Van Neistat [EXCLUSIVE] The Spirited Man | Full-length interview

i didn't know we didn't have the master class stuff like we have now we didn't have all these all your heroes on the internet telling you what they went through like we have now like on youtube you can go and watch burner heard song videos you can watch uh you know david man that you can watch david lynch telling you i did this this this and this and you don't i didn't know my mentality and i think maybe the mentality of my generation was that you are a gene you're born a genius and if so all of this stuff happens or you have you're this smart and if so this stuff happens and it's all natural talent i i didn't know that no no no no no these guys that you've heard of they went and they were hopeless for 10 years and then they they developed technique in whatever thing they picked some picked writing some picked filmmaking some became musicians [Music] hi i'm van neistadt i'm a writer director and you're watching behind the brand with brian elliott everyone i'm brian elliott welcome to another edition of behind the brand today i'm here with the incredible ben nystat van welcome to the show but also thank you for your hospitality inviting us out to your house yeah welcome to topanga thank you for coming i usually ask my guests how did you get this job okay so it started in um to the year 2000 and that was the year that the imac dv came out which was the first affordable um computer that allowed you to edit video it was 12.99 and i was on apple and imax are still 12.99 in 2021. this is like the color unit it looks like a toy but it was like a game changer and it had that um the rolling stones she comes in colors everywhere that was the camp the ad campaign yeah yeah and it had a little um firewire port on the side that connected to a camera and the computer connect uh controlled the camera and it came with imovie and you could import into the computer and you know obviously we all do it every day today with our phones but this imac tv was um a revolutionary thing and it was the next cheapest version for non-linear digital video editing i think was a forty thousand dollar avid rig yeah and there was no final cut pro there was no adobe premiere it was avid or nothing basically our apple imovie yeah and um i took my tax return i bought that machine and then on ebay my i think the first either either the first or the second internet transaction i ever did i bought a um 900 sony trv8 digital video camera which took tons of research to like i wanted one with the lcd screen which was also new technology it had to be minidv which was also new technology yeah i was gonna say this is not like little vhs this is the mini dvds or the mini dvd right they're dv they're tapes oh they actually are tiny little tapes this big and they were 60 minutes long because i had a sony that was a little mini dvd player yeah oh i remember i remember that one i remember that one and so the project was we had from 1985 until about 1991 we had vhs tapes that my mom had shot with a vhs camcorder but that you know that footage is unwatchable except for five seconds every hour or something so the idea was i would digitize them all which you could do with the sony's with the sony's you could go from vhs plug in analog and then convert it to digital yes and um the hard drive on the machine only hold only held 10 minutes of footage and so i would it was a christmas present for my family i i went through all the tapes it took months it took from like may to november or something to um to digitize and edit like whatever however many years it was five or six years of vhs tapes and that's how it started and then after that i had a camera i had a computer and i had new york city i was living in in cobble hill brooklyn and riding my bicycle over the brooklyn bridge every morning to manhattan to soho and i'm from the country so everything in new york was interesting to me and the most interesting things were tiny little tiny things and i just started i never stopped till you know an hour before you got here i haven't stopped making them but how i got the job was um i was i went to college to be a professional writer and i was an intern at scholastic at a classroom magazine called super science that came out every month and this one of my friends his name's joe torksen he was he lived in new york and he had been there a long time and he had all these friends from outside of the business outside of scholastic and he brought this artist over named tom sachs because they had a really great cafeteria on the penthouse of scholastic that overlooked the world trade center and so i would do the science experiments for this super science magazine and my desk would be covered with all this gadgetry and joe torksen said you got to meet my friend tom sax he makes art that goes in museums that's kind of like like homemade weird stuff and i met him and then the the job came to an end i was an unpaid intern no i was a paid intern at scholastic and then i it was i had done two years i was only supposed to work there for six months i had done two years and my editor said look for legal reasons you have to either work here and like you're an associate producer i'm sorry an associate editor and you have to be in the books and all this stuff or you have to you can't work here anymore so i called i talked to joe torson and he said go work at tom sachs's studio he's he's doing a big project and he needs hands and i went for like a 50 pay cut i went and i cut little squares out of phone core building this big architectural model and i brought my camera to school to to to the warehouse where we were building this huge project called nutsys and one day i was measuring foam core to cut and i did the measurement on it with a tape measure and i put the tape measure back i put the tape measure down i i drew my line i was about to cut my razor and i noticed that on the 25 foot stanley power lock tape measure where it normally says power walk it said stanley and then blacked out and hand written in tiny letters it said kubrick is dead so it said stanley and i said that is hilarious yeah so i made a little movie about working in that space which was very creepy it was the old um stables for the nypd from like the 19th century so the floors were all angled like this so that the manure would and the piss would float down and they could just shovel it out so we were leveling everything everything was covered in grease your clothes were dirty he loved it because all of the foam core got really dirty it made it look old uh and we're surrounded by industrial machines so i shot a video of starting with a tape measure and then just doing dissolves from one sort of um one little uh tableau to the next and the soundtrack was the berlioz opening music for the shiny net and i took dialogue from from uh a vhs tape from the shining of the guy hiring jack nicholson and he's saying there's there's one more thing i got to tell you about this hotel the last guy who had your job chopped his wife and kids up with an axe and stuffed him in the east wing and that's like the end of the video and then it's like nuts he's coming next year or whatever and so i showed i was on the clock i wasn't supposed to be doing this job it was like not even moonlighting it was like i was on the clock making this video that i wasn't authorized to make