Why I Became a Filmmaker
When I was three years old, my dad took me to see Jurassic Park. I can remember the movie but not the events around when I saw it. The way my dad taught it, he sat me down and said, essentially, that there were going to be a lot of scary things in that movie but they weren’t real. They were special effects, make believe…
Magic…
From then on, I kind of gained two problems in my life. I became obsessed with movies and deluded myself that I wanted to be a paleontologist (though my lifelong obsession with dinosaurs has not abated, but my desire to study the field of paleontology continued well into near adulthood. I literally took electives on anthropology and dinosaur extinction in university because of that and they were some of the most fun I ever had in post secondary education.)
As a new born movie hound, I became obsessed with visual storytelling. The magic and colossal scale of a film gave it a… dreamlike quality. Beyond the screen, every possible world could be real. Giant monsters, far off galaxies, starships and the dead rising from the grave. Anything, everything was possible and real.
As my mom tells me, I used to set up my Batman 89 toy set and stage action movies and try to make the visuals in my head real. I would watch showa era Godzilla films and Universal monster movies along with Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I would draw movies constantly, something that was really funny given I am now a storyboard artist and screenwriter with actual credits to my name.
It was better than the reality I actually lived. Being sickly and severely asthmatic kept me from being fit, kept me from exercising, kept me from moving. This was not just asthma that required a puffer. As a child, I was forced to use a heavy mechanical machine that aerosolized medication I had to breathe in through a mask. My dad had to come across the street and hooked me up to the machine and sat with me as I took in the medicine during lunch. I was in JK at the time. I was locked inside when everyone else could play. My dad cheered me up by saying I sounded like Darth Vader.
My Dad told me once that he gave up a position working for Don Bluth in the 90s because I would never have survived the American healthcare system (I am Canadian.) I learned later this happened because he was an animator on Dragon’s Lair.
My Dad, Charles Edward Bastien, was a filmmaker. Specifically, he was a Canadian award winning director of children’s cartoons such as Magic School Bus, Little Bear, Mike the Knight, Handy Manny and Paw Patrol. His love of movies, of the medium of film and animation was immense and he shared it with me constantly. We would rent movies constantly. Constantly watch movies in theatres. He would give me his old science fiction collection and make me read Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov when I would refuse to read the books teachers gave me in school. He was adamant on sharing his love of film with me as much as possible.
And this rubbed off on me. Well, as much as you can influence a child under the age of ten. I kind of had a wild imaginative love of the medium. I was not remotely aware of my desire to become a filmmaker then, but the drive was certainly there in retrospect. I was still several steps away from realizing this as a kid and to be honest, it could have gone in any direction at the time. Any other deviation in my life story would have led me to being a film critic, or an academic on film, a la one of my personal favorite writers, David Bordwell. But somehow, I lived in the right environment that took me down the path of filmmaking. And I attribute most of that to my father.
THE WEEKEND
(please remember this is a memory from 24 years ago. I remember the motion of the event but not the exact words.)
The next step in this evolution can basically be summed up as “the weekend.” It’s a story I constantly regale my friends about. It was 1999, I was nine years old and I was in a Radioshack (the weirdest events in my life seem to happen in a Radioshack. Don’t ask me why). My dad, who was a radio enthusiast (I still keep his collection of vintage radios) was looking at shortwave Grundigs and I wandered off into the computer section. I found an end of aisle rack with a display where a keyboard was suspended in front of a precariously placed Compaq PC and monitor. On the screen was a PC game, playing possibly the most violent video game I’ve ever seen (don’t ask me why but Canadians never gave a shit about ratings in stores. HMV, a music and movie store that used to exist up here would play some of the goriest metal music videos on the monitors every day. Game kiosks would have Mortal Kombat, etc.) You were playing as some kind of monster that could climb up walls, sneak around and bite off people’s heads. It was… spectacular. I looked at him and went, “I want this game for my birthday.” My dad took one look at the game and said, “Do you know what game you’re playing?”
“No?”
“These are characters from some of the most important movies ever made.”
“What?”
The game was Alien vs. Predator by Rebellion.
This was the prompt for THE WEEKEND. One Friday my dad showed up after work with a big ass box and a stack of smaller boxes. I was confused. Like really confused. What was this? This wasn’t a game. And my dad was like NO! This is Better! THIS IS TO PLAY MOVIES! I remember that I was like, “What? We have a tape player.” And he was going off. “No! it’s even better than tapes. It has all these other movies about how the movie was made and how they designed stuff.”
