FEATURED FILMMAKER: WILL WERTZ
Curiosity is at the heart of Will Wertz’s filmmaking.
With a father who spent 30 years in the industry, Wertz grew up around film but struggled to make the connection between his father’s work and the movies he was fascinated by on the big screen. By spending time on sets, he had the opportunity to ask questions and have conversations with filmmaking mentors. “The advice that I received was, ‘if you want to direct, then you have to go make things’,” Wertz recalls. “That’s how you’ll learn. It’s how other people will start to see you as a filmmaker, and it’s how you’ll learn what it is that you actually like to make, which is a really important part of doing this.”
After a number of years working in the commercial industry, Wertz began to explore documentary filmmaking, watching films and imitating the elements that caught his eye in his own work. “That first short documentary I was copying, I saw something and I thought, I want to do something like that,” he says. “So I ended up putting it on and it looked different on me.”
“I stumbled into a voice that was relatively authentic to me, and then I was able to chase the things that I liked about it and that did feel authentic,” Wertz explains. “I kept chasing those things.”
As he developed his storytelling voice and style, Wertz continued to make connections within the industry. When a producer from one of his past projects reached out with a potential subject for a documentary, he was eager to learn more. “Immediately, it started with that curiosity,” he says. “Who is this person? What has he done in his life, and how is that reflected on him? And that’s what led us to this film called ‘Mississippi’s Hands.’”
That subject, Jasper “Mississippi” Travis, left his life sharecropping in Mississippi to find work as a custom sign and mural painter. After years of traveling across the United States - and at one point, across the Pond - Mississippi landed in Indianapolis, where Wertz told his story of resilience and dedication to his craft.
More recently, Wertz’s curiosity has led him to pursue his first feature-length documentary, “Forever, For Now,” which focuses on Jason, a quadriplegic man who has made the decision to end his life by voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. “For me, the entry point there is not a large kind of sociopolitical thing,” Wertz says. “It is this human being who’s dealing with pain, who’s dealing with life and love and family and an experience that is both unique to him and somehow universal.”
For filmmakers like Wertz, Indiana is full of inspiring characters and stories to document. “What’s amazing about leading with curiosity and wanting to tell stories that are more grounded in real world experience is that you are not limited by your location,” says Wertz. “If that’s your mode of operation, then Indiana is a wealth of stories.”
“It’s a very diverse place,” he adds. “There’s a lot to be curious about and to chase here.”
But following curiosity to a documentary idea isn’t the whole story. Wertz says the most challenging part of his work is securing the funding to allow him to complete a project. In Indiana, he says, “there’s not a system of funding to support that from pre-production all the way through production. But,” Wertz continues, “there are places and organizations like Hoodox or Heartland Film Festival and people within those organizations and then audiences consistently coming out trying to support filmmakers and films.”
At Hoodox, we’re on a mission to empower and support Hoosier storytellers like Wertz as they continue to bring their films to life. Our goal is to build up the Indiana documentary film community so that filmmakers can stay curious today and far into the future.
“As a documentarian, I’m curious first,” says Wertz. “And I’m constantly making the space for that opportunity and then staying open to whatever will come.”
Follow Wertz’s work on his website and on Instagram @willwertz.
Photos provided by Will Wertz.
