how do you brand yourself as a creative?

Like who is Joe the creative?

- First and foremost I think I'm a writer.

I'm a director, a producer on the side.

I just produced a movie called The Monkey, a Stephen King production, as well as a documentary called Mariah Acts of Resistance that just began it's festival run.

I do a little bit of acting on the side.

I'm kind of getting into that a little bit more because I have fun when I do it, but it's a rare occasion when I actually go full force with that.

And in another life I was an MC.

- That's amazing.

Little rap on the side, hip hop.

- A little bit on the side, kind of kind of keep it under the surface for now but you know, we'll see what happens.

(laughing) - So what about your creative origin story?

So a lot of creatives tend to have like this beginning like where they feel like, hey this is for me.

So what's your creative origin story?

How'd you get to where you are today?

- Yeah, I think as a kid I always had an interest in the arts.

I was constantly drawing or journaling, things like that.

The one thing I know I wanted to do from the beginning is I wanted to be an imagineer for Disney.

And so I designed all these roller coasters and rides and stuff like that.

And I still think Disney might have stole my idea for Expedition Everest when I was seven years old.

Not gonna lie, I had the exact same ride and then next year, there it is.

And yeah, but then as I grew into myself that sort of fell away for a while and I had a really deep interest in music and films.

Looking back in retrospect, I think those were always like a big part of my life, but it wasn't something that had occurred to me that like I could do that.

And then in my mid or sort of early twenties I started taking music very seriously after some kind of personal turmoil, led me down that path of like I think I need to do this because this is what makes me feel fulfilled.

And I took it very seriously and music was very good for my kind of obsessive brain, the way that I'm able to put patterns together and lyrics and things like that, so I really enjoyed that.

I think I had all these things that I wanted to say, but I didn't know exactly how to do it.

So there was this pent up energy in this pressure of like not to kind of put it this way, but it's sort of where my mind was at, was that I thought that if I didn't, I was worried that I wasn't gonna be able to articulate it before I passed away or something like that.

And maybe that was because of the things that I had been through in my life.

So there was all this extra pressure that is not good for the creative process.

- Yeah, the legacy pressure.

- Yeah exactly.

And there was this like kind of thing in the background that had started to take shape of like maybe I wanna make films.

And I started writing scripts while I was at work at my job Project SafePoint.

And there was a lot of downtime where I so basically anytime I wasn't talking to a client I was on my laptop typing scripts.

And then that just kind of, there was a bit of like a sunk cost fallacy thing that I was dealing with where it was like, should I let go of this music thing cuz I'd put all this time and energy into it to pursue what was clearly staring me in the face as like this is my true passion, this is where I and it's funny now that I've made a few films when I go back and write music that pressure's kind of alleviated.

- That's good.

- And I feel like I'm able to get closer to what I actually wanted to say.

When I was younger I felt like I needed to say everything all at once.

And I've talked to my producer Cameron who's here with us today about how our films and our projects can be more like houses on a street rather than trying to like stuff everything into one project.

- One big house.

- Yeah, one big house.

You can kind if you look at it- So I started to look at like each project as like it was just like this one part of the neighborhood and then at the end of your career maybe you have the totality of what you wanted to say in the beginning.

But there was all this extra pressure in the beginning for me to get it all out at once and that just becomes overstuffed and overwrought and overwritten and it's not conducive for creativity when you have that amount of- - It really isn't, that's a lot of pressure to put on ourselves as artists.

- Yeah.

- But I like that whole analogy of like the multiple houses versus one big house.

- Yeah.

- And it kind of is a really good segue to the next question which is your project, your recent project, the Fledgling.

- Yes.

- I love you to like give us a little overview of that, cuz that's a big one coming up.

- That's a big one for sure.

The Fledgling is an eight part vampire road trip episodic.

- Oh yeah.

- I'm excited about it.

So I started writing that back in early 2020 and took about two years of me just sort of plugging away at it.

And it was one of those projects though that I knew from the beginning it just had that kind of propulsive element to it.

This thing where I just had to return to it day after day because I loved the world and I loved the characters and like there was no question in my mind from the beginning this is what I need to do, but I also think it kind of has that nice balance of commercial appeal and artistic expression that make a Joe film.

Cuz I want people to come out of it knowing like this is a Joe film when they see when they see my projects.

- That's a good balance to have where you're like also satisfied with it, but also the audience is satisfied with it.

I think A24 is a big one with that.

- Oh, they're killing it.

- You know, commercial appeal, but also the audiences are just obsessed with the story.

So that's really awesome.

So why did you choose a TV series this time?

- So I think that's just kind of what it wanted to be, in the simplest terms.

Cuz there was times when I was like, I think it's four episodes.

Actually, I thought it was a film when I started writing it.

And then the story just kind of developed and the more it developed I was, I got feedback from a couple people.

And the funny thing is, the more it balloons the harder it is to give feedback.

You're like, Hey, can you read my 500 page screenplay?

And we just started submitting to festivals for our short film Proof of Concept, which basically took a scene from the pilot episode and repurposed it as its own self-contained story.

We attached two fantastic actors, Juliet Landau of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.

She played Trucilla on that show.

- Great addition.

- Yeah, it was incredible working with her, having her fly out from Los Angeles to be in it.

And we have a terrific young actress named Anastasia Veronica Lee, who's playing the lead role of Charlie.

- You created a children's book that's also kind of reflective of the series as well.

- Yeah, so I met with another 518 filmmaker, Cameron Gallagher, and we were talking about unique ways to pitch our projects and he brought up that he had known somebody who, for every project that he had done and apparently he had sold like a few films this way, he made some sort of children's book for his project.

And I just thought that was such a clever and charming idea instead of going into it with to a meeting with like a PowerPoint or something like that, you're going in there with something tangible and something charming and beautiful that you can leave behind with them too and have them really get what the heartbeat of the show is in a super simple way.

And I think that's what really drew me to it was like how can I reduce and simplify this eight hour show into the most important elements in a 25 page illustrated book.

- When can people view it or is it still like are we gonna be able to see it on TV or what's the end goal?

- So yeah, I mean the end goal is definitely major television whether it's a streamer or a major network show, but for now we're in the process of submitting the short film proof of concept to festivals.

We actually just got a waiver to Tiff, which is something that is very rare for them to offer past their deadlines.

So fingers crossed that things go good with that.

- That means it's good.

- But so we have a lot of hope for this to be a great festival run and then we'll see where it goes, but right now we're also in the process concurrently of pitching the show.

It's a tremendous challenge, but one that we're all very excited about.

- Awesome, well I look forward to it.

Thank you.

- Thank you so much Jade.