Josh Clinton: Hey Mateen.
Mateen Kemet: Hey Josh, how are you doing?
JC: Pretty good. What about you?
MK: I’m good.
JC: Good. So you have a pretty interesting background, can you explain more about that?
MK: Sure, in what capacity?
JC: Well you were on Wall Street at one time, weren’t you?
MK: Yeah, I initially was in the financial industry as a bond trader. During my undergrad study, I was an economics major. I then worked on Wall Street for various investment banks for 5 or 6 years. Then I left that business to go back to school to teach and work with kids. Community service is something that I have always been involved with. Anything dealing with social justice, if you will. That lead me to pursue that as an activist and working with kids. So I was doing that, but in the mean time I was starting to go to film school, but I didn’t realize it would take so long to get in.
JC: Why did you get into filmmaking then?
MK: For two reasons really. One, I feel like I have something to say. I wanted to come in and have commentary on the world as its unfolding and as I see it. I think film is a good medium for me to do that. In another life, I probably would have been a novelist. But in our society, we don’t read.
JC: **laughing** Right.
MK: So it would be great to write a book, and I still may hopefully before I leave the earth. But really for what I want to say, film is probably the quickest medium to get that message across.
JC: Yeah. So you did go to film school?
MK: Yeah, I went to Chatman in Orange County, California.
JC: Okay. Some people on the show didn’t go to film school at all. Do you think that really matters?
MK: A filmmaker is part practitioner, part artist, part visionary. There are just certain things that you have to know to get through school like setting shots up and the various shot angles. Typically you learn all of these things in school. But you don’t have to go to an official film school. You can go to a library and get books and read about it. Isn’t that really like school as well?
JC: Yeah, right.
MK: So when people say they don’t go to film school, that’s fine. But it doesn’t mean that they haven’t studied the craft. I think that film study is real important, but how you get that study doesn’t really matter. For me, I’m an academic. I’m good at school. School is very important to how I learn. I’m not a guy who can read a manual and know how to program a computer. That doesn’t work for me. I have to be in a structured environment.
JC: Right. How did you hear about On the Lot then?
MK: I heard about On the Lot through a friend. I wasn’t even going to apply until my friend told me to check this out and that I should apply. I had a short film called Silence that had won a lot of awards and had been through the festival circuit. But I was just about ready to hang it up and put it on the self, because I was trying to finance my next film. Then this show came about and I still wasn’t sure about it since it was reality TV. But my friend was like “what could it hurt?”. I said there was no way I would get on the show. There are going to be only looking for these kinds of people. I finally got convinced, though, and the next thing I know they were calling.
JC: Yeah, that’s cool. Talk a little bit about the environment of the show. Are you guys secluded from everyone else or how did that work exactly?
MK: Yeah, we were sequestered. Basically, there was no contact with the outside world. No television, no internet, no phones, no texting, etc. Basically, we had to live in a bubble. So for the time we were there, we all bonded and most of us became friends. We were either working together or talking about films. We couldn’t take a walk by ourselves. We couldn’t be alone at all. If one of us went to the store, we all had to go.
JC: That sounds crazy.
MK: Yeah, it is.
JC: If you could, would there be anything you would change about the structure of the show?
MK: Yeah, I mean this sort of thing has never been done before. This is a very extensive project. There are three different people involved. You have Spielberg with Dreamworks. You have Mark Burnett with the reality television aspect of the show. And then you have FOX, which is straight television. So in hindsight, I guess I would try and condense the partners and be a more cohesive unit. In terms of the actual mechanics of the show, I would have liked a little more cinematic perspective from the judges. I would have liked to have seen a film critic as a judge. Have that element with critiques based on more of the technical aspects of film as opposed to the emotional component, which I think is what the judges were looking at. How did that film make them feel instead of this shot looked good or it would have been better shot this way. That’s what they did at the beginning with Brett Ratner and John Avnet. They were very technical. That was great that we got to learn from those guys.
JC: Yeah, that’s cool. So I’m just wondering, how many times a day do people come up to you and say “hey you look like Spike Lee?”
MK: **laughing** Man, if I had a dollar for every time someone said that to me, I would be a very rich man. It’s really funny, if you ever saw us together we actually kinda look alike in the fact that you favor someone, but if you put us together we really don’t look alike. I guess I remind people of him and I guess I talk like him a little bit.
JC: Yeah, how would describe your style of directing? Do you take a page from Spike Lee or is it like a mixture of different people? How would you describe it?
MK: We all have our influences. Spike is certainly one of my biggest influences. But I’m also influenced by David Lynch and some of the Italian realist directors. I like a lot of older films and you can tell by the choice of stories I like to tell. I really like to get inside the actors. So older films take more time to get into that, because there weren’t special effects back then. So I have a lot of different influences for sure. But if I had to coin a term, I would say my films are culturally eclectic with a sense of conflict. There is always some conflict in my films, there is always a cultural connection, and there is always some weird stuff that has happened. Something that is bizarre. It’s something out of the element. Some character that doesn’t belong. There is always something that makes you say “huh?” That way you ask questions. I want people to ask questions. I just don’t want to give answers.
