Jack Turits
"These traits were also inherited by my brother, who is an actor and a musician. He was a big part of my early exploration into filmmaking. When you always had someone around who was ready and willing to take part in my films - it helps to push you."
"My dad always had video cameras lying around the house. This made experimenting with filmmaking super easy for me. I would spend all of my spare time making stop motion animation movies in our basement. The process of making and then watching these films was revelatory for me, and I knew from that moment on that it was something that I wanted to spend all of my time doing."
"In high school I would borrow Criterion Collection DVDs from the library and became exposed to a lot of great European films and directors. I realized, I wanted to make movies like these. My friend and I spent a whole summer watching these films in a room in his house we took over; we called it “The Cinematheque”. We were obsessed with New Wave films at the time."
"My high school had great theatre, dance, and music programs, so I was surrounded by a lot of talented people who also happened to be my childhood friends."
"I decided I wanted to make a more ambitious film before graduating so for the last two years of high school, I made a film with a group of my friends called ‘Away from War.’ Everyone involved was super dedicated. I even rented out a movie theatre for its premiere. It was a really big thing in town, with more than 300 people showing up to a sold out screening. There were even people standing in the back of the theater."
"Getting that kind of response was the first time that I realized there was an audience for my work beyond just my friends and family."
"My high school gave us the opportunity to leave a few months early if you had an internship. So I contacted every notable commercial production company in New York at the time. Most of them didn’t even respond or weren’t interested because of my age, but Smuggler asked me to come in for an interview -- and I got it! Everything I’ve done since then has really sprung from that initial opportunity I had as a senior in high school.""
"While I was at Smuggler, I worked for a bunch of directors that I really admire. As an intern, I had access to all of their past treatments and pre-pro books. I used it like a library. That experience taught me so much about the realization of a project from start to finish. And at this point, I hadn’t even graduated from high school!"
"The first job I got to work on was this massive stage job directed by Randy Krallman. Being able to watch Randy, whose work I had admired for years, do his thing; and to be a part of this huge production was a massive jump from me doing my small projects in my parent’s basement to suddenly being out in the professional world."
"I got an unbelievably valuable education working for those guys. But then my internship was over and I was to start college a couple of weeks later. So I left Smuggler reluctantly and went to study film at New York’s School of Visual Arts."
"It quickly became apparent to me that my experience at Smuggler had catapulted me miles ahead of anything I was learning during that foundation year. At the time, I felt that I had taken a step backwards. But I stayed with it for the year and had some wonderful experiences with the people I met there, many of whom I continue to work with today."
"Throughout that first year I kept going back to PA on the days I didn’t have class. Before long I was skipping some classes just so I could still be involved in the New York world. That year, I ended up making some work that I was really proud of but it still felt so separate from school. Even though they were assignments, they felt totally independent."
"I ended up going back to SVA the following year but that only lasted a semester. I really struggled with my decision to drop out. But on the very same day I decided I wasn’t going back, I received an email about a director’s assistant role that had just opened up back at Smuggler. They were putting together their first feature titled ‘Greetings from Tim Buckley,’to be directed by Dan Algrant."
"This film was a multi-generational story about musician Tim Buckley in 1960s and his son, Jeff Buckley, in 1991. One of my oldest friends, Ben Rosenfield, was cast in the title role as Tim Buckley. The director had seen a film I had made with Ben that he really liked, so his work in that helped him to land the role."
"Buckley was such an incredible experience for me, because I was on the project from the very beginning to the very end. There was so much work to be done and I was proud of my contribution to it. That film was my life. It’s hard to put into words what that feels like. I thought about this thing 24/7, so by the time my work was done, I really needed some time off. So I took a month or so and then went back into commercials."
"After now having worked on a feature film as well as numerous commercials, I felt it was time to take another step forward. I was doing various jobs, still trying to learn whatever I could. Around that time, I came across a brief for the MOFILM competition that sparked an idea. At night, I worked on a number of scripts and treatments hoping to get some funding for a project they were doing with AT&T. I got the funding and that ended up being ‘We Are Here.’"
"That project got the attention of my friends back at Smuggler. With them now having more confidence in me as a director, they thought of me for a piece of this larger project they were doing. They asked me if I wanted to write a treatment. I ended up writing seven treatments for various ideas I had over 4th of July weekend that were due that following Monday."
“After submitting my treatments, everyone was super excited by what I had come up with. So I got to make two of those ideas. One was a documentary and the other was a mock-u-mentary piece.”
“It was those two pieces that got me started working with goodstory films. I had known Paula Cohen for years and she had just started goodstory films with Susan Horn Toffler. Goodstory is a cool group to be with because they’re hyper focused on storytelling and they really care about the work we pursue.”
“My goal has always been to be making feature films. In between my commercial projects, I have been spending my time working on a number of screenplays. I’m trying to get the best of both worlds and achieve everything I want to achieve. There’s just so much I want to do.”