Sam Mirpoorian’s short film, Safe Place, gained the immersion and admiration of its screeners at the 2023 Austin Film Festival winning both the jury and audience awards for documentary short. The documentary about the mistreatment of Jerod Draper in a Southern Indiana jail brings awareness to drug use and addiction as well as the darker side of corruption within the disturbing case of Draper.
AFF Short Film Programmer, Samuel Garcia, recently sat down with Mirpoorian to discuss his experience and drive behind making the documentary short, his experience with the Austin Film Festival, and his biggest influences and inspirations behind his passion for film.
Samuel: Okay, so we’ll go ahead and just start off with some introductions. Go ahead and tell us your first name and your film that you had screened with AFF
Sam Mirpoorian: My name is Sam Mirpoorian and I had Safe Place play at the 2023 Austin Film Festival.
Samuel: Can you let us know who some of your favorite filmmakers are?
Sam Mirpoorian: I would say some of my favorite filmmakers span between the fiction and nonfiction space. I really am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson. Man, the list goes on. Jesse Moss, I really enjoy Ben Proudfoot’s work also, I’m just trying to think. Ava DuVernay’s great. Luke Lorenzen. I mean, I admire peers that are around my age and also some of the legends. Stanley Kubrick, obviously Francis Ford Coppola. I mean, the list goes on, I feel like I missed so many.
Samuel: Yeah, it’s always tough when you’re surrounded by such awesome movies in the world. Speaking of which, was there just a certain movie that you had saw that made you have that moment of “Aha! I want to do this for my career?”
Sam Mirpoorian: That’s a good question. I feel like when I get asked that, it’s really hard because I feel like every experience I ever had in the cinema so many things would resonate with me and leave a profound impact where “that’s what I want to be, that’s what I want to do”. I remember something as silly and as subtle as going to see the Jimmy Neutron movie. I don’t know, 15 years ago when I was 12, 13, 14 years old, I wanted my parents to buy me a tool set. I wanted to learn how to make stuff like Jimmy Neutron. And so I think with every movie I would see Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, all that stuff growing up, it just has a lasting impact on you. And I feel like it’s not necessarily about the subject matter, it’s just about actually experiencing storytelling in such a masterful way. And so I think that ideology subconsciously just burned in me over the years, and it eventually just resulted in leading me to where I am today. So I feel like I’d like to hope and think I’m on the right path, and it’s been a fun ride so far
Samuel: So let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about your film Safe Place that you had screen with AFF. What was the driving force behind making Safe Space?
Sam Mirpoorian: The driving force behind making Safe Place was a lot of different reasons. I would say for one, the Midwest is full of such interesting stories and topics that a lot of individuals maybe don’t really think about. The Midwest is considered a flyover country if you will. So I think it was an opportunity to really highlight a very dark, profound, twisted story on the criminal justice system that ripples through the United States, like these kinds of issues and stories happen all the time across America. And so I had an opportunity to tell it in a microcosmic way, and I’m grateful for the support and the executive producers that I worked with that really helped. Jason Stevens really helped guide me to that point of making it happen and I wanted to hopefully tell it in a bite-sized way where it wasn’t too traumatic for an audience. I feel like if it was a feature, it’d be a lot more difficult to digest. I think a 20 minutes short was really sufficient, and I hope we’re doing impactful stuff, which is great. We screen with public defenders, we screen with attorneys. We’ve had some impact events, which is really great to have some conversations with service providers in the mental health space and the law enforcement space and in the legal space.
Samuel: Tell us about how it feels to have that film premiere in all these different spaces, knowing that the story is such a really personal tale for everyone involved.
Sam Mirpoorian: I would say it’s hard to not get wrapped up in premieres and accolades and awards and stuff like that, but it’s ultimately somewhat the nature of this business that we’re in. I think it adds validity and it’s affirming when a project does carry weight of Vimeo staff picks and awards and screening with such a prestigious festival like Austin is. I mean, I remember 10 years ago when I was in my late teens, early twenties submitting a couple projects to Austin. And so it was a really cathartic experience to play with Austin and to win at Austin. It was amazing. In my social media posts, there’s a picture of A DVD from 2000, I don’t know if you saw it as from 2013, it was my debut feature. We had to submit our films through DVDs back then. And I’m not that old, I’m only 30, so I think I had to do this when I was like 19.
Samuel: In terms of the end product, was it fully what you envisioned it to be? Was there any kind of changes that came over the course of producing the film?
Sam Mirpoorian: That’s a great question. I mean, I think with docs, especially with features, my debut Greener Pastures, was a much more intense thing. That was over a five-year period as a feature. So with a short, I think those issues still persist. But working with Brenton, who has a great eye, wonderfully talented dude, we talked about execution. We didn’t really scout anything, which was really funny. We just waltzed into these locations. He’s masterful at crafting composition depth, and he wasn’t very happy with a couple of the things that we had to work with. But he made it work really well. It was just me and him. We didn’t have a crew, we just kept two people. So it was incredibly light and lean. We’re doing the roles of four or five different people through the sets and through the shoots, which is how I wanted it because we’re telling such intimate, vulnerable details of a very traumatic story and incident.
