Breakfast with Casey Neistat
An early breakfast meeting during an international advertising festival might make many people wince, but filmmaker and social media star Casey Neistat is very much an early bird. He’s already been out battling the morning heat and humidity of Singapore – he’s in town to Speak at Spikes Asia as the "DDB Presents..." speaker – and now he’s fuelling up on a breakfast of dumplings for a busy day ahead. The director has blazed a trail for a generation of YouTube creators – he first came to the world’s attention with a pre-YouTube film about unreplaceable batteries in iPods before embarking on a series of online film experiments and then creating his own TV series for HBO. These days he entertains and informs hundreds of thousands of fans with films that gain millions of views – and he’s even persuaded some impressive brands to fund his adventurous films. This week he’s in been in the news with his controversial film about the fact that the new iPhone 6 launch was swamped by cash buyers scooping up units for resale.
LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Casey in Singapore (and was treated to a few directorial tips during an impromptu ‘photo shoot’) to find out more.
LBB> Do you consider yourself more of a journalist or a filmmaker? So many of the films you make have a very journalistic bent.
CN> I only ever have made movies about things that I’m interested in and things that affect me, which is why a lot of my movies are very personal. I know those experiences well. When they edge into journalism, they tend to be about matters that I care about deeply. Most recently there were riots after an 18-year-old black kid was shot in Ferguson in the States. He was a year younger than my own son and it affected me in such a profound way that I felt an obligation to go and see what was happening and share my experience rather than me being forced to understand it through the eyes of others. Because I have this opportunity to share my own experience with a humungous audience. I think the journalism is the result of that, not the cause of that.
LBB> Quite a few of your films, like the iPhone battery film seem to be the result of an annoyance that’s just got to you and that you can’t let go of. Where does that persistence come from?
CN> I was frustrated my entire childhood because I never felt like anyone would listen to me. I never really felt like I had a voice until I started making movies. And making movies is the like having the loudest megaphone in the whole wide world. If I start bitching about an iPhone battery or a ticket I received from a police officer, nobody cares. But if I can communicate that same emotion or experience through a movie to a large audience then a lot of people will hear about it. I think we all want to be listened to and my movies are my way of communicating.
LBB> In terms of ‘listening’, what sort of interactions do you have with your followers and fans? I gather that even in your visit to Singapore you were greeted by a fan who camped out at the airport to wait for you and another young kid who sneaked out of a study session to wait outside the Spikes venue.
LBB> He was there an hour and a half. I think it’s an intimate relationship, albeit extraordinarily lopsided. I think it’s because of the intimacy of the work. I’m a big fan of Leonardo DiCaprio because I thought he was awesome in his movies, I really liked him in Blood Diamond, I think he’s a great actor… but I have no idea what he’s like as a person. I think the difference between someone like that and someone like me is people know exactly what I’m like as a person. I’m very honest in my work and my work’s very public. It’s definitely a unique, one-sided relationship and one that I’m both really comfortable with perpetuating and really uncomfortable with dealing with.
LBB> The theme of your talk at Spikes, was honesty in storytelling. Does opening up and being so open and honest about your life give you ‘the fear’ at all?
CN> It’s never really bothered me. I’ve never really considered it – it’s never something I’d give much forethought to. But the more I get asked that question the more I consider it… when I look at the work that’s always really influenced me it’s always come from a voice that is willing to share personal aspects of their own experience. That’s what’s always guided me. So to think that I might have the opportunity to impart some of that to people who were at the same place I was, that’s a tremendous opportunity and legacy. It’s with that in mind that I, very bullishly, share whatever it is that I want to share.
LBB> So you’ve cultivated a massive following on YouTube and other platforms over the years. I was curious as to what extent there was a strategy behind that or whether it all happened quite organically?