and i showed it to tom sacks and he was just like okay just you you're still a fabricator you still have to build all this stuff but just keep making these movies whenever you think of something and then it took two years to build the project and by the time we were done we had 30 videos and he would over my shoulder be like change this make this this is shorter go really tight get close-up and he helped me refine my my technique my filmmaking technique he was directing yeah yeah essentially and then they he had a show in new york and then he had a show at the guggenheim in berlin and all these videos played at the guggenheim in berlin and they played in the new york show and i because i was the most involved um fabricator in the project i was chosen to move to berlin to work there and live there for four months and that's when it and that was probably my first paid gig and then after that it was just hustle hustle hustle hustle and eventually with my brother casey we did this tv show called the nicest brothers on hbo and then it got a little easier to find work and i don't mean that facetiously i mean it got a little bit easier to get paid to do to do this work so let's go back in the chronology a little bit um let's go back to young van i like to ask people what they wanted to be when they grow up and i asked for context because i think you know a lot of people watch this show well they're all different ages but the common thread is people are trying to find their passion what they love to do what they want to do for the rest of their lives or at least you know for a period of time so going back to young van what did what were you thinking about you know future career when you were younger i wanted to build things like be an engineer make things um were you handy then at a young age yes that forever from from day one i was like that and as a child i would get in trouble for taking everything apart in the house and also i would get in trouble for taking apart my bicycles because i was unable to put them back together and my dad wasn't that he was he was okay but he wasn't that handy yeah and uh what other things did you take apart in the house the telephone the old belt about telephones that were like indestructible yes yes yeah cause the whole shell would come off right and the little you could unscrew the only the receiver and it was a two-piece mouthpiece that's right i remember that you could take it both out yet and there was bells in there and there were actual bells with a little hammer and you could get in there and mess with it a little bit and then there was this trick i don't know if you remember this trick but you got your standard cable with a box on top of the tv which had a dial with like 40 channels on it and channel like 17 18 19 was like hbo cinemax blah blah blah right and there was this trick for a little while where you could take a three inch index card and bend three quarters of an inch of the end like this so that it was like a little claw yeah and then you could shove it into the seam of the cable box and pull it back a little bit and move the blurry line that would obscure because you didn't you hadn't paid for hdl right you could move that little line a little bit over and get free hbo i never figured that out i didn't figure that out but lots of little hacks like that there was also in thrasher magazine or it might have been skateboarding magazine they would show these little fingerboards that these guys had made and they didn't shh i don't know that they showed how to make them but um i figured out that you could make them the way they make an actual skateboard but instead of using seven ply maple you could use the cover of a notebook because it's sort of like cardstock and you do like three or four layers with glue in between and when it hardened it was pretty stiff yeah and then you smash apart a matchbox car take the wheels out make trucks out of more of that apply fake plywood yeah and glue it on and then you could go through the magazine and pick out your favorite skateboard which you could never afford your favorite skateboard graphics and razor them out and stick them and then you'd have like a new steve caballero skateboard that is so cool and then you build little half pipes that was one thing once when we were really little fourth grade one of the things was to make blow guns out of pens you take the the knob and the thing off of the pen and then you take a needle or a pin and you put like tape around it or spitball around it and then you'd shoot it once my friend was over and i did it and i inhaled the meal and i never did i got so scared i started crying did you swallow it yes oh no and that was that that only that was for that gadget but just anything we kind of wanted but you couldn't really you know we didn't have any jobs or money or anything you just kind of improvise and make skin boards i got a moped when i was 13 because a neighbor was moving and i said i had my eyes on and i said how much of a notepad and he said 30 bucks and this was i was 13 so that's uh 1988. to have like a pole starter the whole you had to pedal backwards to start it okay and then you pedal forward to like ride it like a bicycle like no one does no one's doing that uh 30 bucks and i had been saving up for uh uh like generic walkman because sony walkmans were 100 bucks but you could get like the whatever one for 30 bucks and i had it all in a um in a a margarine jar like in really small bills and coins and i took the coins of the banks i didn't want to look that amateur and i got bills and i brought them like this huge stack and it was 30 bucks i didn't think it was gonna run and then i got a kid named chris caldwell he lived in that neighborhood he was a lot he mowed lawns he was probably 14 and he was like i know how to get this started just pour pour alcohol rubbing alcohol in the gas tank and it worked wow and that was probably that's like one of the happiest moments of my life when that motor kicked on and it was just like and i was 13 and i had a bike with a motor on it because we live in a place like this tons of hills yeah you could get to a place but you on your bicycle but you really had to want it i re you're bringing back all the shenanigans that that i used to do too and i'm thinking i wanted a moped too but you remember bad news bears like the original bad news bears jerry foster yeah yes and who was the kid that was like the too cool for school yes i and i remember this kid yes he rides in on that what was it like i think it was a a monkey a honda monkey or a honda gorilla yeah a mini bike yeah it's a mini bike yeah he comes in just like you can see like running all around the i was like i want that right now like that's what i want that's a beautiful machine my friend andy spade had this store called um uh uh called jack spade and he had all this he had beautiful props in the store and he had one that had like that bike in the in the store yeah so sweet good times so you've already you've always been a tinkerer you've always been curious taking things apart you basically invented a tech deck or you know that phenomenon that happened there was a wave of popularity of the mini decks yeah yeah yeah yeah when they were you could buy manufacturing yeah this is like maybe 10 years ago they were pretty popular yeah so ahead of your time yeah um but i copied it it