Michael Worth was not born a filmmaker, but he came pretty close. Raised as a child not too far from the Chesapeake Bay, Michael began his camera savvy ways at the young age of ten. Armed with a Super 8mm camera and a willing younger brother, he began to shoot small films that revolved around plots involving monsters, Kung Fu and secret agents. By high school, Michael had moved to Berkeley California where he had managed to convince his English teacher to let him make a film as a final project, rather than write it out on paper.
Worth moved to Los Angeles at seventeen and lived in his truck with his German Shepard, Thrasher for four months while teaching martial arts and chasing auditions. After dozens of background jobs and a few walk-ons, Michael landed a leading role as a young, eager kick boxer vying for a world title that paralleled his own life in many ways in the film “Final Impact.” A positive notice from Variety “Worth is a promising newcomer” and a contracted two more films would follow before he landed the role of “Tommy” on the syndicated series “Acapulco H.E.A.T.” with Catherine Oxenberg and romance novel king Fabio. It was during his stint in Puerto Vallarta Mexico that Michael began to reconnect with his young filmmaker beginnings and refocused his creative energy into writing as he worked on several scripts. Shooting second unit action on the show would be his professional training ground for directing as well and by 2003 Michael would have his first screenplay produced in the hybrid western/martial arts film “Ghost Rock” with Gary Busey and Jeff Fahey.
Steve Mason: So Michael, it sounds like films were an early part of your career ambitions.
Michael Worth: I know that they say if you have a job and something you love and they both happen to be the same thing, you know God is smiling down on you. If that is true I certainly had some pearly whites above me at a young age (laughs) because I had always been attracted to the fusion of film and life. Not that I was getting paid at that age, but my first ambition of living in Africa and being Tarzan got quickly derailed when my mother told me I would need a shot to go over there, so I knew I had a new career to focus on.
SM: A lot of kids play with toys and stage plays for their parents but you took it a step further, didn’t you?
MW: A couple giant leaps in some cases. I wanted to emulate the whole movie making process so I wrote scripts, hired actors (sometimes just my mother and brother), story boarded scenes and even had a small film splicer to cut my films. I would hold premieres in my living room and make posters and even once did a comic book spin off on one of our films. So, I was trying to be the Clint Eastwood and George Lucas of Berkeley.
SM: Were there influences in your career at that age?
MW: My influences come from lots of odd areas as I had never wanted to “be”like a certain actor or director, but did admire the ability some seemed to possess to do their work in unrivaled ways. Actors that always had my attention were Steve McQueen, Spencer Tracy, James Garner and Christopher Walken. At ten years old of course, it was guys like Roger Corman (a prolific low budget filmmaker), Ray Harryhausen and Bruce Lee but, as I grew older and became more sensitive to the trials of life I began to pay attention to some of the more subtle aspects of film as a storytelling vehicle. Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, David Mamet, John Ford and even Sam Peckinpah began to grab my attention as dynamic filmmakers and workhorses of film. As a teenager, I was still caught up in the crazy Kung Fu craze and Stallone movies, who is a pretty amazing filmmaker now, but was beginning to open my eyes to the ways of cinema translation that had eluded me as a kid.
SM: The transition to being a professional did not sound easy for you.
MW: Well, it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped, but life never is. I think some people come into the business because they have to, there is no other choice, and then there are those that come because the idea of “Hollywood” sounds great and fun and easy. One tends to survive and the other doesn’t. Don’t let this place kid you as the survivors are mostly hard headed and broke or have a godfather that works at Warner Brothers. But most business is like that. The entry-level guys usually have to be very good and very lucky to continue to the top, or at least get to a level or two below it. But that is the thing about filmmaking as you can be a fourth tier actor or director and still have a house in Malibu. So, the allure stays strong among the faithful. There are plenty of examples of people walking in with just the clothes on their back and a paper thin resume and still attaining their goals. Hollywood is always open for “the next cool thing,” so that open door policy shines a little hope on aspiring film devotes. I have been here a fairly long time and I am still fighting my way up the ladder so, one cannot rest once you are here. Trust me, my house isn’t in Malibu, but that hunger to fight for the championship belt drives you harder sometimes than defending it.
SM: So you came out to Los Angeles more as an actor?
MW: I wasn’t sure to be honest at that time. I just liked being around guys making movies. An actor manager who ended up representing me for over ten years kind of picked me off of Venice Beach, a few months after I arrived. So, the acting thing became my freshman and sophomore year of college. I really enjoyed finding the ability to create other characters and discover things in yourself that you didn’t know you could find as you did the work. That more externalized expression is still a part of me and I love doing it, but at one point the challenge and design of the writer and director in telling stories has become the fuel of my fire. I have always loved photography and when I sit down and design a shot, the lighting and the staging of a scene it taps into that deeper “artist” in me that keeps me alive and going. I love trying to orchestrate a scene to evoke some emotion or deepen an understanding of the story in a visual way, not just through the dialogue.
SM: So you consider yourself….
MW: Well, a human being first. And I don’t mean that in a snide way, but in just that is where all of this springs forth. It is being truthful to those experiences that can make a film a better and more dynamic piece in the end. Trust me when I say there are battles I have experienced in my life, or may even be currently experiencing, that are transposed into the scripts I write. There may be a Sasquatch in it, but the foliage around him will be entangled with the truthful. But as far as where do I fall in the filmmaking line up? I usually just tag myself as a “filmmaker.” I make money acting in other people’s films and TV shows. I rewrite people’s scripts. I have even edited a few people’s films. All of this sculpts me into a better filmmaker I think as long as I remember the simplicity of the appeal I had as a child.