OHO WHAT’S THIS THEN!?!
That’s right! My dad went out and bought a fucking DVD PLAYER in 1999 and a fucking shitload of movies. Science fiction and horror films to be exact. And in the span of a weekend we held a two day private film festival in our TV Room. I watched, on a 27 inch CRT, Every single Alien movie (He bought Alien and Aliens, but rented 3 and Resurrection because he hated those movies), Predator 1 and 2, The Thing, 2001 A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, the first Planet of the Apes film, David Lynch’s Dune because he wanted to show me how not to make a movie, Mad Max, Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and probably the most important film of all, THE DIRECTOR’S CUT OF BLADE RUNNER .
To call this a monumental shift for me is an understatement, to say the least. It was like… everything I knew a movie could be just exploded and became something much, MUCH larger, grander, and more viscerally engaging than anything I had felt before. I watched Batman 89 and Returns and they were my favorite movies. Not after that. Alien and Blade Runner were my favorite films, without question. Like, I need to impress upon you, the seismic change in how I thought about movies at the time. Before The Weekend, movies were a gluttonous affair for me. When I was a kid, I voraciously consumed everything put in front of me. But these weren’t action movies, superhero flicks, kaiju films or monster mashes. This was something beyond that. It was…
It’s hard to parse out in comprehensible language what this did to me…
…
AH! I figured out the words.
It’s the experience a person has where you stop thinking of media as consumption and instead start thinking of it as art. This was a thing, made by a person. Choices were involved. And it was something sumptuous, deep and engaging on every level to me. It was something somebody created and sent out into the world.
And I was keyed back to the same notion that fizzed in my head as a three year old on my dad’s lap, in a theatre, watching Jurassic Park.
This was magic…
And then later that summer, I watched The Matrix in theatres with my father.
AND SO ON…
The next 8 years passed. I got into video games. I kept watching movies, consuming several films a week. Art projects I had done for high school were multimedia showcases for a film that did not exist. I had started writing film scripts a year or two earlier.
I still did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. Writing was something to do on the side as I got a respectable job in STEM.
So I was a year into university at this time and was having a bad experience. I was in biochem and genetics in University and I fucking hated it. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the work or the subject, it was that I was so deeply unhappy that I just did not want to be there. I would often skip class or spend free time watching movie after movie in the York Media Library on tiny 12 inch monitors. I consumed hundreds of films during that period. I thought, at the time, it was to escape my depression. But looking back I was feeding a deeper need that I was not cognizant of.
And then I watched Ridley Scott’s American Gangster on DVD. The director’s cut version. And another seismic shift happened. I was watching the scene where the church’s janitor led Russel Crowe through a guided tour of the old cathedral and I was absolutely enamored with the janitor’s performance. It was… the most natural and understated performance I had experienced in a film. It was a man playing, with absolute verisimilitude, a regular guy just talking about a building. He had accurately captured something I can only describe as “the love a person has for a place they’ve basically lived in for a long time.”
It was, say it with me…
Magic…
It was a profound moment of being brought to tears. Just a deep calling rang out within me. I got picked up by my Mom. I broke down and I straight up told her. “I want to make movies.”
My mom’s, and later my dad’s, response?
“It’s about time you admitted it, you dumbass.”
Yeeaaaaaahhhhh….. They knew before I did. My dad had a career in entertainment so they never looked at it with any kind of stigma. He knew because I was his kid. It gets worse. The guidance counselor of my high school said I would end up in movies because he described me as a polymath that should be in a creative field and not sciences.
Basically everyone knew instead of me. It’s fucking hilarious in retrospect.
So uh, I completely rethought my goals at 18. I was going to be a filmmaker, or at the very least a writer-director of some kind. But I knew I couldn’t just go into Film Studies. I found that specific major kind of self absorbed at the time, as all it did was teach its students to look at film in a solipsistic manner, basically using movies to talk about how smart they were and not the texts themselves. There was no functional system of analytical criticism. And I needed to learn how all this fundamentally worked. I couldn’t get into the film program at York for dumb reasons and I failed to get into the Ryerson film program because I did not own a camera and was just using my personal storyboard as a portfolio.