wasn't my idea to begin with but also it makes me think of a brand name vulcam which is a surfskate snow brand and vulcan's advertising in the 90s late 90s that was that's what they were all about they would cut out little things and they would paste it and like photocopy it into their ads and it was so homegrown grassroots i mean it reminds me a lot of your filmmaking technique now that it's just so like back to basics or grassroots or homegrown like that whole it's very nostalgic so i just i love that style so you were thinking about a career in what though like you are good at taking things apart you're curious but like were you thinking i'm going to be an engineer a doctor or own a flower shop like what were you thinking so i met a boy named sam when we were 11 we went to camp together and sam was from like the fancy town across the river and sam's mother was an intellectual and his father was a psychiatrist so this is like eagleton and pawnee this is like he was from eagleton he's from eagleton yeah eagleton heights he and they had beautiful style his father was the son of a holocaust survivor okay and they and they were his family was a very wealthy family in germany and then he said that his ceo of he was like the sam walton of germany and he said one day his ceo came into the office in a nazi uniform and said you got to get out get your family get up okay and uh they moved to whatever and this is sam my friend was the grandson of this guy and so they were very sophisticated family they were ivy league people and they had tons of books and they had beautiful things beautiful clothes and the people were all beautiful and they lived on the water and that family taught me about the like i don't even the profound like soul-changing power of reading books just read books all the time and i did that because i wanted to be cool for this family i wanted to be like oh i wanted to go i only saw them in the summers because he went to he went to boarding school and he went to a private school before that i only saw them in the summers and i wanted to have books under my belt when i saw oh i read this over the years i did that and then they would give me books and then his family like took an interest in making sure that i went to college and like making sure they like helped me with you know college essays and so forth and what was family like for you at that time i mean well there were four kids and it was we were the wild you know the opening of um of uh caddyshack the very opening and danny's like getting ready for work and it's just this house of mayhem that was our house and like we were popular kids because our house was just crazy like my parents would go away on vacation and leave us like once they went away on vacation they left mice me and my friend this kid sam in charge of the house they were gone they were like massachusetts and uh dressed my brother casey up in casey neistat who's a famous youtuber now we dressed them up and i've never heard about fur coat her hat brought him to high school with us brought him to my high school because at this point sam had transferred to my high school we brought my high school and we told everyone that he was my sam's french cousin andre so that's what that that's what the house is like typical just gen x on your own don't burn the house down and figure it out and that's what it was like it was like you know self-sufficiency and so the reading of books knowledge is power sort of caught on the reading of books and then my my mind was like okay i want to do a job where i make a lot of money and the jobs that make a lot of money you have to go to college to go to the to get those jobs and then at the time there were writers that made a lot of money like now they don't like magazine writers could buy nice houses that now they can but yeah so what was it about making money was it because you wanted job security you wanted things or you wanted what sam had like that kind of lifestyle what was it what was it about making money to me that's like a ridiculous question well crazy but you know why was it when you're 11 or 12 what is it about making money well even like when you're in high school maybe you were thinking like okay i got to get a job or i want to make a job that brings in the bacon i think it was because i wanted to live there was this town near our town called mystic connecticut and that's where they built it's famous for building whaling ships and they preserve that town for it's the same way it is now as it was in the mid 19th century when they were building these whaling ships [Music] and it was so beautiful and in order to live there you had to be in my mind rich you had to be doctor or lawyer in a small town rich to live there and i wanted to live in a very beautiful place like that just some i don't know where it's from just some aesthetic sensitivity that i had yeah it was a means to an end yeah and so i thought you know if i want a house in mystic i have to be you know a professional yeah i have to make a lot of money yeah and so where did that take you so i went to the i had hot terrible grades in high school i had okay sat scores and then my junior and senior year i had ok grades in high school so i went to west virginia university for two years and i was very miserable it rained 29 days in march my freshman year and so miserable there and then i got like a really good gpa there because all i did was study and so i was on the dean's list and i went and i was really miserable one day and i went to the college and they i went to the library and they had all these college books and it said top it said like the top 25 our top 50 american universities and it was like a book about them so i got into william and mary and i matriculated at william and mary and i was way outdoned i was not smart enough and i didn't work hard enough for those those kids were unbelievably smart but i loved them and i they're still to this day that they're a lot of those people are my friends guys and gals and i met this i guess you know back then there were girls but i guess she was a woman she was 20 years older 21 years old and i dated this girl and she was um her father was norwegian her mother was american and she had like grown up in norway and america and we were dating for about a year or something and then the summer came and she said let's go to europe we can visit my family in norway and stay there for free and um so i worked doubles i was a dishwasher and then at the in an industrial kitchen and then i i think i had another job too anyway i worked as like a madman i still have like bad elbows from pulling sheet trays out of boiling hot water and i saved like 3 000 and like you had to do i mean without the internet it's so hard to convey all of the little technical things you had to do in order to do to to go on a european trip and figuring out hotels and like what's my daily budget and everything's in a backpack and i got a url pass a 30-day unlimited url pass and like we and that was how i learned about foreign travel and i got a sense of like what other how other people lived did you have a map all unfolded like on your floor and it was called the um the one that people the famous ones called the rough guide and then there's the one i can't remember the name of it but it was this big and had like all the european countries and it would do like for five