Meet Denis Budanoff | Film Writer/Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Denis Budanoff and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Denis, what’s the most important lesson your business/career has taught you?
My response to this question will certainly be a useful note for future reference. I’m still too young to fully reflect on my career — but mature enough to share some early observations. The biggest conclusion I’ve drawn after completing a few projects is this: I can’t win this game alone.

Coming from a professional alpine skiing background, I was used to relying solely on myself. It was either me winning or me losing. That part of my life shaped my perseverance and goal-to-result mindset. But the individualistic nature of skiing didn’t make the transition to filmmaking any easier. When I moved from skiing to film, I kept counting only on myself — and that approach made things more complicated. It led me to my first major lesson: filmmaking is a team effort.

My scripts would remain just scripts unless I had a talented team to bring them to life on screen. No matter how skilled a writer or director may be, they’re powerless without a great team to help shape the vision. Assembling that team is a talent of its own. It’s both a goal and a challenge — to find people you can trust, both personally and professionally. It takes years and many projects, working with hundreds of collaborators, before you start identifying the few you’ll eventually call your team.

At this point, I haven’t finished building that team, but I’m certainly on the right path. I work with people I know, and whatever challenges the next project may bring — I know for sure, it’s my team and I who will face them together and turn a challenge to a result.

What should our readers know about your business?
Filmmaking is often seen as a bold career choice — uncertain, risky, and anything but secure. For me, it never felt like a choice. I wasn’t weighing options or making big decisions. I was born a filmmaker and knew it early enough to direct my first feature at sixteen. Years later, I still feel incredibly lucky to have found my craft so young, and I’m excited to keep growing as a writer and director.

Nothing can describe an artist better than their own work. My works are reflections of who I was the day that passed and the day that’s still present. The Little Man has been my life for almost two years, and it’s the project of my present. The Little Man is a short film-symphony set in Austria and Germany in the 1900s. It tells the story of an 18-year-old Austrian painter who lacks the talent for depicting humans. The Little Man is a period anti-fascist metaphor for one of the biggest monsters of our past.

The film was shot primarily in Los Angeles, which added a major challenge to the production—Los Angeles does not look like Europe of the 1900s. At the same time, LA is the city where film magic prevails. It’s a city with endless possibilities for recreating any place at any point in time. Eventually, shooting The Little Man in LA was the right call, as it gave me the privilege of collaborating with top professionals on both the cast and crew sides of my film.

Now, in mid-June of 2025, my film is completed but still not available to the public—it’s currently being submitted to multiple festivals around the world. I’m honoured to invite you, the audience of Shoutout, to follow the film’s festival journey and stay up to date with the upcoming premiere and showcase screenings in LA and other cities.

The Little Man is my biggest work so far, yet it’s still just the beginning of my film journey. I’m already working on my next project—a feature film—that will be announced very soon!

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
LA offers great variety and a diverse range of places to choose from. I used to live in West LA, so my go-to places are generally along the Hollywood–Santa Monica corridor. Below are some of the spots I would take a visiting friend to during their week in LA:

Greystone Mansion always inspires me as an artist. It’s calming and graceful—definitely a place I would take a friend for a nice chat, surrounded by historic gardens and a tall arborvitae alley.

The Getty Museum is well worth visiting as a tourist. It has one of the largest collections of works by Manet, Rembrandt, and Turner, which I personally adore.

Venice Beach is a great area to check out both day and night—one of those places where you can still feel the LA spirit that prevailed in the city decades ago.

Once the sun sets, No Vacancy, The Victorian, and Lubitsch are the places we’d go for a fun night out.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My mama has been — and still is — a major part of my filmmaking journey. She’s a unique privilege in my life, the one who gave me the foundation to start my career and the confidence to keep moving it forward.

Website: mrbudanoff.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mrbudanoff/

Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/mrbudanoff

Other: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt33728717/?ref_=fn_all_ttl_2