And then I realized I could just teach myself the technical aspects of filmmaking myself. I was teaching myself how to draw cinematic images. I could learn how editing works. How cameras and lighting works all by myself. What I needed to learn was how to tell a story…
So I became an English Major. And basically for the next five years I studied storytelling. I specifically sought out genre narrative, narrative studies, and the evolution of writing systems and genres (the functional genre, poem to epic to romance to novel, etc.) It was an era of intense study, both personal and academic for me. Basically I consumed as much narrative as possible and I taught myself how to write movies through pure brute force by taking what I had studied in class and started applying it to my screenwriting.
Over the course of 2009–2014, I had written upwards of 200 unique screenplays. And they were all awful. But this, in my opinion, was the best way to learn to write. Brute force, through self education, worked the best for me because I fundamentally could push myself without being bound to an education system that needed results to justify the cost of tuition. I was good in my major so I could suck at my life’s goal until I didn’t.
At the same time, I was making use of York University’s library which had a FUCKING MASSIVE SECTION ON FILMMAKING, with textbooks going all the way back to the god damn 30s, to teach myself the art of film as a tactile, visual craft. I was literally transcribing any books I could find and then reading along with what notes I took to a movie and learning to
And then I graduated. With a specialized honors in English which means I had inadvertently done two times as many credits as I needed to graduate. It’s more than a bachelor, less than a master’s. It doesn’t matter. It gave me the fuel I needed to keep my brain working on the problem of “how do I tell a story?”
I went to film school. It was more like a trade school than academia so it was just what I needed. I did not need more theory. I needed practical experience. This was what I needed. And then I moved into the industry as a storyboard artist and eventually got my first, second, third and fourth writing credit on the show I worked on. I had, by all intents and purposes, gotten the first step to what I wanted.
Then covid happened. My grandfather died from it. A very close personal friend died from it. But I kept working. And I still work even now.
So… is this it? The end? If you haven’t noticed yet, this article is really about one person.
My father.
Without him I would never have figured out what I wanted to be. Who I wanted to be.
My father died in March. He had been battling cancer for half a year and underwent surgery in January to remove tumors from his liver. There was a 90 percent chance of success.
He was in the other 10 percent. Over the next weeks we saw him struggle and fade from the surgery until he passed away due complications causing a bad case of Pneumonia.
In a moment that felt like cosmic mockery, his cancer came back hyper aggressively right before he passed. It’s hard to express in words the idea of what utter doom feels like. The day before we learned that, my mother said, essentially, “I know you don’t believe in God, but I feel they will prove themselves to you.” And then it got worse. Ten weeks of absolute terror. Of doctors going, THERE’S HOPE and then HE WON’T LIVE THROUGH THE NIGHT. And then everything fell apart.
I watched him as they took him off life support. I felt I had to do it. That I needed to witness it for myself.
I am not okay. If I believed in God, I would say they hated our family in particular. The rhythm of giving us hope then snatching it away felt… deliberate and measured in our grief addled minds.
But the truth is… there’s no reason. Nothing is out there and no one really cares. It’s all just meaningless misfortune that befell a family. The universe moves on. We have no actual control.
But I no longer fear failure now. Because I’ve seen the worst of suffering. Maybe I’m just supremely damaged, but as I slowly make my way forward, my soul stops fearing what might happen. I am making moves for my career I was hesitant to do before this.
Maybe that was his last gift to me. To build a name for myself that isn’t under his shadow.
I don’t know. As you can see, I’m conflicted about all this still. Haha.
You know. In some way, I am haunted by a lot of things. I am haunted by the fact that I promised both my friend and father that I would have my name on the poster for a major movie and neither saw it before they passed. That I didn’t spend more time with my father. That the last movie I watched with my dad in theaters was NOPE. That I will never be able to finish watching Dune with my dad (One of the things he would say as he got chemo is that he hoped he would live long enough to see Dune Part Two and… well, that didn’t happen.) That we would get a corn dog at the EX the next summer (The EX is a giant fair that happens in August-September every summer in Toronto). A lot of unfinished things. A lot of promises I made that I intend to keep, even the small ones.
And I hope that will be enough. So that if we do meet again, I can say I did it and I became the filmmaker I promised I would become.
Goodbye Dad
-Phil