dollar meal eight dollar meal not ten dollar meal 15 and that's just how we did it and you'd go and then some people would just tear out the countries that they weren't going to yeah like a zagat guide right like uh some i could i can't remember the name of it yeah but it was um but that's how you would do it and that book was your lifeline and the url pass was just like sure let's go let's go and you know we did trains all over europe and that did something to me that made me compatible with going to places that are and i'm the gen x i'm i'm a nomad that's our that's our archetype and um so what did your parents say did they say van you better get a real job we're kind of concerned they just said no anything that was i mean my dad would be like you know money is something you're gonna need um and then my mom was is very mystical and you would say woo woo is the is what you would say around here really well progressive and so you know it wasn't like that then it wasn't like you know the culture wasn't like it was now you know it wasn't about it wasn't it just or it was but it wasn't as out in the open about making money and stuff that was kind of like a vulgar thing to talk about and so but there was a path i mean and there was a path i wanted to do something where i made a lot of money and i wanted to do something that i knew because i knew work was ten hours of the third of your life yeah and then my dad didn't have that life my dad's sacrificed my dad didn't do what he wanted to do and he ran the family business he was like the third generation running this family business and it was rough on him and he worked with his old man so that you know we could live and what did he do he sold restaurant supplies he was a salesman and his dad owned the company and then my dad sold that company to a bigger company and then he was a salesman for that company and then he eventually turned the building into a coffee shop and that's what he's been doing but he didn't quit his his job doing the salesman what did he wanted do you think was his dream he wanted to be a kindergarten teacher but he couldn't afford it because he had four kids like you so um [Music] so cool and and then a couple years ago i've had a lot of girlfriends like long-term girlfriends yeah and so i had another long-term girlfriend and i was gonna say there there was a path back then and you know we're talking back in the day the path was you go to school hopefully you go to the best college that you can get into or if you're like me you go to a junior college because you don't have the grades for a university and you you earn i think about that movie rudy that really resonates with me because i got turned down so many times at the junior college level to the big school and then finally the big school let me in um but there was a path you you go to school you get your piece of paper you graduate and you get a great job and you stay there for 30 years that was the path but you're on a different path you're in a very nomadic path i wasn't like i remember the kids in in college talking about you go and you want to make money you go work at goldman sachs you want to do this and you have to be really good at math and physics and you have to be good at chemistry to get any of these jobs to get any of those degrees to do the business stuff and it was like my i liked english and film and we had two film classes or something at william and mary i think i took both of them and i took art history classes and i wanted to be i read all the hunter thompson books and i was like whoa you can live like this and make money and get like a big head like a nice house in a like big farm okay colorado paz that explains everything yeah he's the big first digging point oh that explains it it explains it all yeah okay he was a wild crazy dude but he also wrote really well yeah he was a really good writer yeah and then i got to new york and i hated [ __ ] writing i hated i didn't hate writing but i didn't know we didn't have the master class stuff like we have now we didn't have all these all your heroes on the internet telling you what they went through like we have now like on youtube you can go and watch verner heard song videos you can watch uh you know david man that you can watch david lynch telling you if i did this this this and this and you don't i didn't know my mentality and i think maybe the mentality of my generation was that you are a gene you're born a genius and if so all of this stuff happens or you have you're this smart and if so this stuff happens and it's all natural talent i i didn't know that no no no no no these guys that you've heard of they went and they were hopeless for 10 years and then they they developed technique in whatever thing they picked some picked writing some picked filmmaking some became musicians you know the malcolm glad books well books hadn't been written yet yeah and i'm actually so glad to and i want to make sure that the audience catches what you just talked about because it's very subtle if you miss it but this idea of the overnight success is a complete myth you know there is no such thing as an overnight success all of the greats anyone who's worth talking about who's done anything that matters has toiled and struggled just like everybody else the difference is some start younger that's the difference mozart started at three years old okay okay he was a genius at 12 and whatever he had 10 years in and he had those 10 years he had those young 10 years when your brain is like really really good yeah and i you know and then i think the real breakthrough was i got that camera and it was this you know i knew when i was in scholastic and i was going into a cubicle even though i was in soho and riding my bicycle over the brooklyn bridge every day and riding over the brooklyn bridge at home every night going to these crazy parties i knew that i wasn't going to be sitting in a cubicle writing these articles like wait writers what about the typewriters and the view of of the mediterranean and you know in the suitcase full of paper and all that stuff like no i'm just going to be sitting at it at a a generation three i'm a macintosh because the imac hadn't been invented yet and uh and so you know there's that that all the stories have that like i went this way and i went all i could this way and it was not the right path right and so then you know i i got the camera i built this little rig that went on my handlebars with like sponge material to observe the to absorb the camera's weight and then i during rush hour i rode my bicycle through the holland tunnel it was gridlock traffic and i it was like a 90 or 47 minute delay through the holland tunnel and i got through in five minutes and um i was like well there's something to this there's something to these videos and you can put them on the internet and they you know it took an hour to download it was like three megabytes yeah also uh let's demarcate this a little bit before this is before gopro had the gopro mount oh yeah this is before i mean so in many ways let's give credit words too i mean you're a visionary you're sort of a pioneer you're someone we were talking off camera it's a little bit like they've got qualities of an elon musk or a steve jobs i mean we're talking about van nuys that's fine but like you see things that other people don't see or you are frustrated and angry