Experiencing Interruptions?

Apathy

A lonely girl is conflicted between completing her goals and the instant gratification of her best friend.

  • Michael Musselman
    Director
    Whiskey & A Water
  • Sarah Mais
    Key Cast
  • Brenna Jones
    Key Cast
  • Project Type:
    Short
  • Runtime:
    24 minutes 25 seconds
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Michael Musselman

Michael Musselman was born and raised in Sarasota, Florida. He attended the Art Institute of Tampa where he met fellow classmates and alumni whom he later moved to Austin, Texas with to pursue a career in filmmaking. It is that same crew that he assembled to help create the short film Apathy that he wrote and directed.

Michael has had an eclectic career as a filmmaker. After writing and directing an award winning film Whiskey & A Water for The Texas Water Foundation, and interning at Richard Linklater’s Detour Films, he moved to Beijing China to write and direct a number of commercial and documentary film projects for the Cheetah Yassa Entertainment Corporation. In China, he was mentored by internationally acclaimed Director/Producer Pauline Chan, whose credits include Rush Hour 2, Ultraviolet, and 33 Postcards. Under her guidance, Michael wrote and developed a variety of feature screenplays and commercial properties.

Michael’s future projects include writing and directing the upcoming Amazon teen drama action mystery series Islamorada High, a narrative drama short called, A Girl Can Dream, and the adventure comedy series Carl Carlsberg Season 2.

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Director Statement

The late Michael Musselman (1990-2021) lived a life of creativity and passion. His following words were written to support the film.

Director’s Statement

Cinema is an emotional experience. It is the filmmaker that expresses that experience. In Steven Soderbergh's State of Cinema Address at the San Francisco International Film Festival, he discussed how without the filmmaker’s fingerprint, the film wouldn’t exist. Without the signatures that artists like Lars Van Trier and James Cameron leave on their work, there would be no work.

My writing process is often times inconsistent. It’s different for everybody, but without the proper discipline learned over time, you don’t always reach success. It’s about picking away and getting started and keeping going. Every day the goal is to get a little bit more written, even if it’s not as much as you want, that’s why it feels so inconsistent.

I like to give actors their space and let them be creative and invent the ideas that embody their character. It’s about taking the sketch of the main ideas of the scene and discovering how to breathe life into it. It’s sometimes about corralling everyone involved into being patient.

With Apathy, I learned that sometimes you can make cinema that has quality, cinema that you can make with your friends that believe and care enough to create something small and intimate even when you don’t have the budget. If you have an idea of what you want to do, you can make it explode from the screen. If you’re not going to do it, no one else is going to do it for you. You have to believe in the ideas more than anyone else.