CN> No, it’s only very recently that I’ve started to leverage my various social media platforms to create synergy and have them all grow. None of the distribution is done in a calculated way. I still have no idea why some of my movies have been seen 10 million times and some have been seen 100,000 times. It makes no sense to me. I released a movie this summer that’s been seen 12 million times and honest to God, when I released it I was really insecure. I called one of my friends and said, ‘is this even worth putting on my channel? It’s kind of stupid.’ It’s about going to a water park. I like it because I like any movie that has my kid in it and it’s fun. There’s no story, it was just a silly, fun day and my son was like ‘let’s make a movie out of this’. So we did. And five days later there were 10 million views. 10 million views mean the whole world. To me it was incomprehensible, but it just shows how little I understand what people are interested in. And I prefer to keep it that way. I try to ignore the metrics that YouTube gives you, I try to not pay attention to numbers or viewership or any of that because I never want it to skew my work. I think quality lasts. Virality and all those other metrics don’t. Some day YouTube will go away – I hope not in my lifetime but there will be some new means of video distribution and who knows what it will look like in 50 or 60 years from now. If the work is quality, if it matters, the work will survive.
LBB> On the flipside, what sort of content do you seek out on YouTube?
CN> I always feel embarrassed by that question. I do spend a lot of time on YouTube. I enjoy YouTube journalism; I think Vice is doing a perfect job with their short docs. But beyond that I’m a fair-weather fan on YouTube. I have some friends that I follow and I watch their stuff, music videos and things like that. But I don’t have anyone specifically that I could point to and say, ‘these are my YouTube favourites’.
LBB> I wanted to ask you about the work that you do with brands. Obviously the big one was the Nike ‘Make it Count’ campaign, where you splurged the whole budget on travelling around the world in ten days. First question: really?? Second question: how did Nike take it when they found out?
CN> Before that I had a terrific relationship with Nike. I still have a terrific relationship with Nike and my relationship with Nike has always been based on trust. That campaign was just me and a handful of executives at Nike. There was no agency, no creatives, no middlemen. At the ninth hour I just disappeared with their budget and their response was, ‘ OK, as long as you come back with something.’ The truth is the kind of money I was working with then was the same amount that they’d spend on craft services on one of their big Kobe Bryant shoots. An absolute failure would have sucked for me; it would have meant never working with Nike again. For them, they weren’t afraid at all. There was very little risk involved for Nike and tremendous risk involved for me. That’s why Nike is the brand it is. It takes chances like that.
LBB> Typically when you work with a brand, do they come to you with an idea of what they want or do they just come to you with a budget and free rein?
CN> I’m in the fortunate position that I can really determine who I want to work with and under what circumstances. I only like to do jobs that I would do with or without the brand behind it. The J Crew project was made because I’d always wanted to do something about wearing suits on aeroplanes. When J Crew got in touch and asked me to work with them, I said, “well here’s an idea I’ve always had”. The brief that I wrote, that they signed off on, was one paragraph long. There was no treatment, no storyboards, nothing. They had no idea what they were getting.
LBB> And what about the Mercedes film when you rode a skateboard that was being pulled along by the car? How many injuries did you end up with?
CN> The cars were damaged much more than I was – but I did get hurt. Mercedes was largely the same. They were looking to communicate with an audience they’d never communicated with before and that audience was the audience that I speak to. They really just wanted me to do what I do, and do it for them. Mercedes are a fantastic brand, they make the greatest products in the world but beyond that they’re really smart, forward-looking individuals. It’s something I’ve been really, really proud of.
LBB> Your work is very honest and there’s a lot of personal integrity invested in it – is there any conflict or tension between that and the work you do for brands?
CN> No. I don’t think I’d ever work with Monsanto or Halliburton but if you look at all the brands I’ve ever worked with you’ll see they’re all brands that I have some sort of relationship with or that I believe in. I think I was on my third Mercedes when I did that campaign for them. I love Nike, I love what their brand stands for. J Crew’s an awesome company, Mickey Drexler the CEO is a friend of mine. I’m happy to share my brand and my identity with their company.
LBB> When you’re making a film, what’s your set up? What sort of kit do you use?
