TRANSCRIPT
For about five or six, seven, maybe even eight years, I was a filmmaker. I’d like to talk about what it was like being a filmmaker and why I stopped being a filmmaker. I made four documentary films, psychology films on the subject primarily of recovery from schizophrenia and psychosis without medication, without psychiatric drugs. I made my first film in 2007, finished it in 2008, and I pretty much stopped being a filmmaker around 2014. My films all got translated and subtitled in different languages. My first film, I think, was subtitled and is subtitled. It’s all on YouTube now; everything’s there for free, and I can put the links in the description box below. But subtitled in, I think, 20, 22 languages, something like that. The other one’s maybe 15 languages, and the last one, Coming Off Psych Drugs, was subtitled maybe in five different languages.
Well, at first, when I became a filmmaker, when I made my first film, I didn’t say I was a filmmaker. It felt so pretentious, even arrogant. “I am a filmmaker! Hello, my name is Daniel, I’m a filmmaker!” I had a hard enough time calling myself a psychotherapist. People reacted weird. It felt so arrogant and stuffy. “Hello, I’m Daniel Mackler, I’m a psychotherapist,” back when I was a therapist. So I never called myself a filmmaker until the year of 2011, four years into being a filmmaker. I actually started calling myself a filmmaker after a very strange incident, which I would like to share.
I went to do my taxes in 2011, in about March of 2011, and I’ve been going to the same fellow for several years. He was an older man, a very humble guy. I actually really grew to love him. He was a great human being and very, very ethical. Well, as he was filling in the reports for the New York State taxes and the federal taxes, he said, “So you’re still working as a psychotherapist?”
No, actually, I quit being a therapist. He said, “Oh, so what do I put down as your work title?” I said, “I don’t really know what to put down,” even though filmmaker was kind of on my mind because a lot of 2010, I’d spent shooting two new documentaries in Europe, one in Sweden and one in Finland. I’d edited them, I’d been producing them, they were just about to come out. I was making DVDs, my goal being to sell DVDs. I wasn’t putting them on the internet at that point, just little trailers of them, and I would sell the DVDs. I went around the world, lots of different countries and continents, doing film screenings.
Well, he said, “Well, so what are you going to put down? A social worker?” I said, “Well, no, I didn’t really make money as a social worker last year.” He said, “Well, it’s really simple. How did you make your money this year, the majority of your money?” I said, “Well, actually, I made it doing documentary films, selling DVDs. I got a grant that was part of that was income.” He said, “Okay, so you’re a filmmaker.” I said, “No, no, I’m not a filmmaker. That feels so pretentious.” He says, “Listen, your job title is not what you do for a hobby or for fun. You could put down musician or something like that, but if you didn’t make money doing it, then that’s not officially, according to the legal definition, that’s not your title for your taxes. If you made most of your money doing filmmaking, then you are a filmmaker.” I remember sitting back thinking, “Hmm, I guess I’m a filmmaker.” I still felt weird calling myself a filmmaker.
Well, the reason in, I think, 2014, 2015, my income dropped such that I no longer called myself a filmmaker is that I decided I wanted to put all my films on YouTube for free in all these different languages. The main reason being that I was only selling DVDs to rich countries. Well, eventually, when I put them on the internet, what happened is as soon as they were up for free, I lost 90% of my income. People stopped buying DVDs. And why should they spend $30 on a DVD when they can just watch it right there on YouTube? I knew that was going to happen, but still, it was still like there was part of me that, like, it didn’t feel so good. And people said, “Oh, Daniel, why’d you do that? You should have just put them up for streaming and people could have paid a little.” But there was another part of me that said, you know, part it was a few parts, but one big part was I felt like I’d made enough money.
There was just part of me that was like, “What? It’s like, do I have to treat this like a mine in the earth and the stuff in the side of a mountain, and I have to get every little piece of soil out and entirely exploit this mountain to the end? Or maybe it’s just like I’ve done enough.” I’m sure I could have made quite a bit more money. I could have lived a couple more years just selling DVDs and had an income. But there was part of me that’s like, “Daniel, you did it.” I did well enough. I mean, I actually made my living as a filmmaker. I made all my money back. I was able to travel. I was even able to save a little bit of money so that I could live for a little while after I was done being a filmmaker. Not live super comfortably, not buy an apartment, not even necessarily rent an apartment for a year, but have enough so that I could be comfortable enough so that I didn’t have to work for a few months and could just relax and think about my life and think, “Oh my God, what am I going to do next now that this is done?”
But also, by putting them up for free, I could send a message to the world that, look, this is information. All those people who were in my documentary, they didn’t get paid anything. People who told the most intimate things about their personal story, about the most horrible things that happened to them in their life, and I sat there and filmed them. It felt good to say, you know, I made some money, yeah, but now they didn’t make money, and I’m no longer making money, and it’s now free for the world. People can be inspired by these messages and hear the science behind a message that’s often, well, very suppressed by the conventional mental health system. And I felt by giving it away for free, I felt like I was doing a good deed, and that made me feel good. That built my self-esteem.
