The Purple Onion
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After Letting Go: How Walking Away from My First Film Led to Distribution and then Development on my Next
Last November I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about walking away from my debut film. “Just Let Go Already! 12 Takeaways After Making the Microbudget Feature, The Purple Onion” chronicles the five-year process of making my first feature film and sums up whatever wisdom I can impart to anyone making a film. Filmmaking can be likened to many things. It’s rewarding on so many levels. And yet the truth is that what began as a labor of love was becoming a growing burden with no end in sight. Now I’m here to prove why you should keep going anyway. After […]
by Matt Szymanowski on May 19, 2017 -
Five Lessons From a Work-In-Progress Screening
At the end of 2012, Matt Syzmanowski penned a guest post for us on the development of his feature, The Purple Onion. Now, as he’s finishing the final cut of the film, he sends us this follow-up detailing one unusual step along the way: screening the film to a large audience at Cinequest as a work-in-progress. Below are his five pieces of advice for any filmmaker on improving a cut using audience feedback. — SM The Cinequest Film Festival invited us to screen our debut feature film, The Purple Onion, long before it was even completed. We knew we didn’t […]
by Matt Szymanowski on Apr 23, 2014 -
In Pursuit of The Purple Onion
When I was a doorman at San Francisco’s Punchline and Cobbs comedy clubs, I never would’ve thought that three years later, I’d be making my first feature film about a comedian. I went to film school in Poland, from where my parents emigrated. While there, I made several short films, which went on to play at international film festivals in France, Albania, Poland, and the U.S. Before I went to Poland, while working with my father in China, I passed on his proposal to expand his furniture-making empire, as he called it, in order to pursue filmmaking. Eventually, back in […]
by Matt Szymanowski on Dec 29, 2012
