Member Lens: Writer/Director Gerardo Maravilla on Learning to Crowdfund & Sharing His Experiences
What happens when you fall in love with filmmaking, but don’t come from an artistic background and don’t have an MFA from the big film schools? Gerardo Maravilla looked to the resources that Film Independent provides, where he found “a sense of community, legitimacy, and accessibility that can be difficult to find.”
What started with attending a crowdfunding workshop to get his first project off the ground, ended up being a career long relationship, including becoming a Project Involve Fellow in 2021.
The LA based writer/director has made a career making shorts like Cross, about a young Filipino-American backyard boxer in the San Fernando Valley, and Vivir, a horror about an down on her luck artist who encounters a vampire, available now on Amazon Prime, and Show Me How to Die, currently on the festival circuit.
On top of being an accomplished writer/director, Maravilla now mentors youth with our Education Department, and in a full-circle moment, has even taught the same crowdfunding workshop that as an attendee, first introduced him to Film Independent.
Let’s start with your background. Where are you from, and what got you interested in movies and independent cinema?
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley here in Southern California. I didn’t really know that film was something accessible to me. I come from more of a working-class background. My dad is a plumber who came from Mexico when he was seventeen, and my mom worked in public education until she retired. So I had no idea. We didn’t have AC growing up, and it gets to be around a hundred degrees in the summer, so we spent our summers at the movies. I just loved going and felt it was something we could all share culturally together. I became a huge film fan.
It wasn’t until I went to Occidental College that I actually took a film class and used a video camera for the first time and got to make films. Initially I was going to be a political science major, but once I took that film class, it changed everything I wanted to do. I couldn’t think of a time in my life when a politician had genuinely changed someone’s mind, but I could think of times when a film had shifted people’s perceptions. It felt like a better way to make a difference.
What happened after college? You’ve built a strong body of short films. Can you walk me through that?
After I graduated, I was fortunate that my professor’s brother was Mike Mills, so I was able to get an internship on his film. Through that, I started working on different TV shows and movies to understand how larger productions work. I became an office PA on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But production hours are pretty crazy, twelve, fourteen hour days, and I didn’t have much time to make my own work.
I really wanted to make a short film again. I had noticed a real disparity between people who had gone to USC, AFI, or NYU, especially at the graduate level ,and those who hadn’t. So I set out to make a film called Cross, based on my childhood friend, a Filipino-American kid who gets into backyard boxing in the San Fernando Valley. That’s partly how I discovered Film Independent’s resources. I learned about a crowdfunding workshop they offered in partnership with Seed&Spark, and I went. It was one of the few times I walked away with actionable things I could actually do.
I don’t have a wealthy relative I can call to fund a movie, so I launched the Seed&Spark campaign, raised $15,000, made the short, and premiered it at the LA Asian Pacific Film Festival. I built a real community around the film through the crowdfunding effort.
That ultimately led to me working at Seed&Spark, eventually becoming their head of crowdfunding — essentially doing professionally what I had gone to Film Independent to learn. Film Independent was genuinely instrumental at that stage, both in making that film and in my next career step.
Tell me about your experience with Project Involve.
Working as a junior executive at a startup is very demanding. I was traveling a lot and wasn’t creating as much, so I stepped away at the end of 2019. I wanted to make a film in 2020. The world had other plans, of course.
I had a history with Francisco Velasquez. I learned that Francisco Velasquez from Film Independent was an Occidental alum, and he was really kind to me. He read through an early draft of my boxing short Cross (2016). While I had been rejected from Project Involve twice as a Writer/Director, I used 2020 to focus seriously on writing, and was then accepted into the 2021 cohort as a Screenwriting Fellow.
Through Project Involve, I met Evelyn Martinez, who has been a great producing partner. She produced the short I wrote in the program and then encouraged me to make — and produced — the next two shorts I did in succession. The last one was through the Latino Film Institute’s Inclusion Fellowship in partnership with Netflix. Film Independent was again a real catalyst for pushing things forward for me.
What brought you to working with our Education Department, and why you think it’s important to educate the next generation?
I often think back to what it was like growing up and how inaccessible film felt to me. How intimidated I was by cameras, by video editing. Equipment was harder to come by back then. I always wonder what would have happened if someone had given me an opportunity earlier to practice those skills.
I had some experience mentoring before. I was a screenwriting mentor for the Youth Cinema Project through the Latino Film Institute. So when Film Independent reached out to me to participate, it just felt right.
There’s also something about filmmaking that can feel very consuming and self-focused, given how resource-demanding it is. And being honest, it can sometimes feel selfish. So there’s real gratification in giving back, in helping people understand what careers are possible and that they can actually do it, they just need to try.
It’s been great working with Sarah and others on the education team; to go to public schools and charter schools across Los Angeles, and feel like the lessons I learned the hard way can actually be helpful to other people, maybe pushing them to pursue something that they hadn’t thought about before.
Is there a particular event or feature of the Film Independent membership that you get the most out of?
I always love being able to go to the screenings. That’s such a big part of it — especially for films that maybe aren’t getting a huge studio push.
The workshops of course are great. One interesting full-circle moment: when I was working at Seed&Spark, I ended up giving the very crowdfunding workshop at Film Independent that I had previously taken as a participant.
I’ve also taken other workshops there: working with actors, demystifying distribution. It always felt like a real, hands-on, nuts-and-bolts education, and far more affordable than film school. I don’t have an MFA, but those workshops are so helpful. It just felt like, ‘Wow, I met so many great people through those events,’ filmmakers I’ve ended up in other fellowships and programs with.
And then there’s the Forum. It’s fantastic. They’ve asked me to come do some crowdfunding consultation there. It draws a great mix of current Members and people who are just arriving in LA to work in the industry. Film Independent just has a sense of community, legitimacy, and accessibility that can be difficult to find, especially when you’re trying to carve out space in an industry and you’re the first one in your family to do it.
Are there any upcoming projects you’d like to share with our audience?
The big goal right now is my first feature. I have a script called Child of Glass that I’ve been developing — I’ve taken it to labs in Mexico, won a pitch competition last year, and am really trying to build support and momentum behind it. As I’m sure you know as a filmmaker, it’s constantly pushing the boulder up the mountain.
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