Also, on my YouTube channel that had all the different translations, because I have a couple of different YouTube channels, on this other YouTube channel, I was able to look at the demographics of who was watching the video, let’s say in Spanish. And what I was able to see is, yeah, people were watching it in Spain, but suddenly it wasn’t like in one year I sold five DVDs to South America and 270 DVDs to Spain. Now suddenly it was like 17,000 people in South America in the last three months watched my videos in Spanish, and maybe a thousand watched it in Spain. And I thought, “Ah, I’m reaching a new audience, people who were never going to buy the DVD, who couldn’t necessarily afford it, perhaps.” And that felt really wrong to me, and now it felt right to me that they could just watch it for free, and I enjoyed that.
And so many of these different languages, just looking at where are people watching this, I noticed I think in all those years of selling DVDs, I sold what, maybe 15 to Africa? And of those 15 that I sold to Africa, it was like three went to North Africa, and 12 went to literally the country of South Africa where people had money. And I realized they sold nothing to all those other sub-Saharan countries and all those countries where people were earning very little money. And now when I was looking at the YouTube demographics, I was like, “Ah, people are watching this all over Africa. People are watching my film in French in the Ivory Coast, in Equatorial Guinea. And people are watching my film in English in The Gambia, and in French in Senegal. And people are watching my film in Sudan, and people are watching my film all across North Africa, in Morocco, and in Libya, and in Tunisia, in Arabic.”
Arabic became one of my most popular languages. I sold a few films with the Arabic subtitles. I sold films to Qatar. I sold films to Saudi Arabia. But now it was like people were watching it in Palestine. I never sold one DVD to Palestine. Suddenly, people were watching it all over, and I felt great about that.
Well, then comes the question of why did I stop making films? I made one last film on coming off psych drugs. I made that because I felt it was a neglected subject in my first three films. I feel like to talk about the subject of psych drugs at all, especially healing without psych drugs, to not talk about the coming off process, the process of psychiatric drug withdrawal, at least acknowledging the horror of psychiatric drug withdrawal and giving some well description of it, hearing people in their own voices talk about psychiatric drug withdrawal, to not talk about that to me was a shame. I feel like I had to make a film about it.
Well, I think about doing film screenings though all over the world. I probably did 100, 200 different film screenings where I sat in an audience, answered questions, was on a panel afterward, had debates, had discussions, talked with audiences about all my films, about all these subjects. I got paid quite a bit of time to do it. A lot of times, I didn’t get paid. I didn’t care if I got paid. I just wanted to get up there. It was a wonderful opportunity. It was practice. It was a privilege to be able to do this. It was amazing to sit and watch my film with audiences of 50 people, 100 people, 200 people—people who cried, people who were angry, people who didn’t agree, people who did agree, people who were grateful.
Well, people often said after my fourth film and after my third film and second film, “You need to do more films. What’s your next film going to be? Do this one, do that,” when they had tons of ideas. But why I didn’t be a filmmaker anymore? Why didn’t I make any more documentaries? Well, the reason for me was that I felt my filmmaking career, if you want to call it a career, I guess it was a career, it had an arc. It had a beginning, it had a middle, and it had an end. The beginning was full of terror, full of self-questioning. Can I do it? Do I have what it takes? Lots of people told me it’s too difficult to do alone. You’ll never make a good product. No one will watch your film. You need to hire a crew. You need to hire this and that. You need to hire professional editors. At the least, you have to take expensive classes, et cetera, et cetera. You can’t do it on that kind of low budget. That kind of low budget will never produce a product that people will actually be interested in.
I internalized a lot of that. That spoke to my own inner voices of fear, of anxiety, that I’m just gonna waste my money, that I’ll never be able to accomplish it, that I’ll be ashamed if I fail. This goes back to my childhood where my parents inculcated in me a lot of fear of failure, a embarrassment. Well, I had all of that going into it. Well, I tried. That was the beginning, and my first film, it did make it. People liked it. I think a big part of it, it wasn’t the best film in the world. There were some clumsy aspects. There were things that I would do over again, but I also feel it was a good film, and I still loved that film, my first film, “Take These Broken Wings.” And I think what I loved best, and I think that’s key with making a film, is choose good content. If it’s going to be a documentary, choose good subject matter. Choose good subjects of interest. Have a positive message. Have a healing message. Have something that’s new and revolutionary. And I knew going into it I had all that. I had great people who were subjects of my film, some people who had never been on film before, never talked about this stuff about their own journey in healing from schizophrenia. Also, I had great access to mental health professionals, researchers, scientists, journalists, psychiatrists—people who knew their stuff and were willing to speak on camera to me. It was a great opportunity.
