CALEB ARGUETA

 While I don’t have a Christopher Nolan or Steven Spielberg “movie maker from the moment I was born” story, I definitely started making up for lost time since I was fourteen or fifteen. I would say The Matrix was my entryway obsession to film and the endless possibilities which can be explored through the medium. But the movie itself was not entirely responsible for my appetite now, it was really all the exploration that came with learning about it. What got me hooked was the idea of a Matrix trilogy, an expanded universe, director’s voice, inspiration and rhetoric behind the ideas, a story being told across multiple films which had to be fleshed out in a correct way. 

The research that felt required to understand these films, and learning about the directors’ careers has me on what I describe as chasing that never ending high of finding movies I like and that resonate with me. I started looking backwards, forwards too eventually, realizing even the all-too-precious Matrix trilogy was actually a tetralogy/anthology of sorts, with the Animatrix being a sort of unsung movie in the series. Discovering movies this way, uncovering hidden gems, expanding my taste, and going back to directors’ earlier works became a sort of hobby of mine. In this, discovering the Wachowskis Bound felt like a pivotal moment for me and was sort of a tradition I never dropped. I live for my favorite director’s first movies (usually they’re crime movies), and I take all them into account as good examples for films to aspire to for a first movie of mine. My favorite films are dialogue driven, with limited scope due to budgetary restrictions, and have high-concept plot ideas that help propel the story forward in a unique way. 

Eventually, I had watched enough films and gone on a die hard Spaghetti Western binge, and felt like I was done watching movies… I wanted to write my own. Taking cues from a couple older screenwriting books and filmmakers, I broke out my index cards and wrote a Western out on about 120 index cards, roughly a card per script page. Of course, when I was done, I realized I hadn’t sworn off movies completely, instead I just wanted to fuel my passion in a new way. I wrote this first script, then went back to watching tons of movies, and the cycle has just kind of stuck, but recently they have overlapped a lot and I try to write daily and watch a couple movies a week. I have roughly four feature film scripts under my belt, most of which have focused on adolescence, naturally, but I am looking to break out of my shell soon to focus on more adult stories. 

More and more, my passion has been in screenwriting, and honing in “chunky” dialogue to fill pages in scripts to focus on smaller budget ideas…how else am I going to get short films going? Eventually, I want to become a professional writer/director, but for now, I will continue to consume movies like my life depends on it, and draw inspiration and take cues from my favorites to create my own works. My favorite genres to work in are thriller and crime, and I absolutely love writing from these grittier themes to ask questions about humanity and what drives people to do things.