Life-Changing Films | The HyperJump Podcast

This post is a lightly-edited transcript of the Hyperjump Podcast: Movies That Changed My Life, hosted by our Creative Director, Cameron M. Johnson, which you can watch at this link here. As such, it may read more like a stream of conversation than a formal article. Subscribe to us on YouTube for more similar content!

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HyperJump Productions Creative Director discusses 7 movies that left a lasting impact on him, not just as a filmmaker, but as a human being.

Good afternoon my cinematic individuals! My name is Cameron M Johnson, and I am the Creative Director at HyperJump Productions. In this show, we're going to be celebrating all things filmmaking: the passion, the emotion, the energy that goes into it and all of the art forms connected to it. We're going to be celebrating the way that art enriches our lives, discussing all manner of topics related to the film industry, and the wider creative sphere, and having as much fun as we can along the way.

Today, I'm going to get a little bit personal and talk about the films that made me who I am. For a little bit of background, I am the Creative Director here at HyperJump Productions, so I'm in charge of overseeing all of the creative aspects of our company's operations. That means managing projects, it means dealing with clients ,and it also means, of course, breathing as much life creatively into all of our projects as I can, and helping guide the team through interesting and fun and exciting creative directions.

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I LIVE HERE NOW, a short film parodying the workflow at the HyperJump office.

My lifelong dream has been to be a filmmaker, and to direct my own feature films, and that is the vision for HyperJump in the future. Today, I'm keeping it cinematic, talking about the seven films that I believe have most shaped and inspired me throughout my life, personally, as well as the creatively, of course. These are of course some of my favorite films of all time, but most importantly, these are films that, when I watched them, changed my life and put me on a certain trajectory into becoming both the artist and, more broadly, the person that I am today. I love celebrating my favorite films and sharing them with people, and I'd love for you guys to share the films that shaped you in the comments below.

We are an amalgamation of all of our experiences in life, and of course one of the main experiences that we have these days is consuming art and media, so the films that we love, the music that we love, the books that we love, the stories that we love and that we tell each other, are one of the most important parts of making us who we are. So I'd like to explore that a little today, and tell you a bit of my story of how I became the person I am. The first film - or, in this case, film series - that I'm going to talk about that really impacted me as a child was Star Wars.

STAR WARS: the franchise of my childhood

The twin suns of Tattooine, an iconic Star Wars shot that has been burned into my memory since childhood.

I'm not the only person in the world that likes Star Wars, and I'm sure in another video in the future I will get deep into my hot takes on the Star Wars franchise. Famously, I am a prequel enjoyer, perhaps a prequel-maxxer you might call me, but it was the original Star Wars films now known as A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi that had the biggest impact on me when I was a kid. I was born in the mid 90s, and the Star Wars prequels were coming out as I was growing up. But I had on VHS the original Star Wars films.

I later learned that these VHSs were the specialized editions, and I have later in life been educated on and exposed to the de-specialized editions - the more original original version of the Star Wars films. But the ones that I grew up with were George Lucas's specialized editions on VHS, and the first Star Wars film - simply then just called Star Wars - especially impacted me when I was a kid. These vast, gorgeous science fiction fantasy worlds made me also want to create my own personal fictional worlds.

A lot of the time as a kid, I would live in my own world, and my favorite thing to do at playtime was to either be by myself, imagining my own characters and worlds that were largely based on Star Wars, or to encourage my friends to somehow live in this fictional world with me, and do make believe with the characters that I had come up with.

The original Star Wars film, when I was a kid, that really shaped who I wanted to be. From a very young age, very much inspired by George Lucas, I wanted to make my own fictional world, with characters of my own that were unique and quirky and silly, and covered the whole spectrum of, not just kinds of characters personality-wise, but also having characters of many different shapes and sizes and colors.

I'm also a major fan of the prequels, particularly the unparallelled Duel of the Fates sequence from The Phantom Menace.

It was a really important part of my childhood and development as a creative, along with, of course, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers; we really were spoiled for choice in terms of big franchises when I was when I was a kid. But it was definitely Star Wars, firstly the originals that I had on VHS and I rewatched religiously as a kid, and then the prequels, that I grew to love first.

