Sometimes it’s amazing to learn how actors get their start in acting, either deliberately or otherwise.  I myself find a little amusement in learning how some of today’s biggest stars stumble their way to their profession.  The same goes for those that work behind the scenes—writers, producers, directors, you get the drill.  For instance, Seth Gordon, who helmed the comedy Four Christmases, which hit theaters two days ago, started his career in filmmaking in Kenya, in a pretty unlikely scenario.

The Chicago native and former architecture student suddenly decided, one time, to teach high school students in Shimanyiro, Kenya.  After discovering that the task of building schools was left to the locals, he decided to ask for help from the UN in building the town’s school.  The one other thing he did was pick up a camera and record everything.  “How you learn in Kenya is you behave and you get whipped if you don’t behave, and I was trying to break them out,” he explained.  “I had them debating gender equality and the importance of AIDS training.  So I would record them arguing about that.”

The result was the documentary Building Shimanyiro, which proved to be the beginning of his film career.  This led him to record behind-the-scenes footage of the Dixie Chicks, who were then on tour; it later evolved to Shut Up & Sing, a documentary about the aftermath of Chicks member Natalie Maines expressing vitriol over President Bush.  He happened to be the one who caught the moment on tape.

After working on another music-based documentary, New York Doll, he began work on The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, his first full-length documentary revolving around two men battling for the high score on the arcade game Donkey Kong.  That became popular, and a copy eventually ended up on the hands of Vince Vaughn.  The result: Four Christmases, which Vaughn, along with Reese Witherspoon, appears in.

“The hardest part of the transition was the sheer volume of opinions and interested parties and the huge amount of pressure as a result of the budget,” Gordon shared.  “When you’re making a film all by yourself, that requires you to have quite a bit of a point of view in order for anything to get done.  The hard part [with Christmases] was never the filmmaking; the hard part was the politics and fielding and understanding all of the different opinions.”

But he’s finished that film now, and he’s since signed on to direct other feature films.  It may all seem coincidence, but if it proves one thing, it’s this: nothing’s actually impossible.


-Henrik Batallones, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
(Image courtesy of LargeLab)