I, recently, spoke with screenwriter, director and Daytime Emmy Award-nominee Dui Jarrod about his time in the film industry and what he has planned for the future.
He began his filmmaking career at the age of 26 and he claimed to have gotten fired from a job. Since then, he started writing movies for the sake of it and was self-taught. After going to a film festival for short films, it inspired him to start writing short films and he has been writing ever since.
Jarrod is from Arkansas and hails from a family of storytellers who never got the opportunity to tell their stories. He has gotten inspiration from Barry Jenkins, Ryan Coogler and Spike Lee. Those directors have developed their own image which helped Jarrod derive his own self-image.
After shooting his film Lesson Before Love, which can be found on Tubi, it failed to generate any long-lasting success around the film industry. He later signed a distribution deal that didn’t get him that much money. However, when the film was picked up by Red Box, the distributors cleaned up while Jarrod barely got a crumb of the profits.
Jarrod became burned by the film business and decided to study more from the craft of theater for the next six years and became a flight attendant to pay the bills.
Jarrod has said that the best and worst thing about working in this industry is collaborating. The job of a director is to focus on a number of différent departments. It’s much more than just the “action” and the “cut”.
When giving advice to other filmmakers, Jarrod wanted others to focus on their voice and not what is happening with the person to the right and left of you. He didn’t work in film for six years because he kept comparing himself to others and was wondering why his film wasn’t getting anywhere at the time. In time, you never know what the industry is going to say about your work, but you, as the filmmaker, can control what the art comes out to be.
