Filmmaker Keenan MacWilliam on the Art of Creative Directing Your Own Vision
Keenan MacWilliam photographed by Leeor Wild
Keenan MacWilliam didn’t intend to put women at the center of her work, but there is no denying that she captures feminine energy beautifully and dynamically. The filmmaker’s recent music video for emerging artist Hawa, “Kill Some,” is bathed in lavender monochrome softness; in her work for GARAGE, she managed to make Bread Face look elegant; and as a creative director for VICE, she captured the strength of female skateboarder Briana King. Her magic lies in her unwavering faith in her ability to create and see her vision through to completion—an attribute every artist must tap into!
From her studio in Bushwick, Keenan let Other Suns in on how to turn an idea on a page into a stunningly visual video.
AMIRAH MERCER: So you were an actor in Canada. You have your own Wiki page!
KEENAN MACWILLIAM: It’s actually been updated a bunch of times by random people and I’m like, ‘Who’s doing this?’
AMIRAH: How did you get into filmmaking?
KEENAN: I got over acting by the time I was 18. I got tired of the kinds of roles they were asking me to audition for. But I was exposed to different roles on set, so I learned about jobs people had that I probably wouldn’t have known existed. I was most drawn to the writers and the directors—and production design was cool, too. I decided I wanted to start building narratives that told stories that had more dimension and depth and allowed more flexibility for different types of characters to be seen in film.
AMIRAH: What does a creative director do versus a director?
KEENAN: When I’m creative-directing for musicians, I help shape all the visuals and aesthetics that accompany their music—from the single art to album art to tour visuals and music videos. I build an entire campaign that conceptualizes their music in a visual way.
AMIRAH: What about when you’re creative-directing an interview series, like the Broadly videos. What does that entail?
KEENAN: In that setting, I’ll come up with a concept, decide what the interview show is, and come up with the title of it. I’ll brainstorm a bunch of potential hosts who would interview people. I’ll show the aesthetic language, the stylings, and choose a bunch of potential people they would interview. I’ll outline the themes of each episode, and then I’ll collect references [of] other interview shows that I either like or don’t like and how I would want to emulate or make it different from those, so that people can visualize it. And then, I would pitch it to a brand, or if it was internal [at VICE] we would pitch it to the executive producer, and they give us budget to either do it or not. Then I oversee the whole creative process from there, with the casting, location, and production design.
It can be so exciting, because you come up with an idea, and then you decide how it’s going to look. Sometimes I’ll hire a director to execute it. That actually is a really fun job for me—because you’re working with a brainiac who has technical skills to bring something to life, and it just feels like you’re having a creative conversation with this person. It’s like, I can’t believe this letter that we brainstormed in a stupid meeting room now looks like this.
AMIRAH: Do you feel like collaboration is really important and crucial to filmmaking?
KEENAN: Yes. You physically can’t do it by yourself—unless you’re the only person in front of the camera and you have a tripod—but if you want to do anything more complex, you really have to rely on other people. I personally feel like collaboration is a huge source of inspiration. Every director is different in how much they want to bring in other people’s ideas. For me, other creatives that we hire—whether that’s stylists, makeup artists, hair artists, DPs—all of those people are usually extremely creative beyond just what their title is, so I find it extremely beneficial to collaborate with them in a really intense way. I’m missing out on a lot of cool ideas if I’m just limiting this person to execution. I have a vision, and then I want to hear if they have an inspiration based on that vision, and it becomes a really exciting back-and-forth.
AMIRAH: After you’ve created all this footage, how do you feel about working with an editor at the end of the project, who could potentially change your vision?
KEENAN: I edit my own personal films, like art pieces, but for music videos and commercials, I always have an editor. How it works is I give them the footage, I send them a list of my favorite shots from each, and I walk them through the treatment or the script and tell them ideally what scenes look like and in what order. But the way that I remember things being shot on set is not always accurate. You’ll be like, ‘That scene was so sick.’ And then you watch it later and you’re like, ‘That’s trash and we’re going to need to cut it entirely.’ My favorite thing is when an editor is like, ‘Here’s what you wanted, and here are my thoughts on why this doesn’t work.’ Editors are geniuses when it comes to stitching stuff together. Their brains are wired to just be like, ‘That doesn’t make sense next to that.’ And I like working with people who understand nonlinear narratives, because that’s kind of how my brain works. But you still need to make sense of it in some way. So my favorite is when they do the thing I asked, so I see it and I know it doesn’t work, and then they’ll be like, ‘Here’s what I think.’ And usually I’m like, ‘You’re right.’
AMIRAH: As someone who creates visuals for other people, how do you maintain your self-expression in your work?
