Five Questions with… Vilan Trub

The way I write is rooted in research. I love to watch movies and documentaries, and very much love to read. I read through the bibliographies of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain then started to go deeper. I read true crime books covering The Westies and mafia figures. I also looked to graphic novels by Frank Miller, specifically his run on Daredevil and his work on Batman. Miller understands how to show the worst out of a NYC street. All streets can be good or bad, depending on what moment of the day you happen to be walking by. Miller knew how to capture the bad moments very well.

I wanted to understand both the private investigator trope and what it meant to be a career professional. We have ideas of what a criminal does, but unless you’ve been behind the desk at a job for 10 years, you don’t really know the details. We think a gangster intimidates someone by breaking their thumbs. You quickly learn that there’s far more creative and effective ways to demoralize a person.

I also always remember seeing movies on TV, on WPIX. They had 8PM movies during the week and matinee movies on weekends. It felt like it was always the same movies playing too, like The Wraith or Short Circuit

There was also the video rental stores like West Coast Video, also across the street. Every Friday I was in there renting movies and starting with well-known movies then before long digging for anything interesting. I’d watch anything I could get my hands on.

It was during high school that I started to realize that I wanted to make movies, and that was from the realization that I COULD make movies. I just purchased Mean Streets, never seen it before. I watched it and was blown away. Not just because it was an amazing movie, but because this was a movie by the director who made Goodfellas. I knew Scorsese and knew him as a big Hollywood director with budgets and crews and everything. You never imagine being able to make that movie. When I saw Mean Streets it looked like something I could make. It was filmed on the streets and in apartment building stairwells. Even though it wasn’t my neighborhood it was all very recognizable and familiar to me and it didn’t look like a big Hollywood movie.

It looked like a camera and some actors and something I could do. That’s when the feeling of wanting to make movies, not just watch them, took hold.

In college I took my home family video camera and moved into a magic shop on Queens Boulevard for a week. I didn’t know what I was going to film but I just knew I needed to get used to filming stuff and the shop and the people who hung out there seemed like an interesting bunch. That week taught me how to not be afraid of filming something. To be a director you need to be a leader, you need confidence. I learned how to get what I want and needed, in terms of footage. Over the course of the week I spent less and less time asking, and more time telling.

I then got an unpaid internship with a guy through Craigslist. It could have been a disaster but I was a nobody and needed to learn, anywhere the lessons would come from. The experience was interesting, unprofessional to say the least, but the person I worked for actually had a great background in the industry. My dedication led to him hiring me when he started getting real projects again. It wasn’t long before I was turning 21 while helping shoot a music video at 50Cent’s house. It’s not where I expected to turn 21 but looking at my watch at round midnight I couldn’t help but think about how cool it was. This was the house, after all, my dad and I knew for being Mike Tyson’s house and we were big fans. It still featured a neon “Club TKO” sign in the club section of the mansion.

I continued working with the producers, even helping make Before I Self Destruct, another 50 Cent vehicle. At that time, I started to feel that the current path I was on was going nowhere. It stopped being cool, the money wasn’t great, and all of the promises that I’d be able to direct my own work became transparent as a ploy to just keep me working. I walked away.

I took whatever money I had saved up, bought my own camera and other equipment and started filming on my own. I realized, if no one’s paying you good money, do it your way. I made my first feature film, Susie Q, and did it my way. For all of its flaws, I’m very proud of the movie and ultimately it served as a lesson on how I want to make movies in the future, what to do, not do, and what to think about.