I don't think I'd be here today if it wasn't for being a huge fan of Star Wars growing up. Of all of the media franchises, that is the one that has most made me want to make my own films, to make something as expansive and imaginative and poetic as Star Wars, with a world with its own unique mythology and rules and lore, and characters that are so distinct and memorable. It really is such a unique world, and we can debate to death the quality and the effectiveness of different adaptations and versions of Star Wars, but as a world itself, it's one of the most imaginative media spaces that's ever been created, and I'm so glad that it exists.

Pulp Fiction: the "film bro" awakening

For a lot of movie lovers who grew up in the 2000s and 2010s, Pulp Fiction was a key film in their evolution. I was no different.

Next we move on to my teen years, where I wanted to be a little bit more edgy and dark with the films that I was both watching and making. It's also when I started making my own short films myself. I got my first camcorder when I was around 11, 12 years old, and I started making YouTube videos then. They were atrocious back in the day, but I was having fun and expressing myself with my friends, and it's one of the the memories from my youth that I have most dear in my heart.

At that age, I think the first R-rated (I lived in the States at the time) film I ever saw was Hot Fuzz, followed closely by 300. Those were both very important and kind of life-changing experiences for me; I remember them very fondly, but I think the film that most impacted me when I was in my early teens was probably - and I think a lot of "film bros", so to speak, have this same experience - was Pulp Fiction.

I'm gonna be honest, that's a film that, when I watched it when I was like 13 or 14, I was like, OMG, films don't have to be so obviously structured, they can be a little bit more freeform. They can have dialogue that's quirky, and flows uniquely. They can be dialogue driven. That was something that was huge to me at the time, and it's something that I carry with me still.

For me at least, Pulp Fiction was an eye-opener, a film as much about character and dialogue as it was about the plot. It taught me a lot about how films can be structured in unique and organic ways.

Personally, now, my favorite film of Tarantino's is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I do think that, watching Pulp Fiction as a teenager really really put me on the track of specifically wanting to write my own scripts. I did write stuff at that age, but when I saw Pulp Fiction, I became really aware of the screenwriter as an entity. Of course, in this case it was a writer and director, and that excited me even more, the fact that I could write my own scripts and craft characters in that way and have such distinct dialogue.

Pulp Fiction taught me that films can be driven by the characters or the themes; these are valid ways of structuring and framing a film, and that helped me think a bit more outside of the box, because until then, I was imagining films very much as the hero's journey. You know, character is introduced, problem is introduced, character has to grow to solve the problem, character solves the problem, and comes back more mature.

That's the monomyth, that's the the standard way of telling a story, and it fits most films, of course, if you stretch it far enoug,h but it's not the only story that exists, life is too chaotic for that level of structure all the time. And as I got older, you know, perhaps more obscure arthouse films that I watched to get Letterboxd clout, taught me that you can play around with structure and do very interesting things if you're not so dogmatic about doing things the standard way.

Babel: serious business

Next we have a film that, more so than any other film I've ever seen, I remember exactly where I was when I watched it, because I watched it in very unique and humorous circumstances. This film is Babel by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, the great Mexican director. It's one of my favorite films of all time, and it is largely so because of this experience watching it.

For a little bit of context, when I was younger, between the ages of 10 and about 18, I lived in Michigan in the United States with my family. We have cousins in North Carolina, and occasionally a few times a year, we would travel to NC to visit them, and oftentimes my dad would drive us the entire way, like a 12 to 14 hour drive, in one day. We had this big car, and I would sit at the back of the car and I'd have a portable DVD player and I would watch DVDs on it.

As I got older I started to want to watch, you know, deep films. The early films that we'd watch together in the car would be stuff like Shrek and School of Rock and Madagascar, this kind of thing, and those films were all unfathomably based, but as I got to be like 15 16 years old, and I was a bit more serious about wanting to become a filmmaker, I started watching more dramas, films that had won Oscars, or were really critically acclaimed, this kind of thing, and my parents had Babel on DVD.

I don't think they'd actually seen it yet, but they had bought it on DVD because it was such a successful film, nominated for many Oscars, and so I took the DVD and I watched it on a car journey home from North Carolina back to Michigan one time. I remember, it was like the last film I watched at the end of the night, before we arrived home, so it was really dark. I was the only one, besides my dad who was driving, who was awake in the car, and I was watching it in the back on this portable DVD player, absolutely encapsulated by this film.

