Our ongoing Member Lens feature spotlights current Film Independent Members to see how they got started, where they are now and what being part of Film Independent means to them. This month: NYU professor John Tintori.

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As we settle into fall, and the beginning of a new school year, we thought it was a good time to focus our Member Lens at a Film Independent Member that dedicated their life to education.

John Tintori didn’t always plan on being a professor. In fact, he didn’t even think he’d go into film until college, where he caught the bug going to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The former Chair of the NYU Graduate Film Program then made a career working in New York as an editor with filmmakers like John Sayles.

He fell into teaching through a favor to a friend, and ended up drawn more to teaching. At NYU, he created the Dual MBA/MFA Degree in Producing and NYU Cinema Research Institute. He still teaches editing workshops works as the Executive Director of the NYU Production Lab.

We spoke with him earlier this month about the village it takes to help young filmmakers flourish.

So just to start off, let’s start with your background. Where are you from? And what were the things that drew you to cinema?

I’m from Detroit, Michigan, and went undergraduate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I was on my way to some kind of science medical career, but Ann Arbor has this great independent experimental film festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

I always like films, and I started to get involved in it, and then ended up taking a film class at the art school, and that was it for science. I just did a 180 there right at the end of my education and started making some little films and getting some grants, and then just moved to New York.

Some of my friends that were getting involved in film went to L.A, a couple went to New York, and I went to New York. I just started knocking on doors and got a job and started working.

And what was that first job? What were the first couple of things that got you in?

I really had no credentials, and I really didn’t have any training, but one thing that I felt about the short films that I was making, and they were experimental films, but they had got a good rhythm. I seemed to have a way of cutting that was pretty effective.

And so, I thought, oh, maybe I’m an editor. So, I started knocking on doors and I got a job being an assistant in a commercial editing room there, cutting commercials. But I didn’t like commercials, and I thought I could be a feature editor and started looking for that work, and that took a long time to get. But I finally did, through a very weird way. I got by some odd set of circumstances.

I got a job being a key grip on a little indie feature called Liquid Sky. I didn’t even really know what a key grip was, but I did it. And, by the end of that film, I got hired on John Sayles’ second film as the key grip and got to know John and got to be friends with him right away.

I let him know, like I let everybody know, that I was looking to cut features and everybody’d say, “Oh, what have you cut?”  Well, actually, nothing, but I think I think it’d be good at it. He gave me a shot, a couple of years later, to be the associate editor, one of his early films called, Brother from Another Planet.

That was my first feature. And from there, I was able to just run a string of features together in New York and some studio stuff in L.A. and I had a good run as a feature editor.

And then, I got burnt out on that. I had a couple little kids, and I was never home. Then I found a book that I wanted to adapt, and I tried to get the rights to it. It was a really odd book, this postmodern novel.

And I was about to make a deal, and then [the author] said, “Oh, actually, you’re offering us a $500 option, but HBO is interested in they’re offering us $20,000, so we’re going to go with the 20,000.” And I said, okay. And they said, “But they don’t have anybody attached. And they’re just kind of curious who you are that is interested in this odd book. Would you want to meet them?” I said, “Sure.”

I sent them the spec script and it was just good enough to get the meeting. But I went in and met them, and they liked the pitch. So both my wife and I, we were working together they hired us to write the script, and with the intention that we would direct it as well.

That’s how I made my living for several years; as a writer, mostly finding material that I would take to a studio and say, “Here’s this book. I think I could make a really good script out of it. Why don’t you option it and pay me to write it?” And in those days, this was the 80s, there was development money. So that’s what I did for about ten years.

How did you come to teaching?

In the midst of all that, a friend of mine who was teaching at NYU, asked me for a favor. They had a student that needed someone to help them with the editing of their film. And I said, sure. And so that was the trade. And that short film was made by Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace) as a NYU grad film student.

So I helped her out, and that worked out really well. She won Sundance. She won everything with that film, Snake Feed. It’s amazing film.

