Q&A with filmmaker Julian C. Santos, Part I

09.20.20

It’s not a stretch to say that Julian C. Santos’s adventures in scriptwriting began when he was playing what he calls “a fun little bit part” (Vladimir the hunter) in Peter and the Wolf, at Young Performers Theatre. The director, Diane Jackson, “let me add a line or two, which was crazy to my seven-year-old brain: ‘Oh, I’m part of this creative process, like I feel I’m welcomed into it.’”

“The concept of scripts was introduced to me relatively early, and so it just seemed natural that, eventually, I would want to try writing.”

Julian’s involvement with YPT would span around 13 years and 15 or so productions. With roles like Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Wizard in Beauty and the Beast and Winnie the Pooh under his belt, he went on to attend University High School in San Francisco, where he began writing scripts and directing theatrical productions and short films. (In his senior year, along with classmate and friend Michael Garfagnoli, he handled most of the director’s duties on a YPT production of Peter Pan.)

Even before setting out for New York City to pursue a degree in film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he’d decided to avail himself of opportunities to take NYU classes abroad. For a summer session in Paris in 2017, he directed a French cast in short film, Le Temps Perdu, based on his original script (written almost entirely in French) about an old man remembering a fateful romantic encounter with a Parisian woman many years ago. The following fall, he found himself in London working on a feature-length script for an Advanced Screenwriting class.

Completing his degree at Tisch in three years and graduating summa cum laude, he immediately got to work developing a feature film project, which grew out of the script he’d written in London. Shot in New York City, The Last Christmas Party is a naturalistic, vérité-style drama about a group of college friends trying to navigate complicated love lives before leaving for winter break. The story, unfolding over the course of one night, has a nonlinear structure and replays the holiday party from the perspective of three central couples. Julian cowrote (with Kevin Nittolo) and directed the film, which has been accepted into a dozen film festivals. At the 2020 Art is Alive Film Festival, it shared Best Feature Film and Best Director honors.

One early review, for the Rome Independent Prisma Awards film festival, dubbed it “a magnificent expression of what cinema can do outside the Majors circuit, with just a camera, a bunch of willing people and, obviously, a lot of talent.” (Watch the trailer here). Four by Three, a production and distribution company based in Cincinnati, acquired the distribution rights in July and plans a release on Amazon and other video-on-demand platforms in November.

YPT spoke with Julian spoke back in May, when he was making the best of Covid lockdown in New York City, working on scripts for two new projects. What follows is Part 1 of the discussion, abridged and edited.

Do you recall how you found out about YPT?

I had my 4th birthday party at YPT. It was kind of a little venue my parents through would be a fun place to have a birthday. That is how I first came to YPT, and I got really interested in it. And my parents suggested to me I take acting classes there, and I did. It took a few rounds before the teacher, Diane [Jackson], recommended that I try doing one of the plays. And from there, I was like seven years old and I just loved it. I kept doing, I think, two shows a year for the next few years.

Do you remember your first show?

Absolutely. Peter and the Wolf. I played the hunter Vladimir, a fun little bit part. It was so nice of the director, Diane, to let me have a lot of fun with it. I think she even let me add a line or two, which was crazy to my seven-year-old brain: “Oh, I’m part of this creative process, like I feel I’m welcomed into it.” Met a lot of fun friends there.

What was your first big part?

The evil magician in Alladin. I loved it. It was a real treat to play the villain, and not something I got to do often at YPT. But I was glad that part was unashamed villainy. I went on to do Peter in Peter and the Wolf and Winnie the Pooh. Those were some of my favorite parts, especially Winnie the Pooh, who I really loved as a child.

YPT is wonderful in that it gives kids the opportunity to act in prominent roles in their productions. It’s not like you’re just playing a side character with one line. Children are entrusted with a high sense of responsibility. The nice thing is that, often, people do rise to the challenge. Some of my fondest memories are just like, “Ok, I’m going to be Winnie the Pooh and if I mess up, that’s not going to be good for the show.” So you try your best and give it your all, and you’re supported not only by the director but by a lot of genuine friends in the cast. Some of my fondest memories, aside from the shows, are just going to get pizza with the cast and just hanging out at lunches and going on walks. Because often you have time between the shows to get to know these other kids from different schools who may have totally different life experiences from you, but you have this in common. You can connect and bond over this.

I had a lot of friends from YPT who were different ages. That really meant a lot, in getting a perspective on life. When I’m in third grad, not everyone thinks like a third grader. Sixth graders think very differently.

The remarkable thing about YPT is, I never encountered anyone who was mean-spirited or cruel about anything. It was very supportive. And that was a vital part of what made those shows magical and what made you want to keep coming back every weekend.

What was it like to work with [YPT Founder] Matilda [Kunin]?