CN> Right now there’s a Sony camera in my pocket, I could shoot a movie on that. It’s just a point and shoot. I like Canon the best, but I’m not much of a tech guy at all. I don’t really care about technology and my least favourite question in the world is ‘what did you shoot that on’. I just don’t care. Anyone with enough money and resources can have access to the best gear in the world. Who gives a shit? That’s understood. I don’t care what you shot that on, I don’t care if it’s 4K. What matters is ‘who can tell the best story?’. My entire HBO series was shot on a $200 camera that I bought at Walmart. It was edited in iMovie. To me that’s a much more poignant aspect of my career than the technology that I’ve now been successful enough to have access to. What can you do with the bare minimum? What can I do with the same tools that that 14 year-old kid who was waiting outside my talk has access to? That’s what I think is relevant.
LBB> And do you edit your own films or do you work with an editor.
CN> I edit my own stuff.
LBB> Many of your films are journalistic or documentary, so you must have hours and hours of unstructured footage. Where do you start when you’re crafting a story?
CN> Editing’s the hardest part. When people say ‘I shot this great movie, all I have to do is edit it’, I want to punch them in the stomach. You can take the worst footage in the world and create the greatest story ever told. You can take the greatest footage ever shot and make it shit. The story is told in the edit. It’s very hard, it’s extremely difficult. Make It Count was between 40 and 60 hours’ worth of raw footage with no clear vision of what that narrative was. We had no idea. The original cut for that had this whole storyline about my son – the finished film wasn’t even close to that. You find the story in the edit.
It’s easier if you shoot it yourself because then you know what you’ve got, but it’s never easy. The edit is always what separates the men from the boys.
LBB> Do you do the edit on your own or do you bounce it around with other people?
CN> I always try and get feedback. I only trust two or three people in the world with that feedback but I always seek it out. I don’t trust myself at all.
LBB> It’s always seemed to be the most terrifying part of production.
CN> The last movie I posted, we shot it in 36 hours, non-stop, no sleep. I came back and edited it in 18 hours, no sleep. So that was just over 50 hours with no rest, no sleep, nothing. It was 50 hours between shooting a movie and publishing a movie that was seen two million times in the first 24 hours it was released.
LBB> Why was it so important to sacrifice sleep to get the film out so quickly?
CN> That movie was about the iPhone 6 launch. I wanted to own the news cycle, which I do. My movie dominated the global news cycle. In order to make that happen I had to get it out there before people stopped talking about the iPhone 6 launch. I think if I had taken another week, another 24 hours, I could have probably made the movie 3 per cent better, but there’s a diminishing return. What that qualitative improvement would have cost me in terms of relevance wouldn’t have been worth it.
But I’ve got a movie I’m working on right now which is an autobiographical film I’ve been thinking about for five years and I’ve been working on actively for the past year and I’m on the 25th iteration. I can continue to just tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak. Time also makes it better. Make It Count, we missed every activation for that, including a gigantic activation at South By Southwest. We didn’t make it, the movie wasn’t done. They were really disappointed in that. It was the first time that Nike was upset.
LBB> With the iPhone 6 film, why was the issue of people queueing to buy iPhones for resale one you wanted to tackle?
CN> That’s easy. Last year I made a movie about the kids that wait in line. I’m one of those nerds who waits in line. That movie was about the enthusiastic kids, but one tiny aspect of the 2013 movie was these people who were sleeping in garbage bags and seemed really unhappy. I couldn’t figure out why they were there so I asked around and found out they were there to re-sell the phones. This year I wanted to shift the focus and make it entirely about that. This year, unbeknown to me, that was what the entire line was composed of. It’s because Apple made it very easy to pre-order this year. There was no reason to wait in line, unless you’re buying in cash. Mine showed up at 10am the morning of the launch. So therefore the only reason for those thousands of people to wait in line was if they were going to buy with cash and resell it. The story was much bigger than I had initially set out to capture. If these people are making money by reselling it then kudos to them, that’s something I support. But there was something very exploitative about the fact that they were sleeping on the streets, sleeping in garbage. It was a disheartening thing and if there’s an infrastructure that benefits that exploitative environment, it should be reconsidered. It didn’t seem right. And when you throw in things like verbal abuse from police officers I think there’s a much larger issue at hand.
LBB> Where do you get the stamina? Even the Nike ‘Make It Count’ film saw you travel non-stop for ten days.