at things that don't work and then you find a solution to fix it that's true but i i would say that i'm not an elon musk or any of those guys i would say that just the resources were available to a new level of income with with these technologies with like the imac and the camera technologies because there was this film i don't know if you've seen it you probably have it's magnificent and it's called the rendezvous and i'll just tell you how they made it and you know you'll understand what it's about i haven't seen it okay the camera is mounted to the bumper of like whatever the fastest mercedes was at the time this is probably 1967 okay so like whatever the s 500 or whatever of the day i mounted a 35 millimeter camera low like this high off of the ground to the bumper and they raced top speed at sunrise so maybe 6 a.m from the hippodrome in in paris to sacra just they had one real they had one reel if they had 11 minutes to do it and he's just racing through the streets cobblestone and the sound they used was from a ferrari okay and winds up uh uh moammar and he gets to the steps of the soccer curve the you see you know the cars park and you see him walk out and there's a woman waiting for him and he walks up and he kiss her and the film runs out of the [ __ ] camera if he had gotten a light or stopped or blah blah blah the thing would have thing and that and so i'm not that guy did it with film camera but he had resources that would i wouldn't i couldn't get the mercedes i couldn't get the rig that you'd have to build i couldn't get the camera i couldn't get the film i couldn't pay for the processing so it just i think it moved her herzog stole his first camera he took a film class they had this camera he just took the he just he's like i'll do more with this than this school do so i don't know i think i'm part of a um i'm just part of a tradition maybe yeah and luckily for us these things now they're in your phone and homeless people and i'm not eva have the technology now yeah to make this stuff yeah but i was early in doing the video stuff because even though they haven't nobody used that imovie thing on their imac nobody went and bought a 900 video camera no one did that so my brother the opening episode of the nicest brothers this is probably his finest thing he made this video and the producers that at hbo said okay we need an inch you need to set the tone you just have all these little videos you need to kind of frame it up for us and he did this video about jack and the beanstalk and he's we bought the like beans man and that's really that's the yeah that's the turning point for this kind of world so this is like the for the i would say entrepreneurial but it's other worlds too it's where you're doing these like because you have to be so tolerant of uncertainty you have to be so tolerant of failure you have to be so tolerant of being broke and living broke that's it that's i don't know i mean i don't know i don't know i've thought about this a great deal but i don't know why some people stay with it i don't i don't know [Applause] i love it um talk to me about the spirited man talk about you know where you are right now okay so it's hard to like do linear though this came from here and then i had this and this and this and this but that project i had i so i did the hbo show with my brother the woman who acquired that hbo show she left hbo and then we and we didn't get a second season and casey went off and did his thing and i wanted to do something i wanted to do like cinema i wanted to do something writing-centric this is like 2010. yeah this is 2010. yeah so i moved here i moved to los angeles from new york and i started i tried to make a television series i made a pilot that no one's seen but i've chopped no one i made a pilot that no one's ever seen um but i have chopped little bits of that pilot and put them in these spirited man episodes okay um it was called we can fix it and what the the concept of it was to be mr rogers for adult for adults the concept of it was to be mr rogers for adults and i what happened was i was like at the height of drugs and like i was smoking pot from morning till night and then in the middle of the night i when the weed would wear off i would wake up and i'd have to smoke pot to go back to sleep and it was like [ __ ] great and i loved it and i was in it and it wasn't like i am now i wasn't this maniac but i i went coming crazy and so i and also i drank a lot and so i got sober in 2012 and it was like uh traumatic head injury like sobriety is like work like you are this kind of person and then you get sober and you are this kind of person and then this kind of person you have to learn why being this kind of person is not is not going to get you where you should be going and it's more than just so i quit doing drugs it's like learning it's learning what your mentality was and why did you leverage drugs instead of leveraging something else or and what did you learn about yourself was it an escape were you numbing no it was a tool to get the work done because it is unbelievably hard okay i think you look at these like people we make these things and the things that we show on the screen are very beautiful and the lives we show on the screens are very beautiful but i i don't know maybe just some of us aren't tough you know i don't know and uh it was a tool for me to work really really [ __ ] hard yeah and i and i leveraged it and then it didn't work after a while and so that's what happened to that pilot it was just too it was off it wasn't precise it wasn't it wasn't dialed and then i got sober and that was my project for like okay so that's 2012 i got sober and then sobriety was my project for the next nine years and then i'm inching and going slow and slowing down and i work and god bless tom sacks because he took me back and he got me real money to make stuff like not real rich man money but like good fees to do collaborations with nike or with hurley and they would pay for these trips and we'd go to japan or bali or we'd do these long projects um like commercials yeah but they were more like uh branded i would say branded content is what they call a little mini movie storytelling because tom did nike shoes with nike and so we would do movies that um were about his studio and then all this the the the the assistants would wear the the shoes and the nike clothes yeah like an integration but i learned that like i learned sort of the um the evolved filmmaking technique of like why there's a reason why that hollywood system that makes incredibly well the best made movies in the world there's a reason why they have a set technique that they go by and one of the things you do is you get that screenplay you have that plan dialed in before you start shooting and then one of the things i've learned is that shooting is by far the easiest part shooting is almost effortless especially with the cameras right now my son is two and a half years old i've handed him cameras he has shot footage that i could use but people think when they get these machines and they have this unbelievable power that they've seen spielberg use and they've seen whoever used they think oh i can get a i can do what spielberg does and it's like no no no no no no you can do the easiest part and you can't even do it that you can't do it like sven nyquist right so i spent those years and this