She was always great. She was the evil stepmother in Cinderella. She would never let anyone else play that part, and I loved it. She was so supportive, and you could talk to her. Even though YPT was completely hers, she would never challenge or override a director in a way made kids feel uncomfortable. She always made sure that everyone was having fun but, at the same time, trying to do the best show that they could.

She was really generous in that way and fostered that level of comfort everybody had. She didn’t set this tone of competition. She always focused so strongly on the importance of the ensemble, instead of certain people being leads. You don’t maintain celebrity status or star status. Everybody’s in it together and gets to rotate around and play different parts.

It totally worked. To reiterate what I said earlier, there were no small parts. I really liked that feeling that everyone felt like a valued member of the cast. If one kid was having a bad day at rehearsal and it was evident, the director and rest of the cast would take the time to address that and make sure they were doing ok. Instead of just blazing past and being like, “Oh, this person is only Tree Number 2,” like it doesn’t matter. No, it does matter at YPT.

Did you take any classes at YPT where the kids created their own characters and the instructor would weave them into a script?

Yeah, when I was very young, before I started doing shows, some of my early classes at YPT were exactly that. The teacher would have to take all of these disparate characters and put them in a performance together. Kids’ imaginations are so wild. One person will choose a medieval knight and someone else will choose a detective from the 1800s. How do you even reconcile those two together? They find a way.

Do you remember any of the characters?

Someone adamantly wanted to be a dragon. And YPT had a dragon costume, so that was convenient. I remember really wanting to be a detective. I really liked Sherlock Holmes at the time. I was like 5. “I want to play a detective.” That’s what I did.

Did you enter University High School feeling confident and enthusiastic about pursuing theatre?

When I went into high school, I definitely didn’t know I wanted to purse the arts professionally. I was still figuring that out. But I think the fact that we had such a good theatre program helped me remember that arts were a big part of my life and I can, and should, think of that as a professional option.

It was great that UHS theatre, coincidentally, also happened to be undergoing an overhaul, and the new director [Susanna Martin] was very receptive to our opinions on productions and what we wanted to do.

What was the highlight for you of doing theatre there?

Definitely being able to put on a production of Reservoir Dogs. I loved the movie. When you’re a junior and senior, you normally get to put on a one act. But a couple of other actors and I had kind of convinced the theatre director: “Hey, why don’t you let us put on something longer? We can do it. We can do it, if you trust us.” And she did. Also, the administration trusted us, which is amazing — that they let us get away with the pretty much uncensored script of Reservoir Dogs. It wasn’t an “official” production. They understood, like, “Don’t invite all the families over because there’s going to be a profuse amount of swearing.”

What did your parents think of it?

They loved it: “Oh, great. We knew you loved this film and we’re glad they let you get away with this, so to speak.” It’s a lot like at YPT. The fact that kids our age were trusted with that sort of agency to create something and not be censored was really wonderful. Being able to do that was a big part of helping me understand, like, “Wow, the arts are definitely what I want to pursue in life, that’s what I want to do.” And directing, especially, was something that appealed to me, and I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t actually gotten to do it.

At what point did you start writing scripts?

I started writing scripts at the beginning of high school. I was encouraged a lot by an English class to try to do more creative writing. A teacher there, Michael Holt, was instrumental in helping me.

Like I said, YPT gave me a good framework to be able to add or rewrite occasional lines. The concept of scripts was introduced to me relatively early, and so it just seemed natural that, eventually, I would want to try writing. And I still do. 

You had scripts performed at University High School… 

I did a Noir one act and I did a Western one act. That was just fun. Because even before I knew I wanted to get into film, I just liked a lot of movies.

Did you write and direct both?

Yeah. The first one was called Three Lost Souls and the second one was Duel at Dusk.:

How did you get interested in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts? What was that application process like and what gave you a good shot at getting into a program like that?

Tisch appealed to me because it’s known as one of the best arts schools. In terms of the application process, a lot of that — beyond essay writing — was showing creative samples and also being interviewed and explaining yourself as a person and what type of things you want to create and act in. One way that YPT did honestly help me through that is, it showed I had a continuous interest in the arts.

You were applying to the film school. What samples did you give them?

They wanted a written sample and a video sample. So, I sent a written sample of a script I had done and a video of a short film I had directed. Theatre work was hard to communicate, so that was more for telling them about in interviews or essays.

Was the short film something you had made specifically for the application or had you already done it?

I’d already done it for a film summer camp at UCLA in my junior year. That was called Sleighted, a little thing about sleight of hand. The plot is about someone trying to win back his girlfriend with, essentially, one very elaborate card trick.

How did the opportunities to study abroad come about?

One thing that NYU in particular, but also other colleges, are great at is the opportunity to study abroad. The NYU film program is, thankfully, accommodating in that they have classes structured abroad. You can take film-specific classes in London, Sydney, Havana, Paris and Prague. Having known about their study abroad opportunities since I applied in high school, I definitely wanted to set aside time to do that.

