Teaching Film Has Taught Him a Lot
Ian Harnarine, an NYU film professor and director of the feature film 'Doubles,' discusses the realities of life as a filmmaker and what he tries to impart on his students.
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by Sebastian Zufelt
Ian Harnarine has been a staple of the NYU Film landscape for more than a decade now. Already holding a Master’s degree in Nuclear Physics from the University of Illinois by the time he came to NYU’s Graduate Film School, Harnarine channeled his unique experience as the son of immigrants from Trinidad & Tobago into his thesis film Doubles with Slight Pepper. The film, which follows a street vendor whose father returns home seeking life-saving medical support, won Best Canadian Short Film at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival.
A dozen years later, Harnarine adapted the short into a feature. Doubles, named after the popular Trinidadian street food, premiered at the 2023 Atlantic International Film Festival, and the film finally saw commercial theatrical distribution in Canada this past summer. In between short and feature, Harnarine has worked as a film professor at NYU’s Graduate and Undergraduate Film Schools. I had the privilege of taking his Advanced Production Workshop course last year, where I experienced first-hand Ian’s passion as a filmmaker and educator.
Following Doubles’ screening at the 2024 Bushwick Film Festival, where the film received an Honorable Mention, I spoke with Harnarine over Zoom about his filmmaking and teaching practices.
How has it been balancing the release of the film with teaching? It was great for me to see you preparing for release when I was in your class. I'm wondering if you’ve brought any of this summer’s experience to your current students.
I haven’t been able to yet. Our class is bigger than last year, so we’re really pressed for time just workshopping scripts and stuff like that. The second semester is where I can start talking more about directing and getting the film out there and publicity and all that stuff. We’re going to talk about the distribution journey I’m on and what happened over the summer with that theatrical run in terms of publicity and cultivating an audience and making sure people show up.
A lot of filmmakers work as professors while making their films. What pros and cons have you experienced with this path?
For cons, you just don’t have enough time to devote to it. There’s the time pressure of being in class, but frankly, that’s not where the pressure is coming from. That’s the most enjoyable part of teaching. Being in the class, meeting with the students.
It’s the other stuff that’s the real time suck, like committees. We’re searching for a new professor right now. Because we have a big meeting on Monday about it, that’s gonna be my weekend. And then we have to interview all these candidates, and that’s gonna be weeks of work. So it isn’t contributing to the class, but it’s time that I don’t have available to work on my personal projects. That’s actually what I want to do next semester: really prioritize my work.
There are a few pros. One of them is I can really show young people what the [filmmaking] journey looks like and be real about it. Like there really is no money involved in it. The crew’s been paid, and the cast has been paid, but my producer and I haven’t been paid. We probably won’t get paid. The distribution money we’ve been getting is minuscule. Like, going to festivals is great, but maybe they're paying $400. You’re not making thousands of dollars doing that. There are a lot of costs involved in going to festivals. So, [part of teaching] is setting up real expectations of what success actually looks like. Success might be just people seeing your film.
Teaching has also made me a much better writer and director. I’ve become fairly quick in identifying the problems in other people’s work, but I can see it in my own work as well. I’ve developed a really good shorthand for solving problems whether on a script or in a performance. You’re definitely using the same tools that you’re trying to pass on to others, and that’s been really helpful over the last couple of years in being able to communicate my ideas in a much stronger and effective way.
You made the short as an MFA student, and now the feature as a teacher. How did that change in perspective and life experience influence the feature?
It changed everything. Teaching, but also life. I’m an older person. I have a different perspective on life than I did 10 years ago. I have a different perspective on what’s important, what challenges or feelings are involved. There’s far more emotional depth involved that I have access to, that I can pull from.
It’s really interesting: You can see students working through it themselves as well, and you can’t help but get fueled by that. One of the great things about teaching is constantly being inspired by students. Not necessarily the work they’re doing, but the energy they bring to it, and the freshness they come with, and the joy that comes with it.
From the beginning when it’s just an idea, to the end of class when people have shot their movie, and they’ve gone through a really strong emotional journey to get to that point. I find that really inspiring and reassuring as part of my process as well.
It was twelve years between short and feature. How was it balancing teaching with constantly chipping away at getting the feature made?
