The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.
Paul Felten '04 is a screenwriter and director based in Brooklyn. He wrote and co-directed (with Joe DeNardo) the feature film Slow Machine (New York, Rotterdam, and Viennale Film Festivals). His prior screenwriting credits also include Burn Country (dir. Ian Olds). A former director of the Olympia Film Festival, he is a Sundance Screenwriters Lab fellow and a recipient of the San Francisco Film Society’s Hearst Screenwriting Grant. He has contributed writing on film to The Brooklyn Rail, 4columns.org, and Metrograph Journal and has taught, most recently, at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
Was there a specific faculty member or peer who especially inspired you while at the School of the Arts? If so, who and how?
Do I have to pick just one? Tom Kalin and Nick Proferes encouraged my best impulses and tolerated my aping-Eric-Rohmer phase. Melina Jelinek gave me the single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard (‘your main characters are always your least interesting because they’re the most like you’). Tom Beller let me crash a prose workshop and offered welcome respite from the screenwriting grind. And Columbia’s where I met Ian, of course. One afternoon we stood by the snack machine and bonded over our disdain for a wretched ‘prestige’ movie that had just screened at the Carla Kuhn series. The rest is history, at least for the two of us.
P.S: I LOVED the Carla Kuhn series.
What were the most pressing social/political issues on the minds of the students when you were here?
9/11 was two weeks after the start of classes. It was a strange time to be a new resident of the city, as most of us were, and we bonded first in surprise and grief and then in collective anxiety about our government’s response to the tragedy. This experience informed a lot of the work we did while we were there. It certainly continues to be a part of nearly everything I write.
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