01-07-2025
From TikTok star to filmmaker: Reece Feldman on the Cannes debut of his short ‘Wait, Your Car?'
'It was quite uncanny,' says Reece Feldman, without a trace of irony, about the Cannes debut of his short film, "Wait, Your Car?"
Normally, the digital creator — known to his millions of followers as @guywithamoviecamera — is capturing the work of others. For the first time this spring, he captured his own. 'I tend to be pragmatic and practical by nature,' he tells Gold Derby. 'So it was genuinely something I couldn't have dreamed of because I just don't allow myself to dream that big.'
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But there he was in May, premiering his own 12-minute short in front of an audience of hundreds on the French Riviera, at an event hosted by TikTok. He calls the experience a 'privilege' — and true to form, he was more excited about the technical specs of the debut than anything else. 'It wasn't just hooked up to some HDMI and a laptop — they had new Dolby Surround sound put into their theater, so it was screened by an actual technician who knows how to work a projector properly,' he says. 'As a tech geek, that was wonderful!'
Next up, he says, is the plan to take it to more festivals, particularly those he's attended himself as a theatergoer in the past. 'Fingers crossed,' he says.
The idea for the film came to him while he was noodling around on a script on a rare day off work. The 'modern day Christine,' as he calls it is about four friends whose friendship is tested when one of them insists her car is trying to kill her. 'I wanted it to be a story that was more about the people than about the fantastical elements, because my favorite movies are ones that are not really investigating the crazy things that happen, but rather are investigating the people which the crazy things happen to,' he says. 'I was like, 'What is the craziest thing that someone could tell me within the realm of reality that I just wouldn't be able to believe?' And it was, if a car came to life, and my friend tried to convince me that their car was alive and just took over.'
From there, the production came together quickly — he wrote the film at the end of January, and four months later, he was premiering the finished product. Connections helped, he admits — 'I hit up a bunch of people that I had known just for my life,' he says. He famously got his start as a PA on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and the crew from the show ended up working on the short with him, 'a full circle moment that's amazing,' he says. 'It felt like the end of Mr. Holland's Opus or Big Fish, where everyone from the movie comes back at the end.'
That shorthand also allowed him to execute the film the way he wanted it. 'One of my favorite filmmakers, and this is not a hot take, is Steven Spielberg,' he says. 'I was very much at the school of, I don't want this to be shot in a modern way, I don't want this to have very fast cuts. I want it to have the appearance of E.T. and I want it to feel as though this is lived in, and everyone just got it.'
Given the amount of time he's spent on set with filmmakers — recent weeks have found him side by side with the likes of Christopher Nolan, for example — he's learned through osmosis. 'I could see what works and what doesn't work, and see how they go about choosing where to place the camera, but also how to talk to how to talk to actors, and when to move on from a setup, when to change like small things that you really can't be taught that you kind of just have to watch and absorb,' he says. 'I would see like someone like a Nolan, the way he carries himself and the way he talks and the way he uses his time preciously. That is something I want to implement. But then I'll see someone like Francis Lawrence on the set of Hunger Games and watching him in real time make decisions, and being like, if we get this shot, then we might not have time for this shot. That's really helpful.'
And rest assured: Only one car was destroyed in the making of the film. Thanks to once again, a great connection and a little bit of luck, he was able to source his dream car — a perfect 2002 Honda Accord, which had a clone that was destroyed. A little movie magic, and the effect was accomplished.
'Now when people ask me what I do, I could say that I'm a filmmaker,' says Feldman. 'I tend to be my hardest critic, and at the end of the day, I'm really proud of what I made. And if that's the only thing I ever make, moving forward, I will be proud that I took a chance and got it made.'
But more than that, he hopes it inspires others to try as well. 'I would love for people to watch and be like, Hey, I think I can make something. Maybe I can make something better than this,' he says. 'I think that's really cool, that you don't have to go to film school, that you don't have to have a big last name, as long as you have a plan and some people that are willing to help support you along the way.'
And there's one more message: 'If your friend says something absurd happened to them, you should believe them.'
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