Meet Whitley Watson | Comedian, Filmmaker and Producer

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

Hi Whitley, is your business focused on helping the community? If so, how?
Why fight for a seat at the table when you can build your own table? When my partners and I created Club Video we wanted to make a space for creators to experiment with what they found truly engaging and inspiring. It’s easy to be sidetracked into competition and lose sight of your values. We deigned our festival to be accessible to guests and purposefully curate a broad group of filmmakers of varying degrees of experience. The goal is to show that resourcefulness, community and vision are more necessary than massive budgets and the best equipment. The media we consume affects are self-perception and we feel that creating space for people to see independently produced media will expand their sense of what is possible for their selves and their communities.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I am a comedian, filmmaker and producer. I work predominantly in the alt-comedy scene in Brooklyn. My work is mostly about social absurdities like religion, gender, race and family. My work is informed by dysfunctional family dynamics and a perpetual outsider viewpoint I enjoy creating stories where the base reality is a world that is “non-normative” but real for many people I.e alcoholic families, mixed race people, blended families. I’m also very interested in art-house cinema so a lot of my projects have a more abstracted or durational cinema approach.

My journey into doing creative work feels very inevitable. It feels like my main interest and skill but it is constantly being weighed against making a living. I think with age I’ve learned how to make myself more accessible. How to structure things in a way that I can bring people along with me into the world that feels natural to me. Finding collaborators who are on similar wavelengths and creating literal places where we can control “normal”.

I think the biggest lesson was that the business mindedness and self promotion that felt foreign to me came easily when I was able to conceptualize them as a part of the game of expanding the experimental creativity I wanted to see in the world. When I clearly defined that vision I was more easily ablate see all the dull administrative work as an actually fun and fulfilling part of a bigger plan.

I think ultimately I would like art to resemble life and life to resemble art as closely as possible and am always to bring people together in a feeling of communal experimentation.

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?
I don’t live in L.A but I visited recently and I loved walking around Venice. That just sort the exact sort of mishmash of culture that is inspiring to me. Me and my partner worked out at muscle beach and then wandered through a fancy hotel. We also visited the sneaker strip near melrose as advertised by Sneaker Freaker. That was a really interesting sub culture to be dropped into the middle of. We love Elysian and Griffith park and ate a lot of incredible tacos.

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?
I would shoutout Micah Phillips. When I started performing comedy he was on of the first people to support and put me on stage. I began making videos at his video show that we now run an integration of together. He’s a deeply talented creator and also has deeply held values.

Website: www.whitleywatson.com

Instagram: videotapezzzz

Image Credits
@enemypixels Noah Eberhart