Justin Warren on Making His First Feature Film and the Lessons Learned
Film Courage: I was watching this documentary last night and it had me thinking about maybe your situation and that is these filmmakers [in the documentary] had been accepted into this prestigious program and they thought they’d just try applying to the school. When they got the acceptance letter it felt as if someone was almost playing a joke on them.
Justin Warren, Filmmaker: Absolutely.
Film Courage: Then [beforehand] we were talking off-camera that sparked this question. So was this something that you went through when applying to leave was it Hendrix College?
Justin Warren: Yeah, so basically I applied to film school kind of as a built-in excuse to not pursue my dreams (if that makes sense).
So I was just like I’m going to apply to USC [University of Southern California] film school and no one gets into there. I’m going to apply, get rejected and then I can say I tried and go about my life. I was going to work at like a gas company in Arkansas. That was what I was going to do after graduation. And I ended up actually not doing that and I worked as a youth director for a little while.
I applied to USC in the middle of planning my wedding basically.
Film Courage: Oh…wow.
Justin Warren: I got a response one day, literally an email that said…the subject line was “RSVP For Admitted Student’s Day,” because I guess they sent the email in the wrong order.
And I was like “Admitted student’s day? What does that mean?” And then a few minutes later I got an admissions decision thing so I found out kind of in reverse and I was so confused. I did…I thought someone played a joke on me.
I found out I got into USC about two weeks before I was going to get married. I was so stunned and I was talking to my wife and was like “So I’m not going to go.” And she’s like “No, no, no…you have to go.”
My wife was in the middle of pharmacy school at the time. She couldn’t just pick up and leave what she was doing. So that meant she pushed me to say yes and to pursue my dreams…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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