Show and Tell 2018: Lana Z Caplan
Lana Z Caplan
Filmmaker
1. What’s your idea of perfect happiness?:
happiness exists in a state of flux, and as a perfectionist, I haven’t found the perfect state yet…
2. What drives you to make films?:
I wish I knew! It is an irrational need to shoot and capture, transform and manipulate the visual world into the way I experience it, an effort to contribute to this conversation and hopefully have a voice, faith in the power of artists to be the reflection of our times and recorders of history – creating an alternative narrative to the one written by money and power.
3. Where in the world would you most like to be right now?:
At Alchemy 🙂
4. When inspiration is waning, and you feel creatively sapped, what do you do to stay motivated?:
doesn’t usually happen
5. What films are the most inspiring or influential to you at the moment, and why?:
I saw Festen by Thomas Vinterberg recently and can’t get it out of my mind, the characters he created and their complexities, but also the way he is able to strip away of all the artifice and cinema tricks while still using the camera as presence. Embedded with so much contradiction, invention, restraint and excess.
I have also been thinking about Peter Burr’s The Mess since I saw it a year or two ago. Again the complexity, but also the obsessive layers of meaning and technological innovation/commentary.
and so many more…
Your top 3 favourite music tracks?:
7. What’s the scariest thing you’ve ever done?:
Not sure it was the scariest ever, but most recent was turning over my life to a complete stranger as a passenger for a terrifying ride with a race driver in a four-wheeler on the Guadalupe- Nipomo sand dunes of California, where I am making a new film.
8. What’s your greatest extravagance?:
Every day decadence, making art as a life pursuit, when so much of the world is suffering.
9. What turns you on – creatively, spiritually or emotionally?:
Something I have never seen before in art or in travels around the world, kindness to and of others, dancing all night to sweet sexy live music, working 🙂
