Swiped Right Too Many Times: an Interview with Veronica Lupo
18 year old Romanian film student makes short film highlighting dating and relationships in 2020
Tell us about your background and background in being a filmmaker. What’s your story?
I was born in Romania, but I moved to New York when I was 13. I've always been into film and photography, but I really started my passion in film when I was about 14. My passion started after watching the movie A Beautiful Mind and ever since then it's always been film for me. Throughout high school I studied Fine Arts and now that I’m in college, I study film at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Where do you get your inspiration from when making films?
In general, it's really all from real life, and from my friends. I always try to hear people’s stories about life. I think that's the most important thing you can do for film. It's the real stories and real people that inspire me.
Do you plan on going into the film industry? Do you know what you want to do in the future or is this more like a hobby?
No, this is definitely what I want to do for a very long time. It's where I see myself being. I'm learning writing and I want to continue doing this for a long time. I'm planning on continuing my studies and then just starting to work and make as much as I can.
Do you know specifically what you want to do?
I really want to continue going into writing. I'm also very interested in cinematography. I mean there's so much you can do in film.
How was the process of creating your short film, Tell ‘Em?
It has been a very long process. I started writing the script back in November, and it took six months to come to a final draft so I went through about 11 different drafts of the movie. I was getting feedback and changing the story up including the characters so I think the longest process was definitely writing it. The writing took the longest part but the casting was also a big part of it. I got about 300 people who wanted to be in it.
It took about a month in itself figuring out the right kind of people. After the casting there was figuring out the location. That was something more difficult to do in New York City because it was quite expensive. It is very personal to me and I wanted to make a location to be the room of a teenage girl so we ended up doing it at my house in my actual room. I had a lot of my close friends helping me along the way and my aunt is a script supervisor so she was helping us with that. Pre-production was very long and complicated but it all came together in the end. All the actors were amazing and had such great chemistry. I don't know how it happened and it was kind of like a miracle that they all had chemistry. It was just so great between them that we actually felt like they were friends for such a long time.
Did you pull from personal experiences when you were writing Tell ‘Em or did just you come up with the idea?
Yeah, absolutely, actually the way the idea originally started was after a breakup. I went through a period of experimenting and trying to figure out my own identity. And let's just say the experiences I've had were disappointing so I started being interested in this whole idea of love, dating and romance especially with people who are young. So I was more attentive to the stories my friends were telling me and people surrounding me and I took on all these frustrations that all of us were relating to and that's how I wrote them. It is all very much inspired by my own experience and my friends' experiences.
How do you think your short film portrays adolescents and teenagers today?
Well my hope is that with this short film, anybody can relate to at least one small thing in it. It’s a story about bad experiences that lead to growing up and what it means to be a young and to be a teenager learning from shitty experiences. I want people to know that finding your identity, dealing with love, and hookup culture is part of growing up and helps you figure out who you want to be. One important thing for me was to show diversity because I wanted to make it true to life. I wanted to show different ideas, different sexualities, genders and races. I wanted to show them all together through this one thing which is friendship, which was the theme of the whole film.
Do you have a favorite part in your short film?
I don’t want to say I have a favorite part because they are all my favorites because they’re all very personal. The whole story means a lot to my friends and I so it’s hard to choose because they're all so different and personal.