Samuel: You do a great job throughout the short film. where nothing ever seems too overwhelming while also getting a good sense of all the different angles at which this event happened. That being said, how did you decide what narratives you were going to follow while you were building out Safe Place?
Sam Mirpoorian: Yeah, that was interesting because a lot of the magic for Safe Place happened in the edit. I know that we wanted to interview all of the major players and the deposition footage. When I say the edit was where the magic happened, it truly was because that’s where all of the archival material came into play with the isolation cell footage, obviously where everything happens, the police dash cam footage where everything is seen, how he gets arrested, and then the depositions. The depositions are really what pulls everything and ties everything together. From a production standpoint, we just shot the interviews. We shot probably 13 interviews, 14 interviews in seven days. And in the film there’s only 6 or 7 interviews. So we interviewed a pathologist that worked on the case. We interviewed an FBI agent that teaches at University of Louisville. I mean we quite a few people that didn’t make the cut.
Samuel: Where do you see yourself going down the line over the next few years? What are some of your next immediate goals?
Sam Mirpoorian: That’s a great question. I hope to be healthy. I want to prioritize my mental and physical health and wellbeing. Sometimes it’s difficult to do that when you do projects and work in film because you put projects ahead of everything else. So I want to continue to prioritize my health so that I can continue to do this stuff. I’d love to keep doing docs for another five to 10 years. I love to do features, love to do shorts. I am hoping to maybe get a feature or short in production this year. And then I’d love to maybe start diving into some fiction stuff within the next couple of years. I’d love to be able to do both, bounce it back and forth between both. And I want to learn to continue to master the craft of storytelling. And I feel like I have so much more to learn and understand, and I hope to continue to screen with the Austin Film Festival with any project I have. It was a great experience and I just continue having fun doing it.
Samuel: That being said, is there anything currently that you’re working on that you’d like to just give a shout out to or a highlight to?
Sam Mirpoorian: Yeah, I know that I submitted a new doc short that I collaborated with my dear friend Adam. It’s called Saving Superman. I think it’s a 10-minute short. It’s much happier than Safe Place. It’s a happy piece about an autistic man in a Chicago suburb that dresses up like Superman during their town parade. So it’s definitely a joyful piece. We started submitting two months ago. So I got that out in the world right now. I have a narrative short that’s out in the world that was my second crack at narrative. It’s not the best. I want to get better, so my expectations are kind of low for that. But I want to definitely get something in production within the next, I hope, three months. It’s an itch. I want to get back out in the field and start doing stuff. I miss it. And I took last year to travel with Greener Pastures and Safe Place, and it was a fun year and I’m ready to get back to work.
Samuel: Having an itch for just getting back out there in the film world, do you ever feel like a certain goal or just a point where you’ve made it in terms of what you want to do as a filmmaker?
Sam Mirpoorian: Yeah, I think everyone’s goals are very different. I think for me, I do have goals for myself. I think some are more vain than others, obviously. I’d love to be able to play at certain festivals. Honestly, playing at Austin was such a surreal full circle moment because I had been submitting, probably five or six projects to Austin before Safe Place. And I started doing it when I was 18, 19 years old. Getting into Austin, was just a huge win. And then to actually win the Grand Jury was absolutely nuts. And to see Cord Jefferson, Damon Lindelof, I grew up watching Lost. So it’s surreal. I mean, even just being there, that experience was amazing. But if I’m lucky enough in my lifetime, I’d love to be able to make 10 to 20 really great movies, and I just hope that I’m on the right trajectory. And those are the goals I guess I have. And just want to keep doing. It’s just fun. It never feels like work. You just feel like you’re doing the right thing and you love it.
Samuel: That’s all the questions that I have prepared for today. Do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers before we part ways?
Sam Mirpoorian: Yeah, I would say I’m an adjunct instructor just this semester only at my alma mater, Indiana University and I am 30, so these students are 21, 22, 23. So they’re not that much older than me, but I try to really provide a certain level of knowledge and experience to them because I didn’t have that. And I really emphasize the things that I’ve learned at festivals and just being in this space for five, six years now, and I think Austin was just a really great experience. I feel like I try to just, and if whoever’s watching this, if I can share that kind of knowledge, just believe in yourself, keep working hard, keep doing what you’re doing. And there’s always periods and moments where you’re making a project and you have imposter syndrome or you doubt yourself or you’re like, WTF, what am I doing? What is this? And that is a very normal common thing. I just want to emphasize, if you ever have self-doubt that you feel like it’s a waste of time or it’s not the right thing, keep going. Because I’ve had that feeling several times on every single project I’ve ever worked on, and most of the time, always, 99% of the time ends up working out. So I would say for anyone that is struggling with that or is lost or ambivalent about what they’re doing, or it feels like they don’t know how to proceed forward, just keep going. It usually always pans out. And it’s very normal to have anxiety or self-doubt when you’re in this space. That’s just the nature of being in film and honestly being creative, or any kind of creative endeavor.
Watch the full short at the link below.