I spent summer in Paris and fall in England. I had the marvelous opportunity of being able to direct something in Paris with local actors and NYU’s equipment. It was good that they just continued their curriculum in other places, instead of strictly basing it in New York.

Did you create these opportunities, in terms of the projects?

The things I directed in France and England were part of classes, open to people who go to NYU. I highly recommend them. NYU has a good infrastructure for that, in terms of having a casting login so you can post a casting notice and have enough fellow people from NYU to work on these projects with you.

Were these original scripts you wrote?

In Paris, I wrote and directed a film called Le Temps Perdu. That was an interesting challenge because I got to work with actors who only spoke French. It really put my high school foreign language skills to the test. If something was important enough to tell an actor, I had to take the time to translate that in my head before saying it. It was challenging but also, probably, a formative exercise that definitely helped condense what is important to say.

In England, I directed a read-through of the first ten pages of a feature script I’d written for a class there — the script that eventually became the movie The Last Christmas Party. I was able, with some actors, to give people a sample of the story.

How did you go about arranging your life so that you could graduate from Tisch in three years? You must have been very focused…

Part focus, part accident, to be perfectly honest. I always kind of had the idea, ever since high school, in the back of my head that I didn’t want to do the whole four years. So in high school, I took a lot of advanced classes — AP credits, essentially — to help me later down the line graduate early. And it worked. By the time I got to college, I needed to be mindful of what courses I picked. And I wound up doing summer classes in Paris, so that was a double win.

Graduating in three years — I don’t recommend it in every case, but it gave me an additional year after college to make a movie I really wanted to make and also think about where I was as a young adult and have some time to reflect on my creative art.

How did you gain insight into the need to take charge of producing your own content and eventually forming your own production company, City Bear Media, with Benjamin Goebel?

One thing that was definitely good in college is that a lot of friends kept track of people who graduated and see what worked for them and what didn’t. One recurring theme is that a lot of people seemed to love arts, go to college for film school or theatre for four years and a year later, they drop it. That was not ideal — to invest so much time in your passion for something and just not have it pay off.

We wanted to establish a production company to kind of hold ourselves accountable: OK, you need to keep creating things. You’re still going to have a day job. But at the same time, you should be pursing your creative side. You can’t just give that up. We also realized, because we’re still relatively young, that you don’t come out of the gate and get hired by Warner Bros. as a director. There is a certain amount of having to create your own opportunities for yourself. A lot of actors try to write and direct their own shows, and that was kind of the same idea for us, except with film. We needed to kind of home in, tell our stories and not give those up.

Ben, who I met in London and has really helped with The Last Christmas Party, was always a supportive force in agreeing with that idea and wanting to keep creating content. Because it’s easy in film school to get daunted by the fact that maybe your work isn’t as polished or high budget as you want it to be. You need to live with that and get better — self-improve and work at it, like any trade.

Was it partly because you wanted to have autonomy? Or did you think of it as a practical way to keep working and realize some of your own ideas?

It was practical and it was fun, too. It’s hard to call yourself a writer or a director if you don’t do those things in your spare time. The reality of it is, it’s hard to get hired immediately as a top person on a film crew or a top person in a film cast. So, you need to just find pleasure in your craft.

Obviously, we loved the autonomy because there’s no one, on these lower-scale things, breathing down your neck. But it was much more about the fact we were doing it and the fun of it; the fact that, “Oh, wow, we made this story we really liked. Let’s make the next one we really like.”

And you kept your mind open about learning technical skills and doing commercial contract work…

Yes. My day job is editing and coloring for a company that makes commercials for McDonald’s, Ihop and Applebees. But also, I think everyone in film essentially freelances on the side, and that’s a very handy thing, in terms of expanding your network. I think that definitely out of college, most of my friends were open to commercial work and music videos because we were like, these are equally legitimate pieces of film content. Maybe they’re not our first choice, but it’s definitely beneficial to learn from them.

One thing I’ve always believed in is having a technical knowledge of other departments beyond directing. Because if there’s one thing that’s really obnoxious, when a director or producing, is asking for something that is simply not possible. And you know that they’re asking for that because they haven’t done it themselves or they just don’t know it.

I’m not saying every director needs to also be a director of photography or be good enough to excel at those fields, but they definitely should have a strong technical baseline so they know what they can reasonably expect and ask of people, and also what boundaries they can push when trying to make their art. The distinction between difficult and literally impossible, I think, is very important to know as a director. Because, otherwise, you don’t know what to tell people. And as a director and a human being, I don’t like BS-ing people and trying to pretend l know what I’m talking about when I don’t. I’d rather just put the legwork into learning what their craft is.