INTERVIEW WITH KILLIAN HEILSBERG | 5/10/2023

KILLIAN HEILSBERG is an independent stop-motion filmmaker with 21 years of teaching experience in film production, history, theory, and communications. Passionate about Japanese transgressive cinema, she loves experimenting with form and aesthetics in her work. She explores many themes, especially varying definitions of strength, power struggles, transparency, and vulnerability. Killian loves teaching. She learns more and more the more she works with students. Curiosity and hard work are vital to creativity and she is grateful to help students discover the joy in all of what we do.

Killian will be teaching the upcoming class DIRECTING: PREPPING FOR PRODUCTION.

CF: What is the lesson you wish somebody told you when you were first starting to make films?

KH: When i was starting out, I wish i had been told how much fun the process would be. In many ways, we're taught about the end result, what the audience sees (and this is obviously very important), but somewhere in the whole mess of learning and failing and succeeding, I learned to love the process - the journey - more than the final work.

It didn't take long. I mean, maybe that's why no one taught me - because it was just getting my hands dirty that became the fun part. Experimenting, testing myself, my boundaries, and watching other people's works to look for the same things: for their boundaries and for how far we can take this form. That does not come from the idea - that stretch comes from putting yourself to work. Hard, passionate work.

CF: What drives your passion for directing?

KH: I am passionate about directing for much the same reasons I love teaching - both are facilitating stories. For me, directing is visceral. It's hands on (not the camera, necessarily, but digging into ideas and feelings, the past and present, research, etc…) I feel like a curious teenager reading new books and getting answers for the very first time, eating twizzlers and losing myself in the world being created, unkempt and bright-eyed. Teaching is like directing. It's helping stories grow. 

CF: On the subject of teaching, you teach one of our core curriculum classes at Chicago Filmmakers, Directing: Prepping for Production. What are the elements of pre-production preparations that you think maximize creativity on set or through production?

KH: The elements of preproduction are myriad, but the most important approach is asking questions. Even if you know the story inside and out, the work is like a partner, or a friend. You may know every tiny piece of them, all the nuances, and you may be able to predict their every move, but sometimes you will simply be wrong. That’s because you did not ask the question. Because you stopped being curious. Because you got complacent.

It ruins relationships to think you already know everything, and it also ruins stories. Get to know the story, work on it, practice, make decisions, but always leave space for it to surprise you.