Babel is a hyperlink film, with multiple interlocking storylines that play out simultaneously in different locations worldwide. When I saw it as a teenager, it was unlike anything I'd experienced before.

Babel is a really interesting film. The way it's structured is, it's basically three (arguably four) different stories that are being told in parallel, that happen on different sides of the world. There's one story that's happening on the America/Mexico border, there's one story that's happening in the Morocco, one in Japan, and all of these stories, at the beginning of the film, seem completely disconnected, but by the end of the film you realize that there are small connections between them.

All of the stories are about situations, problems that are caused because of a failure of communication. Either someone has failed to say something, or they've lied about something, or in in the case of the story that's set in Japan, it's about a girl who is deaf and so she can't hear what people are saying.

This film was hugely emotionally impactful for me. I can remember to this day watching a specific sequence in which the song "September" by Earth, Wind and Fire plays in a club, with the Japanese girl, layed by Rinko Kukuchi in a Oscar nominated role. That scene I can remember watching to this day. It blew me away how overwhelmed I was emotionally watching it, because basically it's this girl who's deaf, she's going to a club with her friends, and she can't really enjoy the experience because she can't hear the music, and it's kind of overwhelming for her. I remember being like, wow.

Themes of people being lonely, but being being surrounded by people who aren't lonely, is a really powerful theme for me, and that scene just broke me when I watched it. But in terms of storytelling and filmmaking, what I took away from that film is this desire to make films that had big ensemble casts with many different stories interconnecting, and I've seen many other similarly structured films since then that have differing levels of interconnecting storylines.

Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), the ultimate example of an ensemble masterpiece.

A great example that's probably an even better film than Babel is Robert Altman's Nashville, which is one of the best films I've ever seen. It's about many different interconnecting storylines happening at a country music festival, that's a masterpiece, fully recommend that. But Babel was the first film that I'd seen that was like that, that was able to integrate multiple stories in a really interesting way, and it made me want to make similar films, basically.

It's one of those films that I haven't actually revisited in many many years, I don't think I've actually watched it since then, maybe once since then, but it's one of those films that like I fear if I re-watch it, I won't like it as much, and almost the memory of how good it was at the time and how impactful it was is perfect.

The Social Network: contender for my all-time favorite film

I often call The Social Network my favorite film; it feels right...it's the film that most "gets" what it's like to grow up in the 21st Century, even if it isn't all factually accurate.

Next I'm going to give a one-two punch of two David Fincher films that had equally big influence on me. One of them is a film that I have often called my favorite film of all time, The Social Network, from 2010. Many of us have seen this film, it's a masterpiece, should have won Best Picture, should have won Best Director, blah blah blah...

The Social Network is about the founding of Facebook, and there's many reasons why I love this film. Every aspect of the film, from the screenplay, to the cinematography, to the editing, to the music, all integrates so well together. Every element is incredible in isolation, and as part of the greater whole, and it creates this incredible atmosphere of the kind of cold digitalia world that we live in in the modern era, while still having moments of warmth and joy and humanity.

It really gets across the nuanced and complex feelings of the rise of social media in our lives in the last (20-30 years now, but at the time it was a little bit less than that), and it was the first film that I ever saw that really got across kind of what it feels like to grow up in the age of the internet and social media. I think people who grew up in the 90s or 2000s, we have grown up in a really important time in human history, and of course, it looks like times are going to continue to be even more unique as we go forward with AI and all these other things happening!

For my money, no film has captured the malaise of social media world - but also its joys - as well as The Social Network. It might be THE defining film of the century so far.

The Social Network network really captures both the joy and the ominous dread that this change in the world has created, and it shows how social media has both been influenced by and driven by, but also impacted how we connect to and relate to each other. Ultimately, the overarching theme is it's all about wanting to connect with other people - that's the whole point of everything! - and is social media the right way to go about that? We could have many different debates about this, but it's impossible to deny that Facebook specifically has had a huge impact on the world these last few decades.