KEENAN: So far I’ve only worked with artists who deeply inspire me and who I feel some sort of creative connection with. Hawa is a 19-year-old queer woman, and we’re just so connected. The way that we work feels so replenishing for both of us throughout the process. And she trusts me implicitly, so I feel a lot of creative freedom. I’ll listen to one of her songs and I’ll be so inspired by it, and then I’ll come up with an idea and I’ll pitch it to her, and almost every single time [she’s] like, ‘That sounds amazing.’ And then we’ll brainstorm together and we’ll make something we’re both super proud of. That’s a dream situation. It’s not always like that, obviously. But usually I spend a lot of time getting to know people before I start pitching to them. So with Tkay, an Australian artist I worked with last year, she is so endlessly interesting and has had such a fascinating life. I just asked her hundreds of questions about herself, like things that sound mundane: What sports did you play in high school? What was your favorite color when you were 15? What’s the thing that you like the most about your brother? I got her to send me hundreds of photos of herself as a kid. And then I, like, go in, you know? I’ll ask her all these questions and she thinks they don’t really make sense, and then I come up with concepts that are inspired by very specific things in her character.
AMIRAH: You’re like a psychiatrist; you’re using that same muscle.
KEENAN: Yeah, that’s a good diagnosis.
AMIRAH: Connecting patterns in someone’s life.
KEENAN: It’s fun. I also think people don’t ask young women what they want enough. Like her older music videos and things she’d done, she was happy with some of it, but it didn’t feel like her. And I was like, ‘Did anyone ask you what you wanted and how you felt about that? Do they know anything about you? Or did they just look at you and project an idea of what you should wear?’ Which I find is so stupid and lazy.
AMIRAH: How do you overcome your own fear or nervousness about embarking on a new challenge?
KEENAN: I’m not nervous at the beginning of a new challenge because I’m a very optimistic person. And I know I have a huge imagination and that we are all full of ideas. So that’s not scary, that’s usually the best feeling ever. And the problem with that is that I’m so excited and optimistic in the beginning that sometimes I set the bar really high for myself, and I think that we always should, but by the end of the project is when I start to get the anxiety. It’s usually, like, right before we shoot I get anxiety, because I’m like, ‘I don’t even remember what my original idea was anymore.’ There are so many no’s to your questions. Most of my ideas that I pitch are 80 times the budget when I send them. Someone will be like, ‘This music video sounds fantastic, but this is a $500,000 music video and we have $10K.’ And you’re like, ‘It’s fine, I’ll just cut a few thing here and there,’ and then you trim it down and it’s not the thing that you pitched.
AMIRAH: What are some of your influences right now?
KEENAN: The airplane. I like the idea of being trapped in a plane with my laptop. I can’t go anywhere and all I can do is write in those moments. I started this new challenge where I’m just trying to write a screenplay, and I don’t care if it’s bad.
AMIRAH: What’s some advice you can give to someone who wants to start creating video content for their business?
KEENAN: What I would do for someone else, and what you can do for yourself, is think about what the brand or person represents—like their core things they represent—and then ask myself what sort of creative pillars come out of that. If you know the audience you’re trying to reach, then what aesthetically are you trying to say that feels like self-expression to you but that also communicates with those people? And then I like to make constraints and barriers for myself, because I think it’s good for my creativity to not just have total free range on everything. I’ll make a list of things I don’t want to do. So, like, maybe if you always shoot in color, literally just [create] a list of colors you like to use. Just sort of make rules for yourself, and then it makes you feel like you actually have more freedom. Because then you’re looking at a page of colors, and you’re like, ‘Wow, I already have a creative vision for this whole thing.’
Then I’ll build a deck out, with the style, the visual language, maybe some little concepts of what types of video content I want to make, even if it’s, like, really loose and totally not linear. Like you have a Rolodex of images that go through to a track, or the sound of someone talking and you’re flashing through people that inspired them. Those probably aren’t good ideas, but that’s a concept. And then another one is small interview bites. What does it look like? What kind of questions do you ask? And then from there, you’re going to be able to make the things because you know what they are already and you know what you need. Build out a brand identity, a creative direction deck that talks about things you like, and it can be something that you build over time. Also it can look like shit if it’s just for you, but I personally love to make them look pretty, because then you get really excited about it yourself. You’re like, ‘I can do this for sure.’ And it’s also easy for you to get other people excited when you have slides that you can share with them about it.
AMIRAH: What was one of the last things you Googled recently?
KEENAN: Let me look... A sea slug.
AMIRAH: Huh?
KEENAN: Sea slug. I really love them. And I was talking to someone about them, and we were like, ‘What would you become if you drowned?’ And she was like, ‘I think I’d become a mermaid,’ and I was like, ‘I think I’d become a sea slug,’ and then she was like, ‘Okay, that’s gross,’ and I was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, they’re works of art.’ Have you seen them? They are truly works of art. They’re so beautiful and unique. And the color palettes are inspiring. Like what the hell? Imagine if you had a dress in those colors. I’m like, ‘These are cute dresses, are you crazy? These are fashion girls.’ Look at that fashion dress, with the trim. My next concept is going to be inspired by sea slugs for sure.
