Edmonton-made short film catches eye of movie director Kevin Smith
Aspiring director Rico Espinoza won a $20,000 scholarship on Monday, along with the blessing of movie director Kevin Smith to attend film school in Vancouver.
Espinoza said it was rewarding to earn the validation of the director of 1990s cult films Dogma and Chasing Amy.
"It's one thing to get the scholarship, it's another just knowing that he saw your stuff and went, 'It's not bad,'" Espinoza told CBC's Radio Active on Wednesday.
Smith personally selected Espinoza to be one of six prospective students to earn a film production scholarship to attend his alma mater, the Vancouver Film School.
Espinoza, 28, was the only Canadian selected for the film production scholarship.
Growing up in Edmonton as an isolated teenager, filmmaking was an outlet, he said.
"I was the son of an immigrant family so, and I say this lovingly, in redneck Alberta there wasn't a whole lot of friends," he said.
"Film was really the only way that I could learn lessons [about] being social and have company," he said. "Eventually, in my late teens, early 20s I started meeting like-minded people who loved art as much as I did."
When he was 21, Espinoza started working in theatre, writing music for the stage and later producing plays. In 2016 he directed the well-received Fringe play Feather Fall.
For years, he said, he wanted to attend film school in Vancouver, but the cost held him back from applying until 2018.
An e-mail he received about the new scholarship felt like a sign, he said.
Smith had created an endowment and three sets of scholarship awards for aspiring actors, writers and filmmakers.
The main requirement for the film production scholarship was a portfolio that included a short film produced in the last year.
That was a problem for Espinoza.
He hadn't directed anything on camera recently, so over a weekend, he wrote a script, gathered his friends together, filmed and edited everything, and submitted his application.
For the short movie Game Night, he drew on inspiration from his weekly board-game evening with friends.
"There are good characters [there], and [good] tropes, so I figured I'd put it all together in a nice four-minute little thing and send it off."
He cast his friends "who are not actors or film people in the slightest," and said he didn't actually expect to be one of the students selected.
"If anything, it was just more for fun," Espinoza said.
But he did have one trick for grabbing Smith's attention: a main character wearing an Oilers jersey. Smith is a well-known fan of the team.
"That probably helped," Espinoza said.
"[Smith] has very well-crafted characters ... and I've tried to do the same thing in this little short film.
"He loves Edmonton and I imagine that the Oilers and their history speaks to him on some level. He is my Oilers. I look up to him. And I my hope to do best by him."
Espinoza is a part of an international group of students selected to receive partial or full-scholarships to cover the $36,000 tuition.
He hasn't decided on the exact date for his move yet, but the one-year intensive program begins in 2019.
He received the call on Monday from the school about finances and he's still waiting on a promised call from Smith himself to officially deliver the good news.