It was hugely formative in my life, and The Social Network is the rare example of a film about a contemporary issue that perfectly gets across how that issue both happened, at least in terms of how the feeling of it changed our lives, and kind of the obviously the aftermath of it. It might not be factually accurate in many ways - in fact, I think it takes a lot of liberties with the truth - but in terms of conveying the dissonant feelings of inevitability and joy and excitement that, as well as the dread and the fear and the loneliness that social media has brought, it's pitch perfect, and every single scene is pristinely put together.

This is a film that made me want to make films that are relevant to the period that we're living in right now, and the unique changes that the world and people are going through as a result of the internet and social media, and how all of these things impact us. I don't think I've found a way to convey my ideas about these things perfectly in film yet, but it's something that I hope to explore in some of my future work, so let's see if I get to do that!

Se7en: structure is king

Buoyed by a chilling yet haunting comfortable neo-noir atmosphere, Se7en is the template for the modern detective thriller.

I promised there'd be a second David Fincher film discussed in this video, and that's going to be Se7en. At some point in the 2010s I became obsessed with David Fincher, watching all of his films except for Alien 3, which I still haven't seen and will not watch, and, while I love many of his films, one of the ones that stood out to me the most was Se7en. As a result of loving the film, which is related to the seven deadly sins, I then read Dante's Divine Comedy, and loved that so much that I read it again not too long after. I really did this and I kind of did this deep dive when I was a teenager into the mythology and the ideology behind sin, and our ideas of human morality, and it became a topic that I was fascinated by.

But what most fascinates me about the film Se7en and what I took away from it as a filmmaker and storyteller the most, was its really unique use of numerical structure. In the film there are seven different murders that happen as a result of the victim allegedly committing one of the seven deadly sins.

I don't know if it's just the way that my mind works, but what really satisfied me about the film is that numerical structure. When I was watching the film, I was like, ohhhh yeah we're only three sins in there's still four more to go I can't wait to see the next sin! Then when the fourth one happened it's like ah I can't wait to see see the fifth sin. Even though I also love films that have a free form structure, I also love films that pick a very specific numerical structure and kind of follow that within the the logic of the film.

Se7en's satisfying structure, experienced by two relatable characters played by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, with opposing philosophies, allows the audience to question their own relationship to its themes.

It's the same for The Divine Comedy, though what makes that so satisfying to read is it's structured into many different rings of the afterlife (hell, purgatory, heaven), and you've got a numerical amount of different zones that Dante travels through as he follows the story, and that there's something really satisfying to that. I think the idea of having a skeleton, an objective finite structure of a number of scenes or characters or locations, really allows you to play within the lines and within that structure in ways that is super satisfying.

I haven't really explored enough why I find this satisfying, but I just do, and Se7en made me really want to put numerical structures in some way in the films and stories that I tell. But also, incredible atmosphere, despite being super specific and unique in its own way, it's also got this universality about human nature and the human experience that when you watch it at different stages in your life, you kind of get something different out of it, and that's what I think is, for me, the sign of a truly great film.

Victoria: one thrilling night, in real time

When I watched Victoria in the cinema, I had no idea it was a one-take movie; it only dawned on me as it had finished, and I was completely blown away. What a raw, authentic film!

The next film also has a very specific structure, but in a very different way from Se7en. This is a film that I watched when I was briefly living in France in 2014-2015. I was like 19, and I was on a gap year at that time in Strasbourg, France, and I remember watching this film when it came out in the cinema. It's a film called Victoria. I believe it's a German film, but it stars the Spanish actress Laia Costa, who has done many other great films since, and the film's gimmick is very similar to Birdman which came out just before Victoria came out, in that the film is designed to be like a one take movie. But unlike Birdman, Victoria I believe actually was filmed in one take - no editing gimmicks at all.

What I loved about Victoria is that, unlike Birdman - I went into Birdman knowing that it was supposed to be this long take gimmick - I didn't know that about Victoria, and so when I watched the film, at the end of the film, I was like huh was that one take? and I was stunned! So if I had gone into Victoria knowing that it was a long take film, perhaps I would have had a different experience with the film, but I was completely blown away the time that I watched it, for the rawness, the authenticity, feeling like you're there in that moment experiencing this night out.

