brand new episode of breakout week leave a show where you can break out of the san francisco bay area i am your host from the west coast on the sabbath i'm joined by the lovely suburban i'm a filmmaker my company is sixty two films and i've been doing short films for quite a while i'm working on a lot of other comedy there's a pretty funny story behind that film because we were supposed to work on another film but probably thought through because of the actors and other actors and i had a very limited time connections and you know we got this part of the perfect three just rushed in but it turned out really nice nice now let's go over ideally what's the creative process when you're when you go from you know   we just hooked up the hero when they when she said she was producing her first film with david and that's where lost pretty just connecting back and forth sent my resume something like a video and they made  mister nice nice any other questions ok back here background you've been doing mostly short films yes do you have a desire to take it to feature of course of course  the right now much of the kills probably has happened hollywood in the movie and the guy just like his work ethic is credible just the way he saves money for the production companies just i respect them and then he's mexican  next we have hundred ninety seven was our first production and mainly we started the company to create a home for artists such as myself who are middle eastern american to be able to tell our stories and produce the plays that we  accidental because nobody was sort of taking nobody was playing that role so we sort of fell into it in a way and being the first theater company in the u s to be focused  middle east we had to deal with next generation issues we had to deal with generation gap cultural gap you know there is a bridging that gap and there's a growing immigrant community in the bay area we have to deal with that so we have to come up with programs that are that are focused on immigrant integration and we come up with programs that help established artists of middle eastern background to get there are going here so we had to play a lot of different roles and actually right now we're in the process of trying to sort of narrow down what we're doing and stay a little more focused on theater and  play development which is really what we're all about and you say you have that action that's coming up in my play opens this october a lot of people don't realize and the amount of time that goes into creating a new play i mean i wrote this play back in twenty two two thousand and ten it had a reading in twenty eleven and now this summer it's going through another workshop the development workshop and this fall it will open so definitely a process where it's a long term process so a theatre company like ours really makes that investment in the long term development process of play and and we invest in artists you know other artists like myself n in the industry entertainment are people are they embracing you in your what you're doing or are you having to kind of fight stereotypes even within the entertainment industry or how does that work i mean i feel like we have to fight stereotypes all the time and there's definitely a lot of support for our work in the bay area and that's mainly why we started the company here and that's maybe it's also why we've survived all these years  the bay area is very open to new ideas and risk taking so that aspect of our work has always been supported but i feel like a lot of times people come to our shows expecting you know a certain thing they sort of expected to be overly political or they expected to have an agenda or an you know ultimately these are human stories and what we want to do is we want to tell compelling human stories and the middle east is much more diverse than what your average american understands so part of what we do is really sort of question those preconceived notions about an arab diverse yeah yeah i mean indonesia which is not in the middle east is has the highest population of moslems you know i'm you know i'm i come from a mixed religious background i'm not arab i don't speak arabic you know and so it's these are you know they're simple identity issues and and then with our artists a lot of artists question whether they have the right to represent the experience of their community because you know after all we can only tell our own story as you said right so it's a huge burden because there aren't that many playwrights there aren't that many artists telling our stories but you know over time i think it's increasing more and more people are working and more and more people are paying attention to the story so i think that's going to change and grow now as far as you do you spent a lot of time in the middle east as well right like i'm you're in iran months six months sabbatical back which i spent that in iran syria lebannon armenia and i was it was really exciting because i got to meet a lot of theater artists that are active in those countries and i made connections that you know are really growing and they're really beginning to benefit golden thread productions here as well as those artists in respective countries where they work gotcha question are you you  people yeah but you know we accept so one of the things that's unique about our company is that we produce plays in by middle eastern middle eastern playwrights about any topic and we produce plays about the middle east by anyone so you know playwrights of any ethnic background or cultural experience can write plays about the middle east that we would consider them similarly our acting pool is very wide and we always try to do co productions and reach out to other communities for example last year we did a coproduction with the asian american theater company in twenty eleven in  next year we're doing a co production with african american shakespeare company so we're trying to reach out to other communities because you know we don't want to be insular we want to be  you can see that even though we all come from different backgrounds essentially everyone is really you know we all have human experiences they like all the girls of what your background is so that's that's great yeah ok so we got a clip actually the there were about to see you want to set it up for us where we can sure i think if we can look at the two minute clip of language rooms and that's the cool production with asian american theater company or it's basically a father son story  the son is working for homeland security as a so called translator but we know those translators did a lot more than just translating and he was kind of being isolated as sort of not a team player so he's kind of feeling a little self conscious and then they say that they've they're bringing sort of a high value