is all unconscious i don't know that i'm doing this i'm trying to get by and i spent those years really um just getting good at it just trying to get good at i read tarkovsky sculpting in time and he's very strict he's like you don't you're not experimenting with anything once the cameras are rolling you know exactly what you're doing you're executing your plan don't stray and then i listened to that guy on william friedkin i heard a podcast with him or maybe an interview with him and he said he was talking about shooting the french connection okay those scenes that are under elevated trains where um uh uh royal pen and bone what's his name yeah uh gene hackman is racing one of those 70s death boxes not wearing a seat belt yeah okay um racing chasing another car with crashes and stuff and he's like oh no we shot those gorilla we would just pay cops to close off the intersection and we didn't have permits for that or anything and then he also said he said oh i didn't do second takes he said it's all one take he said the only time i would shoot a second tape is if a piece of equipment of filmmaking equipment was visible that the light fell in he said if the light fell into the yeah into the shot yeah and i thought oh my god this guy's a master this is i think he also made the exorcist wow and i thought okay well if that can be done i want to that's what i want to do because the thing about shooting is herzog says you know he has these young kids come up to him and they say i have 600 hours of footage for this documentary and he says oh no no no he said we're filmmakers not garbage collectors yeah and then he turns around and says in that movie the abyss he said you see that kid talking with the handcuffs and he's on he's he's he's about to get the death penalty he's like that's almost real time he's like i shot that's like 40 minutes and it was like 45 minutes of shooting yeah and so it's all surgical i took this i took this sloppy digital thing that i've been doing for a while and i had it had become a uh you know that nightside brothers project had become like a um a manifestation of my craziness and my disorganizedness and and also the fury and the mania that's how you could get through that stuff is fury and mania and i tried to refine it down to something it's still fearing me and i'm sorry but that is something more premeditated and now i'm writing and the fury and mania is in the writing and in the writing you go very hard and blah blah blah blah and then you have your shot list and then you just execute that shot list and the edit is feeds and so i did this we can fix it thing it wasn't right i didn't show it i showed it to people and they all said they all had fundamental notes and it was like okay so this isn't the thing and then i just went and worked with sax um i got a studio in the i moved back to new york i left i was in la from 2010 to 2013. i moved back to new york city i got a studio in the bronx that i shared with this guy named dustin grella and um did my my friend andy spade who was married to kate spade they built kate spade together and um andy was from advertising and he's very he's like me and he would have me do he would hire me to do little and my and my cohorts josh safety and ben saffy he hired to do little projects for um uh we would do i do a little advertising for him and then he had people and i do and i did a project with did two projects with tory burch um with torwick's the woman for the company tory burch yeah and um just hustled hustle hustled and i don't know i met i met isabel oh no this is what happened i got a job um doing vidcon a booth at vidcon for twitter and it was this booth that i had to make and it dropped i got the job because i could fabricate and direct and uh and did it hurt that you were a nice set either i mean did that no that didn't hurt okay and i could get my brother to be in the booth for twitter and he did he came over he's a good sport and it was just a it was a basically a this steel boot that you couldn't see in the camera and then it had a crank on it and the crank opened this like sort of top that slid open and then there were three brushes i have a model of it i'll show it to you you can do it for b-roll yeah awesome okay and it had three brushes and three two brushes and three chambers that you could put um leaves in candy and cereal in little toys super balls and then they shot in super slow motion so we had all these influencers sit there and like do something funny and then we that man over there uh vc slaves would crank this thing yeah and then this like first this wave of cereal would come and then a wave of like uh super balls would come and then a wave of spiders would come yeah and with that money then i got paid for that i had enough money to pay my new york rent my studio in new york rent i'm sorry my apartment rent my studio new york rent and then buy an f-350 mount my my um tw 200 dirt bike on a rack on the back and drive to mexico for four months and go surfing and in that four months it was like it was the four months leading up to my 40th birthday and i just concentrated on surfing i surfed every day i hate surfing i hate the water i hate being wet i surfed every day because i i was like this is my opportunity to get good at this thing i didn't get good at it i hate surfing um but it was wonderful living down there i loved it was like a little community and i knew all the people out in the water yeah and i was writing every day and then i came up with this spirited man thing because i read this book called shop class as soul craft and he talks about how when uh he says you know you bring your car into the mechanics and they plug it into a machine and they can't explain to you what's wrong with it because it's all computer readouts and stuff and he says but the spirited man wants to know why his car isn't working and then he went and did like a couple more paragraphs about the spirit amendment and i was like that's me that's me it was like a relief i'm that girl i'm that guy i found my people yeah and i made in 2016 i made an episode and it's the um the one about new york where it's snowing and i'm like to hell with this town to hell with the fort yeah um to hell with fifth avenue i'm telling park avenue and that was an experiment i just sat on that and but the idea didn't go away and then covet i was supposed to make a film i was supposed to make a feature film that i wrote last year and i had was all the machinery was it was canada and i had producers and the money and all this and kovac just the window was shut went away and i had that one episode i said okay just you you're locked in your house just to attention and then i was able to i was still doing a writing project for tom sacks and he was paying me per hour to writing his studio manual and i was supposed to go to the olympics in in in japan to do um to do uh olympics movies for with tom for nike um and but i was able to grind out a few hours a day doing these spirited man episodes and i think it became this manifestation of mr rogers for adults and that was my after my step brothers that was my ambition i was like this man is gone from our lives my generation that's what we all have in common whether you're in prison or whether you're barack obama we all have mr rogers and he was a good thing and he was a force for good and it was a show about working and