finally saw A Separation, which was great. I love how it wasn't about good guys and bad guys, it was about real people with real struggles for sometimes end up doing things with terrible consequences for understandable reasons. It's a very smart and empathetic film, and one of my favorite aspects of film is its empathetic potential. 2011 was a fantastic year for film, I saw so many extremely inspiring ones—La Quattro Volte, Certified Copy, Meek's Cutoff, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Melancholia, Attack the Block, Young Adult, and Pariah were some of my very favorites.