prisoner that needs to be questioned and it turns out to be this guy's father so there's a confrontation between father and son and the son has to prove himself as you know and our american that works for her homeland security and his father has been brought in as a suspect and all they have all these issues all right well let's take a look i know we have different religions here so i will refer to the generic up look down a struggling food and help us to plead to the right path on of the collaborative working together can each of you speak a little bit about the nature of that collaboration and how it works i know in theater you know you don't have a director who is guiding the whole project and same thing with film but i'm just curious you know what are the similarities wh hand but him being an actor yet he stayed in character and used it that's why when he most her face with the bloody hand her reaction was so strong because that was his blood on his face performance is different from the other when you start working with designers you work with a director in case of new plays you work with a dramaturg there's research that needs to be done a lot of the prep work is the same but then when you are in the room the quality of the work is really different because you have to be the kind of actor who can stay on top of their game every night on stage and then the performance report form in very small theatres you know hundred seats it's a very intimate so the audience is right there and you can't really hide you know you can't hide anything so you have to be on your toes would you say you say doing theater it's a lot like your jazz musicians who say you know you never hear the same song performed you know the same yeah it's and there's different notes and different counts you have no two performances are exactly the same you know i mean you want to be consistent as an actor and perform the same way every night but the quality of it is going to be different that's great and let's go to our studio audience and see if there's any questions or comments for trench i know i do have one for because i know that golden thread productions often focuses on new works a new plays rather than you know previous published ones you're not doing death of a salesman but can you speak a little bit towards the challenge of producing new work as opposed to already published plays how is that different i mean so that there a there are challenges associated with production plays that need development playwrights that perhaps are not as experience that you need to support through their career until  they you know their skills are stronger but there are i would say the biggest challenge is on the marketing side because really the playwrights that we produce their names don't sound you know english their names are all weird my name is weird everybody's name is weird they're not known the plane is not known the content sounds foreign so we have a lot of challenges on the marketing front to convince people of what you so quickly responded to saying these are all human stories you know that's a hard difficult thing to convince people of that he hears a great play it's a new play but you know take a chance on it and  come see it it's not shakespeare but it's ok and i think part of it is educating audiences to get them to want to come to see something new and it's also hard to get people to go to see theater anymore i suppose to movies or after all these years i'm in a number of our playwrights have gained name recognition now people when they when they see their names like you said felgate in the who language who wrote language rooms you know when when people see his name they recognize him and word yeah exactly any other comments or questions from our studio audience well i've got one back here hi so how often would you say that your putting out a new play you said this is the one you're working on right now i think you said you wrote it in two thousand and ten and you did the reading in two thousand and eleven and it's just now coming out two thousand and thirteen they do two productions a year and most of the plays that we produce are either and following that there is a play called urge for going by mono mansoor and that's a west coast premiere ok thank you that sounds exciting we are looking forward to that so let's take it back to tony and monique so let's meet then the film was actually scrapped june june tenth no it was done i don't want to do anymore and i kind of hung in there and things worked out and we picked up shooting again in september the twenty first and we script the budget was i think the budget with three million dollars and i thought ok to redo this again so i wrote it again i actually had to rewrite it five times and sold when you said i see the ending of it i don't really have the exact vision of how take a deep breath and come s to me yes or no to the following question do you have my diamonds yes good all you got to do is meet me look boy i'm attached you to address you find your way here why can't guarantee your safety let's go lot given the fact that you're a new filmmaker you know congratulations on having the courage to jump into this how did you develop get a sense of like how do i go about making a movie i mean setting up your shots and you know did you  came to you to your face to the forefront and now is just now hitting and also i will by late night researching and i think admiring the art form is part of you know the learning of doing it definitely we do have a question back here i have to say that i am a fan of your work and i got to see the movie the shop and i was really impressed with in the first fight in minutes i just knew it was an experienced director like someone who had been directing for years so to find out after the movie was over that this was your first film that i was in awe and i just want to say that you did an awesome job and i know you've heard this fifty thousand times but never gets o here so i just want to say that and just acknowledge that you did an outstanding job and you know it's a blessing for you to have just the natural gift like that because i've been i've known of a lot of directors who have been doing it  longer than you however their films are not anything compared to what your project came out to be so many anyway and i wanted to know like what do you have for your future upcoming  projects quite a bit quite a bit should that make a question making sure we have a couple of drama we have a short film and i'm working on now and i do have another feature comedy so it's  it sounds like we're all going to have to go check out the shop for sure but definitely wish you luck on your future project projects and everything so back to my fabulous co hosts all right well this is this is the part of the segment where we let you