i'm sorry i said that wrong it was a show about emotions and working because you were at his work it just looked like his house but it was all a set and um i heard norm mcdonald talk about what his jokes were and he said the jokes are just things that i obsess about and then i write the joke about it the subject of the joke is something that i'm obsessed about like the point spread in football games or something and then i do the joke and i don't think about it anymore it's like the last step of the process of that thing and i think i was also i was reading a lot of books i was reading a lot and there were and and you know i in 2016 i tried to i did i replaced the abs pump in my motorcycle and it was like you had to tear that thing apart to get the things it's like the heart that was buried in there why do they do that anyway i mean we were talking off camera i was trying to change the the bulb and and my front headlights and it's like you have to have a little kid's hand to get in there and get that little thing in there and yet those formula one cars which take five people to start and are the most sophisticated cars in the world they come into those pit stops red bull can change all four tires in 1.7 seconds and they can do like crazy stuff in like 10 seconds yeah i because of the it's all done because of compliance with safety and because of um shipping and design and supply it's all done in the name of i think profitability and god bless them they got to stay alive but the race stuff is done to be made like race when you take like my bike now is like yeah it's it's it's it's more serviceable so anyway it's a very laborious job yeah started listening to podcasts started listening to i think like joe rogan and mark maron was the first one i started listening to quality and i listened to him all the time and i started listening to joe rogan and then i listened to hit joe rogan's guests and he had all these like intellectuals he had college professors and then in your feed in your because of the algorithm those people's things would come and it was this it was like it was like college but like that but every class was that best professor in the college that you could only take his course once yeah but there's like a hundred of those guys yeah and like and i to this day today this morning on my run listening to well okay i was listening to theo ron but he's a he's one of those guys in his own way but yeah it got me really thinking in the 2008 financial crisis really really made me want to know what the hell is going on what's really happening what's going on what's going on and what's gonna happen yeah because this is crazy this is craziness were you surprised by the success of your kickstarter campaign um you know how people are like never in my life okay so you have some person who like makes like a 20 season series of like some incredibly imaginative thing and they're like never in my wildest dreams did i really and you're welcome you couldn't come up with being rich and famous but you came up with this 50 hour storyline yeah so i was not i was i was extremely in extreme gratitude for it and very very very happy but you weren't surprised but i wasn't i was you expected i wanted to make like more right yeah but um why didn't you set the bar higher then uh you don't get the money unless you meet your thing and i had to set it at a level where um i could i could do what i'm promising in the campaign yeah with that with just like what's the minimum amount of money and then the the rest of kickstarter if you look they're like the ones that get funded it's like i'm doing an eight episode series about formula one racing i'll be with the drivers and then like 2100 bucks right like really gonna deliver all and i was asking for sixty seven thousand dollars yeah to do like five youtube or six youtube videos yeah but luckily i got double that because that's what i really needed because i deduct this and you gotta do taxes and you gotta pay to fulfill all the rewards which is expensive yeah but i was um well there's a whole psychology i was relieved because that was it i was [ __ ] if i didn't get that money i was [ __ ] and it just went through today and it just the wire transfer was initiated today so you know whatever i don't have it in my bank account yet but like i you know i was like mortgage life all that stuff it was all hinging on this thing being successful and it's just six movies you know at that time it's just six movies on my hard drive and i haven't had it you know i haven't had an independent thing i haven't done anything independently that's paid bills or whatever it's all been working with tom sachs doing nike stuff and this is just my intent but my brother making that video and pulling my you know my brother made this seven minute or something video about sort of my biography and his relationship with me yeah professionally and that steered so many people to my work did you ask him to do it i didn't i called him the night before um i was going to launch the video the the kickstarter video and i said look i was like why didn't i ask him i said look i'm doing this thing i'm wondering could you post something on one of your things just let people know yeah to let people know and he was just like and then he just started asking all these questions and i haven't talked to him about business and i've never not not since my step brothers i've talked to him about decades yeah so a decade meanwhile he's he's an expert he's he is one of he might be the number one expert at youtube he might be the most knowledgeable person at about like what to do because yeah there are guys with more followers and all that stuff but not he's the first one i mean he's the og think about this and so he just started and hit it so he said you're doing it wrong how succinct he was what were you doing wrong what are you trying to do and well fundamentally what i was doing wrong i didn't know for instance that the gold standard of social media um i can never remember the word it's something like interaction engagement engagement the gold standard of social media engagement is the youtube subscription i didn't know that i didn't know that's what i was trying to do yeah he's like what you want is subscribers you want as many secrets his subs and then he said thumbnails yeah thumbnail and title he said those are absolutely more important that he's like the thumbnail entitled more important than the video yeah just tons of little things like that yeah tons of little things and then he said fundamentally he said everything's gonna pop off at once he's like what's your plan i was like kickstarter i make the money then i release at a regular interval like one a week video and then attract you know with i didn't really know you know attract money this is like a month ago i'm making this up because i was like you know i think i figured get brand deals and sponsor deals like i've been doing for the last 10 years yeah and then that'll just keep the thing going when the kickstarter money runs out and he was like no no and then he just had finite things he's like it's this it's this this you do this don't do this this is not important this is vital what was one of those don't do this um but then you know i it's not that world that that aspect of the thing of like getting an audience essentially is what you're doing building an audience