Filmmaker Jaffar Mahmood (LA '00) will be returning to Tufts tonight for a screening of his new film, "Shades of Ray," a story about love, family and identity in the lives of two multi-ethnic people. The screening will take place at 7:00 p.m. in Braker 001 and will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Mahmood. The up-and-coming writer/director caught up with The Daily over the phone to talk about his Tufts experience, his latest project and what he's learned along the way.
Mike Adams: You mentioned that ["Shades of Ray"] reflects your own life. How did you come up with the idea for the love story?
Jaffar Mahmood: I was an economics major at Tufts and I went to USC to pursue my masters in film producing, and while I was there, I got really bit by writing and directing, and one thing I learned at USC ... was to try and tell a story as traversely as you can because that's your best chance to actually make your money back in a very competitive industry. So I was trying at first to write really commercial stories that weren't really true to myself, and I finally started to step back and realize that the only way I'll have a chance to actually direct something is if I had a personal story, something that only I can tell ... I grew up in New Jersey, and it was a predominantly white suburb of New York, and I had no real access to others like myself until I went to Tufts, and that's where I realized, wow, there are other people like me out there, so that was part of the story -- I didn't want to tell a preachy story that was just about me.
MA: Aside from this screening, how is the movie being released?
JM: I wrote the script while I was in graduate school, and I was unable to get financing from a company or a studio. A lot of people responded to the script, but, at the end of the day, I was essentially telling a story about a protagonist that was half-Pakistani, and that, from a production company or studio standpoint, is not a character they [want] to portray positively. Today, if you see a Pakistani or a Muslim in a movie, they're the terrorist. [Producers] don't want to necessarily humanize them or show them in a positive light. More importantly, they looked at it as saying, "Tell us a movie that's done well, that's a box office hits that stars a Pakistani-American," and the sad truth is there really isn't any. So they're like, "If we're gonna make money off this thing, it's gotta be with an ethnicity that has proven box-office success, like Latinos and African Americans..." I stuck to my guns and decided basically not to take more money and to go on my own.
MA: This is the first [feature] film you've both written and directed. What do you think you've learned from this experience, at least on the production side, for the first time?
JM: You have to be patient. Things do not happen patiently in Hollywood; they go at their own pace, and they can be excruciatingly slow, especially when you're dealing with a film that's very personal, something you're trying to put together by yourself. And then, persistence [is important] as well, because in this business nobody wants to stick their neck out for you, because if they do and you fail, they will lose their job. So then you have to make it on your own, and then once you make it, everyone wants to be in business with you. But it's really easy to want to be in business with someone who's already successful ... If you want to be successful with a film, from a production standpoint, you have to be able to work very well with people. It's the most collaborative industry you'll ever work in: I'll have 120 people working on a movie with me while we're in production ... I'd never trade anything for my first film experience; we finished on-time and on-budget and now we just need to find a distributor to take notice and buy the film.
MA: You graduated [from Tufts] in 2000. Did you study film or do anything related to film when you were here?
JM: I was always the kid in high school who ... on a Friday night I'd go to the movie theater first to see the opening movie and then I'd go to the party. I've always had a love for film, but [growing up] I'd never ever considered it as an actual career path. The first week I was at Tufts I was pre-med, and one week in, that didn't happen anymore. I dropped Bio 13; I could tell I wasn't cut out for it, and I studied economics and had a great time. It wasn't until my junior year -- I spent my junior year abroad on the Tufts in London program -- that I was really having fun and taking more electives. I was taking a history course [and], one week of the course, we did film and studied Alfred Hitchcock and "The Birds" [1963]. I wrote a midterm paper on "The Birds" and it hit me there ... I was normally the kind of student where I was going to do the work I need to do and move onto the next thing, and the paper was done and all these books were [on my desk] and I just wanted to learn more. I went back to the computer lab in my dorm and typed in the two film schools that I knew of -- NYU and USC -- and searched for their grad programs. I came across this one program at USC, called the Peter Stark Producing Program, and it was my savior, because [to get into] every other film program, you had to have been not just a lover of film, you had to have made films, you had to be a little eight-year-old kid with your super-eight camera in your back yard, or writing plays, or being a photographer, and I'd done none of those things; I just watched movies. But this [was a] producing program that was half the business side of film and the other half was creative. So I came back for my senior year and I took every film class Tufts had to offer.
...If you really want to be a director, working today, especially in the beginning, you have to be a writer first, because no one hands you that first script. You could probably make a short film like I did based off something I did write, but that first feature -- unless you're a really prolific commercial director -- to come up and direct your first feature, you've got to write and write and write. That is the gateway. So I've been writing non-stop ever since grad school.