So even though I was clumsy with my camera and I did stupid things like, “Oops, I forgot to turn the air conditioner off at the back,” or “I didn’t do the autofocus right sometimes,” or “the camera was a little strange or tilted or too close or too high,” all sorts of mistakes like that. Well, you know what? The subject matter was good enough that even though I made some errors—errors being an inevitable part of the learning process—errors being those inevitable errors being so far much of why I was terrified beforehand in parts of me that said, “Daniel, don’t do it. It’s a mistake. You’re wasting your money. You’re wasting thousands of dollars, eight thousand dollars that I put into that first film. You could go out and buy a nice car with that. What are you so stupid to make a film that probably will never make any money? It’ll just bring you embarrassment.” I’m glad I didn’t listen to those voices at that beginning stage.
And what I ended up being is this film that people loved. Okay, some people hated it, but it was a controversial subject. A lot of people didn’t like it because it threatened their professional existence. Even some patients didn’t like it. “How can you tell me that I can recover? I’ve been told for 20 years that I can’t recover, and now I’m so heavily dependent on these medications that it’s very painful to hear the message that you can recover.” And maybe statistically, you would have been likely to get all well from this thing called psychosis or schizophrenia if you’ve never taken medication or if you can figure out how to get off your medication. Many people said I couldn’t figure out how to get off my medication. I saw so many people cry in the audience watching that first film, but mostly people loved it. I heard so many people love it and feel like, “Thank you for making this.” People sobbing in the audience, I could hear them during the audience just crying. Sometimes I cried. That was a privilege, and that was the middle part of being a filmmaker, realizing, “Daniel, you did it. You made it. You figured it out. You are a filmmaker. You can do more.” And I started.
And then what happened is after, oh, I tried to get grants for my first home. No one would give me a grant. Nobody trusted me, especially with controversial subject matter. But then my second and third film, somebody gave me a grant to make this. Someone came out of the woodwork and said, “I like your work. I trust you. I know you can do it. There’s nobody who can do it better than you and do it with your little system and do it with your clumsy little style. Your personalized style works very well with this subject matter.” So it was like the world suddenly was giving me good karma back and saying, “We are going to help you. We’re going to give you a little boost to help you make your films.” Because traveling to Europe, well, that’s expensive, and it’s expensive and scary to do. Make a film out of a backpack—that’s what I was doing. I was dragging all my camera stuff with a backpack. Not easy.
Well, that was the middle stage, and then the end stage came along. I made my last film, and then I realized the reason I became a filmmaker wasn’t to be a filmmaker and to be that pretentious person who walked around wearing cool and odd clothes and had a nice fancy style and said, “Yes, I’m a filmmaker. Nice to meet you.” That wasn’t my motivation at all. My motivation was to share a message, and I realized that filmmaking was the best medium for me to share this message. I’d actually gotten a book published. I’d co-edited a book with a psychiatrist on the subject of recovery from psychosis without medication. It was peer-reviewed and published by Rutledge in the UK. It was called “Beyond Medication,” and almost nobody read it. It was very expensive, and it was very academic. And although there was a lot of good material in this, it was like a lot of academic.
Books kind of dry in a lot of ways and kind of hard to ponder through. Yes, some people liked it. Yes, it got some good reviews. But I realized film is where it’s at. This is where what people care about. This is what people are much more interested in.
So I’m glad I did it. But what I realized is there was an arc. And once I’d accomplished my mission of sharing this message through film, this message about recovery from psychosis, I realized in my heart I was done. It was complete. I didn’t need to go on keep making films just because I built a career in it.
And I think part of what made it easier to walk away, not just from being a filmmaker, but from the title of filmmaker, from the status of filmmaker, from getting invited to do film screenings, from making money, having a mail-order business of DVDs, part of what made it easier is I had already quit one whole career. And that was the career of being a therapist.
That too had a beginning, a middle, and an end. There was an arc to it. And I realized it was time for me to move on and do something new. And if I had not moved on from being a therapist, I don’t think I really would have made those. I wouldn’t actually, I wouldn’t have had such a nice career as a filmmaker. I wouldn’t have reached so many people. My message and the message in my films wouldn’t have been shared so widely. I wouldn’t have been able to use my life to contribute so much.
So I learned that lesson already: when it’s time to move on, move on. And yes, it’s scary to move on and face the blank slate of an open life with who knows what to do.
And I’m now, well, several years into this new life, doing lots of new things. I wrote a couple new books. I put a lot more effort into this YouTube channel. My mind has been free to talk about things other than psychiatry and mental health and psychosis. Instead, I’ve been able to focus much more on a subject dearer to my own personal heart, and that’s childhood trauma and healing from it.