is not intuitive it is nothing like making the thing making the thing that that that a lot of people connect with right and like a lot of people love and embrace that is to me i can do that with with my instincts i can do that i know how to do that oh i'm sorry i keep touching you okay so making the thing and touch and and connecting with people with the video the thing i can do that but i can't i don't know i don't have an instinct for the the i guess it's marketing i guess that's what you would call it the other levers right it's like you talked about thumbnails being important and title and maybe even the strategy of it all which is instead of launching it in chronology or sequentially casey's advice was no brother we gotta have it all in place because when you go it's all gotta hit there's gonna be continuity you got one shot yeah yeah and he also said two videos a week now i have been making one video a month sometimes it would take more than a month because i only had an hour a day because i had to do i had for covet my boy didn't have child care and then uh i was doing um freelance projects so i had about an hour a day to do the kickstarter which took me five months and to do the the videos which took almost a year okay so i was my i i didn't know what my pace was and i thought okay wait wait how long does does one of those spirited man videos take you how long did it take you to make okay that's a great question the one where uh the it's called it seems like you're using sort of archival footage yeah which is fine yeah but like okay welcome to it okay so obviously it depends but the one calling what the one that's titled why comedians are the most important artists of our age yeah where i hand type out all of kurt vonnegut's breakfast of champions and then mount it okay that part of the video eight hours a day took three months okay that's not making the video and then to make the video and i put this in the kickstarter i was like that thing took i was like i know i'm asking for a lot of money this actually happened all this stuff is like analog you know i'm not just like this was assembled yes yeah and so that part took three months and then to make the video probably took a few weeks because remember i only got an hour a day which you can't do anything in an hour oh my gosh however i did a movie yesterday yeah which is um called running and the youtube so you get to write i have a title within the movie within the videos and that's the theme and then the youtube title which is another title that's the youtube title and so i think the youtube title for this one is going to be called does running suck are you picking the titles yes do you have any help or input on that no okay but why are you offering your services no no i was just curious if like if you have like if casey's everyone i know i'm like you know it's casey weighing in like that's a sucky title he said he does do that he's a that's a great i i did like their my friend was nominated for an oscar so i did a video about that and i went for the most goofy um thumbnail where i'm like yeah with a fake oscar in my hand and he was like that was a great thumbnail man that was perfect yeah so he does weigh in with that but like he hasn't been complimentary about the titles i don't think okay um but he's like stan he's like he's like look at mr beast look at mr beast these are so good yeah and they are they're so simple and it's like mr beast was an interesting expression yeah a really cool intro like yeah a compelling um prop no there's a formula there's a whole yeah yeah yeah yeah so i'm trying to like reverse engineer that and it's like my my artistic instruction is like no just call your own voice and people will catch up so all right so that one took however that long but the running one yeah we started yesterday and it's done okay and that's a nine that's just as long it's nine minutes long it's a it's a theme movie it has it because i have the theme movies and then i have the movies that are like fix-it movies yeah and those are short i can do those in one day yeah one long day but i've been keeping up with the two videos a week okay i've been keeping up with it van i could talk to you for another six hours easily let's wrap this up with a little bit of advice let's go to camera okay let's let's connect right now let's engage and give some parting advice to current or future creators and creatives people who want to tell stories what is your advice about making their art okay this is the advice that tom sachs gave to me work hard and be brave read that's what verner herzog says read read read read read read read read read books read books that are printed on paper that you carry around with you in a backpack and before you go to bed and while you're in the bathroom while you're on the subway read um i don't know i need advice i need advice um you know when the doctor says this isn't gonna hurt and then he puts the thing in your arm or somebody said this is going to be easy no no no no it's really easy you just go up you take a right on fernwood you take a left on saddle peak road then you go down tuna canyon it's one way but stay on the right it's extremely difficult if you're trying to start from scratch it's extremely difficult and you can't get your project done in less than ten years i'm sorry unless you go so insane and if you're one of those people you don't need my advice but i'd say it's ten years it's a 10-year project whatever you're going to do it's a 10 it was 10 years ago that i did hbo it was 11 years ago and this will be 10 years before it's like at a level where i don't know it's i don't know what but i mean we were just sitting back you know chopping it up reminiscing about the good old days and all that you know tracking my roots where i came from where i'm going [Music] it's all about [Music] your dreams in the past ain't nowhere near you backseat drivers got nothing but two cents riders two buyers they all liars i should get an a for effort i'm too tired but i'm never giving up that's why i'm kind of in mine role model like it or not i gotta play it sugar cook the rhymes sometimes but still say it said i was quitting that 40 is just a fib i'm still a kid that's wiping the food off of my bib you ever wanted something so bad that you could taste it cried over every opportunity wasting good and bad news which one you want first either way you pick the best still gonna hurt you the worst i never got the bask and the fruits of the labor and i never got the cash from that dude from the label

Channel: Behind the Brand

Views: 116,720

Rating: 4.970314 out of 5

Keywords: Bryan Elliott, Behind the Brand, entrepreneur, van neistat, van neistat channel, van neistat the spirited man, van neistat jack knife hack, van neistat interview, van neistat casey neistat, van neistat tom sachs, van neistat youtube, van neistat fourth turning, van neistat fantasy fixing, van neistat meets his dad, van neistat wife, van neistat reaction, van neistat details, the spirited man

Id: qbqBYcqL1tM

Length: 64min 34sec (3874 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Vegan_Biltong_co_za]

Behind the Brand is good stuff. He did an hour with Candice, about two years ago.

[u/RetroBreak]

Great interview! Love his passion

[u/Venturian_Candidate]

still holding out for a Neistat Brothers Season 2

(or at least some kind of collab)