| Recommend |
| Comment |
| Email this article |
| Print this article |
| Get news alerts |
| RSS Feeds |
 Share
|
Digg
Mixx
Linked In
Facebook
Twitter
Delicious
When Christian Nilsson of East Moriches was in elementary school, he watched his older brother and his brother’s friends remake classic movies with their father’s video camera.
The films were anything but serious—a rubber toy shark became “Jaws,” and a flushed toilet stood in for “Twister”—but the experience was heady enough to convince a young Mr. Nilsson that he wanted to become a professional filmmaker.
“Watching them let me see that it was possible to make movies,” Mr. Nilsson, now 21 and an award-winning film/video student at Five Towns College, said last week. “Before then, I never really thought about the process.”
Today, that process has become an integral part of Mr. Nilsson’s life and on Wednesday, June 24, at 6 p.m. he will share some of his best work with the community. Mr. Nilsson will host a screening of six films he has made since beginning college, and proceeds from the event, to be held at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center, will raise money for his senior thesis project. That project will be a film he will use to apply for jobs and post-graduate programs after he completes his degree requirements at Five Towns.
The event will be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Mr. Nilsson, who said he has nearly always wanted to put his own stories on the big screen.
He spent two summers mowing lawns to save up for his first camera, which he bought in the fifth grade. “I still have my first movie on my computer,” he said last week with a laugh. “I would shoot (my first) videos in order, and they were terrible, looking back on them.”
In seventh grade, Mr. Nilsson wrote in his yearbook that he would become a motion picture director. By eighth grade, he had purchased his first video editing program. He said that he made movies whenever he could in high school, especially for class assignments.
“It got to the point where my classmates wanted us to be assigned projects just so they could see what I had made,” he said.
Mr. Nilsson took all of the film and video courses offered at Westhampton Beach High School, and even enrolled in a course in psychology because he thought it would help his filmmaking skills.
“I tried to be as focused as I could,” he said.
Upon graduating from high school in 2006, Mr. Nilsson enrolled in Five Towns College in Dix Hills, where he is currently working toward a bachelor of fine arts degree in film/video production. His short films have been featured in a variety of festivals, most recently at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in France.
“He’s one of the top students here,” Tom Calandrillo, deputy chair of film/video at Five Towns College, said last week. “He’s the first student who went to Cannes.”
Mr. Calandrillo said Mr. Nilsson has a knack for creating comedies.
“He’s got great timing for comedy and direction,” Mr. Calandrillo said. “And that’s one of the hardest things in filmmaking.”
Mr. Nilsson’s screening will feature six of his self-described “dark” comedies, including “The Looney in a Strait-Jacket,” which was featured at Cannes.
Attendees will also catch a sneak preview of the as-yet-untitled senior thesis film—Mr. Nilsson’s friend, Sketch Williams, will show renderings of what some of the scenes might look like. The movie will tell the story of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome who works at The Open Book in Westhampton Beach, according to the filmmaker. When the boy becomes upset with what’s going on in the store, he retreats into a fantasy world of famous literature. At certain points in the movie, the boy will become a character in Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or Miguel de Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.”
“I’d like the community to support me,” Mr. Nilsson said, adding that he hopes to shoot most of the film in Westhampton Beach. He has solicited advertisements from local vendors for the screening’s playbill, and all contributors will be thanked in the final film’s credits.
Mr. Nilsson said that after graduation he hopes to move to Los Angeles to pursue advanced studies at the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA. But his ultimate aspiration isn’t necessarily to become the next Wes Anderson.
“I don’t actually want to make dark comedies,” he said. “My dream is to make musical movies, especially ‘Les Miserables.’
“I was in it in high school. I’ve read Victor Hugo’s book twice, and I’ve watched every film adaptation,” Mr. Nilsson said, “and I want to make the musical.”
more
Add a comment