CN> We didn’t sleep in a bed till the sixth day. It was brutal. Stamina? I exercise a lot, I run a lot. I think you can supplement sleep with exercise. I hate sleep, I’ve always hated sleep. Sleep and the wind are my two arch nemeses. I loathe sleep. If I could take a pill I would. I believe that you need sleep like you need food, but I sleep the absolute bare minimum. Always.
It’s a fucking waste of time. It’s so unproductive. I’m not doing anything when I’m asleep. I’m vulnerable, I don’t know what’s going on. The world’s still functioning and I’m not. One of my biggest phobias in the whole world is missing out on daylight. Everyday I wake up before the sun comes up and I go to bed after the sun goes down. Everyday. 365 days a year. The idea of sleeping through part of the day is terrifying. Life is so short, so fleeting. Life is an orange, or a sponge, and I want to squeeze every drip out of it till there’s nothing left.
I do sleep. Last night I went to bed at 12.30 and I got up at 5.30. Usually I wake up at 5.15 in New York and go to bed anytime between 1 am and 2am. So I get four or five hours a night. I’m just not very happy about it. My wife says I have something like ‘voluntary narcolepsy’. There’s no process to falling asleep, I just go to sleep, the alarm goes off and I get up. I can sleep anywhere. Even with three minutes of down time in a car, I can fall right asleep. I think it’s because I’m living my life on the absolute precipice of exhaustion at all times.
LBB> Who are your creative heroes and why?
CN> Creative heroes? I have heroes. Malcom X is a big hero of mine. He was a thug and a criminal and he spent a bunch of years in jail and developed astigmatism in his eye in jail because he read so much by candlelight. When he left prison he was a highly-educated autodidact. One of the best communicators of our time.
George Patton is a big hero. I’m a big WW2 buff – I think I learned everything I know about business I learned from reading about World War 2.
When it come to the film world, Werner Herzog is a big hero. I love his movies but he’s hero less for his movies and more for his approach to life creatively. The Steven Spielbergs and Quentin Tarantinos of the world have always impressed me more than some of the other independent filmmakers. Beyond reaching broad appeal, there’s also the diversity of their work. Imagine making one of the most definitive movies about the Holocaust ever made and then making a movie about gigantic CGI dinosaurs. To me that shows a true mastery of the craft. To me Quentin Tarantino similarly does that in the fact that all of his movies are so different but he’s able to maintain his style and his ethos.
There are lots. Biggie Smalls. Tupac. There’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan, who had a number one album and was still collecting welfare cheques. Pretty amazing.
To me, what I draw from all of those individuals is that all of them had to define their own path. People always ask ‘how do you get to do what you do?’. It’s a really frustrating question because to succeed in the creative world in any capacity you have to carve your own path. If you don’t have a job, make a job. You can’t be taught the trajectory, you have to create the trajectory. And that’s a really tough pill to swallow. If you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or a car mechanic, there’s a path that can be taught. It’s duplicable. But if you want to succeed in the creative world, there is no defined path. That’s really frustrating for a lot of people to hear. Look at Justin Bieber. Love him or hate him, he was the first to succeed the way he succeeded. It was stupid YouTube videos of himself singing.
LBB> What are your ambitions? Is there anything you haven’t been able to do yet as a filmmaker that you want to do?
CN> I think the answer is just ‘more’. I mean that. I don’t mean that in any kind of hyperbolic way. A girlfriend of mine gave me an amazing notebook and on every page I’ve put a movie idea. I’m 170 pages into it so there’s 170 movies that I want to make. It takes me forever to make a movie. Some of my movies take two years to make. Some I can turn around in 50 hours. If I didn’t take on another job or commitment I wouldn’t feel caught up for at least five years. I want to be able to tick off all of these boxes.
It’s insatiable. If I’m a bricklayer trying to build a house and I get hurt, the bricks will still be laid. You can go there and lay these bricks for me. But my movies, if my notebook never gets realised these movies will never get made. For someone who takes such pride in their movies, it’s disheartening. I feel like there’s a mad dash to make as much as I can before the parachute doesn’t open.
