Undine: First up, how did you get into making music videos?
Jason: We met at NYU and did music videos for a while. I don’t think either one of us went to class much.

Undine: What did you study?
Jason: We both were at Tisch, studied film and minored in English. Looking back, I don’t know if college was the right choice. We live in a completely different world today, where going to college is this incredibly expensive arduous task that is, especially in creative fields, totally unnecessary. The amount of life experience you could have bought for that. Werner Herzog has this whole idea how the best way to make a film, the best way to become a filmmaker, is to walk across Europe. The only way to ever make films is to have life experience that impregnates all these ideas that you have. Without these experiences, you end up having an empty lens that you look at life through.
Simon: For some people it makes sense, for others it doesn’t. Teaching art is so difficult. Particularly film. You learn by doing. It’s so accessible now, you can pretty much YouTube any question you have and get your hands on gear really inexpensively. There should be a good justification as to why you’ll invest x amount of dollars into learning skills that you could teach yourself for free.
Jason: I learnt by taking risks and fucking things up so badly.
Simon: Exactly, you just learn by doing it.
Jason: I learnt so much more by doing that than I did at school, for any reason, at least about making films. Like, getting my heart broken, getting beaten up, the things you need to do to be a full-rounded person. That’s told me more about what a story is and what a film is.

Jenny Holzer, The Living Series: Someone Wants To Cut a Hole in You… (1980-1982) $POA

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