Then they asked me to NYU. They said, “Do you want to teach a workshop class here?” And I said, “Are all your students as brilliant as Debra?” And they said, yes. And I said, “Well of course I do.”

 So I started teaching a little bit. And I was still writing and doing some cutting, and then I just got more interested in teaching, and being part of that program. I became full time after a few years, and then I became the chair of that program for nine years.

And I’ve been there ever since, over 20 years now. That’s it. That’s my whole life!

So I want to ask you a little bit about your work as a teacher. What courses are you teaching right now and what is exciting about them?

I do a bunch of stuff for the university, and I’ve always taught editing since that beginning. That’s still my passion, just getting in front of a room of 12 people, somebody puts up a film and leading the conversation about it. I really enjoy that. I think I’m good at it. I’m an editor and I could just take over and cut the film. And I never do that. I always just try to facilitate a conversation where people figure it out themselves. And I think that’s the real joy of teaching, having that patience to help people figure out the problem.

The way I approach it is– a lot of times you put up a film and then people said saying, “Well, you should do this, and you should do that.” And I go, “Before we get into solutions, let’s name the problem, because like in life, if you can name the problem, usually the solution is pretty obvious.”

So that’s really what I work on with my students in the workshop. And then over the years, I’ve developed a bunch of little lecture topics. So I teach an elective course in editing. And this is before they go out to shoot. I show them a lot of stuff and talk about different styles of filmmaking and editing. I say, “Okay, if that’s what you’re interested in, then what are what are the shots you need to make it? How do you need to stage it? How do you need to block it? How do you need to design so that when you get to the cutting room, you have the material to be able to work the scenes the way you’re imagining.”

It’s a lot about screen direction and eye lines and stuff like that at the beginning. But then we get into how you go about doing action scenes, and comedy, and those who want to do oners, I have a whole way of thinking about strategies for doing that. So that’s a lecture class, which I’ve been doing for a long time.

You also created an MBA program in the film department. Can you tell me about that?

When I was when I was the chair of the department, I worked together with my counterpart at the business school at NYU, and we created this dual MBA/MFA program. I’m so proud of it. It’s been going now for 17 years.

It’s a very small program. We usually take 3 to 6 students a year and they integrate in with the MFA students. When we designed it, the idea was that it was a way to have the business students who were interested in film but knew nothing about film being able to work with the film students and gain some knowledge about the creative process.

Well, it turns out that that is true, and we’ve graduated any number of people that have gone on to produce and be studio executives, and they’re all over the business. I love it, but then a bunch of them end up being directors. So, you know, Charlotte Wells, who made Aftersun, was a dual degree student, is a really great producer.

She’s got the math skills, and she could work in banking if she wanted to, but she made Aftersun. Cathy Yan (Birds of Prey, Dead Pigs), she was a dual degree student. We’ve had a number of them that have gone on and directed features or become studio executives and everything in between. It’s kind of amazing.

That’s so cool. Something I want to ask you, too, is just like how the film school has changed, in the last 15 years or so, the barrier to entry for technology and information has gone down so much. How do you see the role of programs like yours changing to adapt to that?

That’s interesting. I am always like paying attention to that, especially because I teach editing and I don’t teach the technical part of editing. It’s all about story. And so that’s what we really concentrate on. But I do notice that every year people come in, they’re just more sophisticated now, film savvy, than they were ten years ago, and certainly more than they were 20 years ago.

But they still need to learn how to use those tools to craft story, and I think that’s what we’re really good at. And that’s what I focus on, what we all focus on. So, the technical part keeps evolving and we keep chasing that to try to keep current with technology and the different tools and make sure our students are trained for professional career.

But really the heart of it is, the tools are just tools. You know, it’s about finding the truth, finding the honesty, finding your voice, using these tools to tell stories that other people would like to hear as well.

With MFA/MBA program and the Cinema Research Institute, which you also started, both have a big component that deal with the business side of the industry. That’s clearly a focus of yours, so I would love to hear your perspective on the business side right now, because obviously, post strikes, things have gone upside down. Where do you see things, and where do you see them going?