JC: Exactly. Your horror film, Profile, did just that. It wasn’t a traditional horror film. It seems like you had a message you wanted to get across. What was your motivation for making that kind of horror film?
MK: Well, going back to your last question, I want to make films that challenge my audience. I don’t want to dumb everything down. In this competition, most of the films were comedy even during horror week. It was always something light and comedic. That’s not where I’m coming from. I think film is a medium that you can use to talk about real issues. So if you bring it up, it will be talked about. That film is still probably the most debated film on the entire show. That’s what I wanted. In my opinion, whether you liked it or not, now people are talking about police brutality as a component of American society. It’s regardless of race or class or anything. You could be black or blue or Latino or Asian or white, people are still brutalized by police. I thought everyone would at least understand the concept. Everyone that has been stopped by the police, particularly an African-American man, would have some form of fear. Horror is about fear. That’s the number one component that you have to have to make a horror film. You have to be scared for that person in the movie. Then there is the component of abandonment and being along. Then there is, of course, the gore component. You have to blood and things that are repulsive. When you put all those things together, you have a horror film. I had all of those things in my film. There are no “monsters”. But many people would say I look like you and the horrible, corrupt police could be the “monsters” that are in many of us. That doesn’t indict all policemen. I think that got misconstrued. I think many people thought everyone is this way or everyone is that way or all police are corrupt. But that’s not what I was saying at all. It is still horror, though, because I know I am scared of the police. **laughing**
JC: **laughing** Yeah, me too. The last film you did was your action film. In many people’s opinion, that was probably your best one. So were you completely shocked by that?
MK: I mean yeah, you are always shocked when you get eliminated, aren’t you?
JC: Yeah, but why do you think you got eliminated then?
MK: To be honest, that is still a mystery to me. I do think that it was a very good film. I think it certainly covered the genre really well. In fact, I thought I had the best stunts of all the films. So really in action films you always have to have good stunts, a good story, and a really capable villain. So I thought I had one of the top three films that week. I don’t know, it was very strange. Reading online, I think most people agree. It was a strange film to get eliminated by. I could have seen people not voting for Profile, because it was so political. But my action film was very mainstream, it had action and it was clever, if I do say so myself. Nobody saw that ending coming. I had a lot of fun with the film. No one really knows how people vote. Unless the judges all agree and love your film, then that kinda sends a signal to the people watching that it is okay to vote for that person. Until people get that confirmation, it’s really up in the air.
JC: Yeah, that makes sense. The five people left in the competition are all white males. Does that mean anything to you or do you think that’s just a coincidence?
MK: **laughing** Are you trying to get me into trouble?
JC: **laughing** No, I’m just asking. The women got kicked off early and now we are down to this.
MK: Well I think more than the fact that there are five white guys left is really the fact that there are five mainstream directors. As opposed to being independents like me and Kenny. We were going to the beat of a different drum. In our films, we were always trying to find ways to go outside of the box. The guys that are in there now are far more into conforming. What they do is very good. They are really good filmmakers and I have no despairing remarks for anybody. But I guess the difference between me and them is that I’m far more independent-minded and my style is a little more independent. So I think all their films are starting to look alike and it’s hard to distinguish between them now.
JC: Yeah, I can see that. So do you have like a clear favorite in your mind for who is going to win it all?
MK: No, I can’t give you a favorite because they are all my friends. I really don’t know. It just depends on what the people are looking for. There will always be Zach as the favorite, because he has got most comforting praise from the judges. Other than that, you have Will, he is a Southern and we know how the South votes in mass numbers. Jason has that same vibe going on as well. Then, Sam and Adam are mainstream cats too and depending on the genre they could keep on surviving. So really there has to be something great to win everyone over. Right now it’s a crap shoot man, I can’t really call it.
JC: I understand. So do you have any projects coming up that you are working on now?
MK: Yeah. First and foremost, I have been commissioned by the Port of Oakland to shoot a film about Oakland, California. That will air at the Southwest terminal at the new Oakland airport. So that is a pretty big deal and will definitely heightened the awareness of my work. I’m really excited about that and is a good opportunity for me. I could be doing that as early as September perhaps. Then, I have a short film called Film or Flower that I have been trying to raise funds for sometime, and I want to do that before he end of the year. Then really I know can do those things, after finding out that I can do a film in a week. I’m in this really hyper work mode and I will continue to write a really fantastic script that I have been playing with for sometime, and hopefully I can capitalize from me being on On the Lot.
JC: Well that’s all I have for you. Thanks for your time and good luck with everything.
MK: Hey man, thank you so much and I look forward to checking out the article when you get done with it.
– On the Lot airs on FOX on Tuesday nights at 8:00 p.m. ET/PT time all summer long.
– On the Lot airs on the CTV network in Canada on Sunday nights at 7:00 p.m. ET/PT time all summer long.
