At OCC, a different generation of filmmakers

Everyone’s a critic, as the saying goes. And when the latest group of students files into Erik Forssell’s classroom, everyone’s a filmmaker.

With iPhones and other digital devices turning users into amateur cinematographers, Forssell, the department chairman of Orange Coast College’s Film/Video Department, doesn’t often have to spend much time going over the basics of technology. Instead, he focuses on techniques, such as narrative, nurturing actors and turning one’s passion into a story.

On Sunday morning, the Newport Beach Film Festival screened a program of OCC short films, as it has done in the past. For Forssell, the festival isn’t merely a showcase for his department; he also urges students to attend other screenings and rack up ideas for future work.

Last week, as the festival’s starting time approached, Forssell spoke with the Daily Pilot about his approach to teaching film, the enduring power of silents and the realization that when it comes to film history, “Back to the Future” is back in the past. The following are excerpts from the conversation:

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To start with, let’s talk a little about the work you do as a filmmaking instructor. Now, making a movie sounds very fun to me, and I know absolutely nothing about making a film. So if you get a student like me who’s a complete and utter novice, what is the very first thing that you teach them?

Well, first of all, I want to give you a little explanation. I’m in a really unique position for somebody like yourself who comes in with zero experience and just the dream. Right now, in this semester, I am deep into teaching our first production class and our last production class, so I get this really cool experience of seeing people come in and learn kind of the fundamentals to get them going to understand visual and lighting and storytelling as best they can while they’re analyzing movies.

But then, I get to see them at the end, where they’re now ready to make their portfolio-level work. So I love having that perspective, of seeing them progress in that year to two years, maybe even a little bit longer, depending on the student, but it’s really kind of fun to get to know them and see them go full circle and become ready to go out in the industry.

Some of the first things that we teach them in our beginning production class is we really have a very heavy focus on storytelling. I think a lot of people today can make a nice-looking image with very little training with a nice DSLR camera. It’s affordable, and the lenses are so nice. But the ability to tell a good story is a much bigger challenge. So I’m thinking about the first couple weeks of my video workshop class, where I go back to the three-act story structure and start talking about components that should be in your movie or your story.

When you talk about telling a good story, that’s one of those things that sounds so easy and can be so hard to do. What are some of the tricks — if “tricks” is the word — that you teach students about how to tell a really effective story?

I think the first thing that they kind of need to bring to the discussion is a decision. This is the kind of story I want to tell. This is the kind of story that I dream of making. This is what speaks to me most as an artist. This is what calls to me. And then I often will ask that they need to start researching that. They need to start researching films from history — obviously, the kind of typical film-history films, but then, of course, maybe you have a real passion for a particular documentary, or maybe it’s science fiction. Maybe it’s action.

Whatever it is, the individual has to be kind of ready to commit to that journey, that exploration, that where-do-I-start-to-get-closer-to-that-dream project. So we start analyzing. We look at movies. We look at maybe some of the easier-to-identify components in stories, but it all starts from learning what makes a good story.

Years ago, I actually took one film history class at UCI, and on the first day, the professor — he was sitting around a table of students, and he asked every student to name their favorite movie. And he said that every single year, whenever he asked that question, there were always two movies that came up. One was “Scarface” with Al Pacino; the other was “Dirty Dancing.” How about your students? Are there any movies that you see them, just year after year, really loving and really knowing by heart?

Well, yeah, you certainly would see trends. I think what Christopher Nolan did with the “Batman” franchise has become very, very popular for a lot of them, all the way down to what Disney and Pixar is doing. A lot of our students still love the “Harry Potter” franchise. Of course, a lot of them love independent films that you’re not seeing in a mainstream theater.

[In terms of what I show in class,] I tend to kind of bounce all around, even really old films from 70, 80 years ago, and then films from the past decades. So I try to give kind of a range of different things that keep me kind of excited too, to share with them. We just looked at the opening sequence of “Apocalypse Now,” which is one of my all-time favorite films as far as the accomplishment involved with it. But it is stunning, and most of them don’t know what that movie is. And that does kind of freak me out, because I’m not that old, but a lot of my students don’t know what “Back to the Future” is. It’s kind of like, what?

Honestly, the other year, when I learned that “Wayne’s World” was 21 years old, that was the first time that I truly felt middle-aged. But it’s true. We’re so used to thinking of movies like “Back to the Future” being a few years old — or the movies we saw in high school or elementary school —

“Goodfellas” is turning 25.

“Goodfellas,” there you go. And, yeah, you wake up one morning, and it really has been a quarter-century. That is a very jarring thing to realize.

I think another contemporary movie [more] on the artistic side would be a film like “Amelie.” A lot of us look at that and love it so much that we want to find ways of borrowing from it and replicating it. It’s so beautiful, and every trick in the book is in a film like that. And then, of course, staples that we all believe in would be the “Godfather” franchise, as far as the classic kind of choice.

There was a little revival of silent movies, actually, a few years ago. That was after “The Artist” and “Hugo” were both nominated for Best Picture. How about your class? Do you thinking watching those old silent films can still help a filmmaker here in 2015?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I encourage them to cut as much dialogue as possible when possible, because they need to focus on impacting an audience with visual storytelling, and that’s always been a better approach. One of my favorite films to show a new class of students is “The Red Balloon” from 1956. Here is a movie that has very little dialogue in it, and it is so strong in how it is structured to carry us in with this kid and his friend, the balloon. I mean, it is beautiful.