Yeah, it’s terrifying right now. There’s no question. But it has been in the past as well, and it kind of always is. It’s always a little risky to be in the arts in general. I have to believe that people will always want films, that people will always want some kind of cinematic experience. That’s never going to go away.

The business right now is in turmoil, as you know, as the streamers have taken over. It’s been just such a big change. There are a lot of people that are not working right now, a lot of people I know who always work, are not working. It’s scary.

You go to school, there’s this promise that there’s going to be an industry out there and a career. And for me, being here and training people with that promise– if I didn’t truly believe that we will get to the other side of this, and things will grow again– I think that’s what I hold on to.

This is a really bad patch we’re going through right now, and it’s really easy to see what just happened and why this is happening. But I really do believe that it’s going to get better soon.

And the other thing that we do is, besides the dual degree and the Cinema Research Institute, which I’m big part of, is we started this thing a few years back called NYU Production Lab. The whole focus of that thing is to help students and recent alums in the arts transition from their academic to their professional careers.

And it’s wildly popular. We support people in a lot of different ways. The university is really happy with it. I’m really glad that NYU is committed to this work, because there’s not a lot of programs out there for alums. Even when I was trying to pitch this a long time ago, certain people, not the university, but other people were like, “Well, that’s a tricky call because alumni aren’t paying tuition and where’s that money supposed to come from?”

And I was like, “Wait a second, they’ve paid a lot of tuition.” I think for me, after someone’s gone through one of these programs and really dedicated themselves and put a lot of themselves into it and a lot of money into it, I always felt like the university owed them some help on the other side, and that was actually a really smart investment, because if you can help your alums launch their careers and they love their university for that, that’s going to come back to you.

I’m playing kind of a long game. But I also really just feel the obligation to people that have come to these programs to take that next step and help them over that big hurdle. That’s awesome. This is not like a business school where you get recruited in the second year by the time you graduate, you already know where you work. It’s not like that in the arts.

Yeah, navigating the career stuff is like half the battle. There’s a skill to that. There’s the skills of learning how to make things, but then there’s a whole another set of skills which is like learning how to shape a career.

Yeah. And getting and getting those first breaks. So a lot of stuff we do, we call ourselves a production lab because we make things. We try to do a lot of experiential learning and a lot of integrating with the with the industry and, just really creating maybe people’s first real work in contact with the industry.

And we started it because I come from film and the vice chancellor that I was working with at the time, Linda Mills, was a filmmaker. She’s now the president of NYU, which is great. We both came from film. So the Production Lab started very much film centric, but it was always meant to serve all the arts.

So in the last couple of years, since the pandemic, we branched out. We have a big dance program now and a creative writing program. And we’ve done a lot of podcast stuff and episodic. So we’re moving into into other arts, which is really nice.

Awesome. I wanted to ask about your relationship with Film Independent. When did you first become aware of Film Independent and what interested you about it?

I love programs like this. And when I lived in Los Angeles, was when I started coming to programs and joined. That was in the 90s.

It’s funny because, what we do at NYU and especially through the Production Lab, we help filmmakers. You see a film like Chloé Zhao’s first film and, we’re very proud that we were there at the beginning. We helped with some moneys and mentoring and stuff. And we have a poster on the wall, but so does everybody else. I love that about this business.

And I mean, it’s a necessity, but I really do like that Film Independent, Sundance, the Gotham, that all these different organizations, it just takes so many people, in many cases, to get these careers started and launched.

It never feels like these institutions begrudge each other. We all are very proud of the work we do and we’re proud of our filmmakers. And I love it when people come through and everybody feels like, yeah, we helped that one. It’s really nice.

So I really appreciate that relationship as well over the years.

Yeah, absolutely. what I mean, what has been your favorite part about being a member benefit wise or anything else?

I love getting all the, all the films for the Spirit Award. It’s just great. I look forward to that every year, getting to see all those films. It’s really huge!

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed speaking with you today.

Film Independent promotes unique independent voices by helping filmmakers create and advance new work. To become a Member of Film Independent, just click here. To support us with a donation, click here.

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