SM: Well this change in your direction of actor to writer/director/actor has been very positive for you it seems.
MW: Yes, on many levels. I remember sitting in a casting office once about nine years ago and this actor who I knew of and he came in and sat down with his script. He was reading for another part in the film and I remember thinking to myself “I know this guy. I have seen him dozens of times in films and television and here he is, driving to this crappy audition, sitting in the same traffic I was, except maybe in a better car, but he is about fifty five or maybe sixty years old. And he is still doing this routine?!” I knew this industry was where I was going to be for awhile but I did not want to be that guy sitting next to me in thirty some years. So that was where I really knew it was time to start grabbing every moment by the throat and not letting go.
SM: You have gone out and made your rent with some films, but then you have made others in which the reward was the film itself. Examples coming to mind are Dual and God’s Ears. Can you tell us about these?
MW: It’s funny as those two films were easily the least expensive films I have been that prominently involved with and are easily my two best films. Both cases are intimate, character studies that are stitched together with so much of my philosophy and emotion.
I am not one to use my films to preach a certain opinion, but I am not against presenting my case when appropriate. When I was considering being a fighter at one point, I remember being aware of how important being a role model was. You have to go out and do your job, winning that fight of course, but since you are on this platform where a lot of people are watching you I felt I wanted to respect that blessing. Film it is no different. So I like to show theatrically some of life’s lessons that I have learned, or maybe are currently learning, in these films.
Dual deals with the danger of abandoning self-examination and embracing denial. This is all told through the action of a western, but if it were not for my trying to connect those themes and issues with the story, it would not be the emotional piece that it is. I am not one to extol my own work, in fact I am more critical of myself than anyone, but I can’t help but choke up and be pulled in by scenes in that film when I watch it. And we shot it in 12 days on 100 grand. My director Steven R. Monroe and co-star Karen Kim were both so committed to making this thing work and I feel very proud of it.
“God’s Ears” for me is a film that I not only look at as my first real directing job, but also the first film of what I would like to think is a trend in my work. Making films that transcend just being a two hour escape but rather an experience that resonates with people into their lives as they walk away from it. I don’t believe I have the skill to always instigate that kind of power but sometimes you and your cast and crew come together in a special way and make something work. “God’s Ears” is that for me. It is not a perfect film by any means, but for once, I see my work actually doing some good in people’s lives and generating something more than ticket sales. It is the first time anything I have been in have I had this many people tell me it gave them hope for their son or daughter who are now struggling on some scale of the spectrum of Autism. However, at the same time, it also creates the same kind of levity and optimism to someone who has no connection with autism at all.
SM: The film’s main character, played by you, is autistic. What made you want to tackle that?
MW: Well, I have spent considerable time with some autistic children and was just taken by their challenges. Originally, I started relating my background in boxing with it, about being contained between these ropes, fighting this opponent that you can’t predict. This idea of a character that has a hard time connecting being attracted to a sport where connecting is the goal seemed really interesting. Throw into that a bikini dancer (Margot Farley) who spends years connecting physically but never emotionally with anyone and an old boxing coach, played by John Saxon, who sits in his corner of a gym reading about the past while the future of his chosen profession goes on around him seemed very poignant to me. Yes, much of those themes I relate to and so having the opportunity to channel this in to a film was what I have been gearing towards since the first day I stepped into this town.
SM: The film has really made waves at the festivals.
MW: It’s been so rewarding. Amazing actually the way people respond to it. John has won best acting awards at Methodfest and The Las Vegas Film Festival. Margot has been nominated as a Best Actress several times and won at The Action On Film International Film Festival and Reelheart in Canada. We won The Audience Choice Award at The Big Island Film Festival and had an amazing encore showing of the film on a giant screen outside on the grass. Incredible. It was the only US entry into Japan’s Skip City Film Festival in 2009. I was petrified it would not be understood or resound with them and boy was I wrong! I spent ten unforgettable days discussing the film with people who read so deeply into it that it validated every choice I have made to try and not just “point and shoot.” That if I truly make an effort to infuse the art and the emotion into film, it will resonate with people, even if they don’t understand a word of English. And finally, we won The Jury Prize at The Feel Good Film Festival in Hollywood, which was an amazing festival to bring the film home to. Winning $70,000 in prizes didn’t hurt either.
But the big surprise for me was in the market, how few distributors would even look at the film. An autistic boxer? God’s Ears? Who stars in it? The same nightmare most filmmakers face has been no different with this. But just recently I managed to get a few people to actually sit down with the film and see what it is about and we are making some headway. We are selling a preview edition on www.godsears.com and taking a much more new world approach to distribution. The old ways are starting to change quickly in this day of Itunes, Netflix and streaming web sites. “Two guys with hats and accents” are no longer making the decision for filmmakers as to who in France or Bulgaria wants to see their film. The filmmakers themselves are beginning to handle their own projects from top to bottom and will make for a much more interesting market place.
SM: Thanks for your time Michael and anything new on the horizon?
MW: I have been struggling to get a road comedy off the ground the last year or so called Apple Seed that David Mamet is helping me to produce along with Gigi Garner and Cherokee Productions (started by her father James Garner) and Rebecca Pigeon is acting in along side a great troupe of supporting cameos. I am also working on an interesting experimental film that tackles in a humorous way the low budget film world using actors like Lance Henriksen and Tim Thomerson playing themselves. It’s going to be a challenge but then, that’s why I’m here.