Until that time, I had thought that all the movies that I was gonna make, I wanted to make these big, epic stories, spanning thousands of years with everything that ever happened in human existence appearing in the film, like The Tree of Life or World of Tomorrow. But watching made me realize that, wow, films can be real time, they can be raw, they can be authentic, they can capture these little moments in time, (usually 90 minutes long though!), and they can tell these really compelling stories about how one night can be so pivotal in one person's life.

Yi Yi: life itself, in all its beautiful imperfection

After watching over 3,000 films (if you go by my Letterboxd, at least), there's really nothing that compares to the gentle beauty of Edward Yang's Yi Yi.

The seventh and final film I want to talk about is a beautiful film, and I always kind of debate in my head whether The Social Network, which I already mentioned, or this second film, is my favorite film of all time. They're both great, let's celebrate them both anyway.

But this film, without further ado, is a film that's been getting huge acclaim in recent years, especially with people calling it one of the best films of the 21st century. It's the 2000 film by the late great director Edward Yang, Yi Yi. So the film Yi Yi had a huge impact on me, largely because it's a film where there is a vague plot, things obviously do happen in the film, but it takes a very gentle approach to portraying these characters and their lives.

And it's a film that, instead of having some dramatic plot that is being followed through the whole film, is more of just a painterly reflection of the human moments that these people go through in a particularly important period in their lives. The gist of the story is it's about a family of four, a husband, a wife, their daughter, and their son. The daughter's a teenager, and the son is like 9 or 10 years old. And basically the wife's mother goes into hospital with a coma, and as a result of that, the family all kind of goes through their own different way of coping with that event.

The father ends up going on a business trip and kind of being a bit distant from the rest of the family. The mother turns to her religion and goes on a mountain retreat and kind of throws herself into her faith as a way of coping with the situation. The daughter, who's a teenager, goes through a rebellious phase. She dates this biker boy, who appears to be a bit older than her. And then the little boy, the son, goes through this phase of photography. The iconic image on the poster of the film is the back of his head, and the whole gimmick that the boy has with his photography is he only takes pictures of the back of people's heads, and in the film that is explored more thematically. But that is the general plot. It's about the lives of these four people as they're going through this transitional phase in their family's life.

The true sign of the greatest films is that, upon watching them at various ages and stages in life, they reveal to us a different part of ourselves we hadn't previously noticed.

What makes the film so special is just how gentle of an approach the filmmaker Edward Yang had to this subject. It's kind of like we're having a window into these people's lives. Everything in the films feels so real and natural. You might not have experienced the exact same things as these people have experienced, but the way that the film captures quiet, gentle moments rather than just focusing on the big dramatic moments, allows the film to be extremely relatable, feel like the world is lived in, and that you are experiencing these things yourself.

Every time I've watched the film, and it's been at least four or five times now, I've watched it at kind of a different age, and I've had something different to take away that was, for me, relatable to the film. And it taught me that films don't have to be these big bombastic, like, "Megatron is gonna destroy the world" kind of plots. It can be simple, painterly. It can be a look on life. It can be poetry. It can be a bit more freeform, structurally.

And it can simply be about people living their lives. Ultimately, film is the great empathy machine, and it's all about seeing other people through their depictions on the screen. And film is the greatest medium at allowing us to connect with other people and to understand that, even though we all might have different lives and different problems, we are all connected and we're all human. There is no better medium at portraying that than film.

Of all the films I've ever seen, I feel like Yi Yi is the best at that. It's got some absolutely incredible scenes. There's a brilliant scene where the father is on a business trip and he's meeting with this guy. It's probably a guy he's never gonna see again, but they go to dinner together, and they share this kind of somewhat bromantic, like, you know, half an hour with each other. And it's perfectly captured in this five, 10 minute scene that is kind of pivotal to the film. And it's one of those amazing examples of a scene within this film that feels like a key moment that has been captured in this person's life, even though it might not be the biggest thing that ever happens to these people. It's those kind of gentle connections that we make with people that really make our lives meaningful.

And I love this film for that! So these were seven films that had a huge impact on me and that I loved to share with you. I'd love to know in the comments below, which films are most meaningful to you, which films have changed your life and made you the person or the artist that you are today.

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