It was really hard. I have to remind myself that it did take that amount of time to get it made, but it kind of didn’t because I made a bunch of stuff in between. Other shorts, a documentary feature, a bunch of TV work for Sesame Street. All those experiences made me a far better director. If I had made the film ten years ago it would have been completely different in terms of the directing because I’ve had so many other opportunities to flex those muscles and learn things. How to work effectively with the crew. How to spot a good performance. I remember on set for the short, working with a crew of a lot of trusted friends, and really relying on them to tell me if a performance was good or not. At that time, I still wasn’t sure if what I was seeing was believable or not. It was important for me to realize that, because on the feature I didn’t have a lot of the people I’d made films with before. It was my first time working with pretty much everyone on that feature and I really had to go with my gut and trust my instincts, and that only came with the experience of directing a lot of other things.
Working with actors is something that we talk about constantly in class, and I see the results in student work, and that’s the best learning. The best learning you can do is when you’re watching other people direct. If you’re on set as a producer, or as a sound person, or a grip, even if you’re just on set and watching people do it, you learn so much. When I’m in the class, I’m seeing and learning. What does good prep look like? What does bad prep look like? How does that result on screen? I’m constantly seeing those results over and over and that’s made me a far better director.
Do you have any teaching philosophies or strategies that you carry with you in creating the environment of your class?
I try to set that [tone] on the first day of class. It’s sort of cliche now, we set up a list of class rules every first class. I think it starts there, in setting up expectations for people of what the class is gonna be about.
I still do ‘effectives’ and ‘going forwards’ [rather than ‘like’ or ‘dislike’] because I don’t care if you like something or didn’t like something. What’s important is that you are able to communicate and really care about making people’s work better, and making yourself better as well. That’s what the community is about. No one’s going to tell you your movie is garbage or if they liked it. That’s inconsequential. It’s more about, Do we believe we are all here to make my work and everyone else’s work better? And I think it takes a long time to get to that point. Usually towards the end of the semester. When people start coming back with footage and we watch dailies, you see the delight on the filmmaker’s face, but also the entire class’s face, because they did it. We’ve been talking about it for so long, but there it is! When we show dailies it’s such a special moment, ingraining in people that it’s about the community.
The emphasis on taking care of yourself in that final class, of prioritizing your mental health, stuck with me too. How did that come to be such a pivotal part of your teaching practice?
I only started doing that recently. I think it’s because it was something that I was dealing with. And, frankly, society’s gotten a lot better about it as well.
Also just talking with my students, people are coming to my office, talking about how stressed or how anxious they are, and everyone’s sort of saying the same thing. I’m not a mental health professional, but what I can do is just acknowledge it and talk about it in a frank way where people can feel that they are being heard and that somebody does care. We genuinely do care about it and about one another. You’re not alone, because chances are everybody’s feeling the exact same way, going through the exact same thing. As a professor and film professional, I’m still dealing with these same things. That stuff isn’t going away. Whatever you’re dealing with right now, whether you’re not sure what you’re doing creatively, you’ve got no money, you just broke up with your girlfriend or boyfriend, or whatever the case is, people will say it gets better. It actually doesn’t get better. It only gets worse because you’re going to have way more responsibilities. But what is becoming easier is how to deal with it, how to manage it, so to speak.
To end things on an inspiring note, what message(s) do you try to impart on your students as they leave the class?
What I’ve always tried to do is demystify the process but also the life of what this is. Growing up, I had no idea what it meant to be a filmmaker. I had no idea what it meant to be an artist. This was just something that rich people downtown did. But as I’ve learned, you actually can do it. It takes a lot of time. You’ve got to really want it, and you’ve got to be really proactive, but it’s totally possible to do if that is what you want. I want people to leave with the skills, but more importantly, with the feeling and knowledge that they can do it themselves, and I’m hoping that is a source of freedom for them. That by the end of their studies they have a better idea of who they are and what it is they want to do with their lives.
It’s really strange and it’s really special to see people go on that journey from semester one to the end of the class. I’ve been here long enough where I’m seeing the journey that people go on as storytellers and as people that change their entire identities. It’s special to catch someone at this really defining time in their lives and be part of it in a small way.
Doubles is currently seeking US Distribution and will be out on VOD Platforms soon.
Sebastian is a filmmaker from Seattle, based in New York City. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, his films have screened at festivals worldwide. Recently he participated in the Reykjavík International Film Festival Talent Lab, where his film 'Third' was nominated for the Golden Egg Award. He has worked in film distribution and education at A24 Films and Northwest Film Forum.
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