Filmmaker Jonathan Blank on filmmaking, educating kids, and why the yellow snow may actually be banana flavored

(An interview we conducted with Jonathan while he was in between visits to his shaman.)

Filmmaker life: Tell us a little about yourself?

I’m a filmmaker, educational software developer, and circus runaway. My career began the moment clowns yeeted me out of a Cirque du Soleil audience and forced me to entertain thousands without pay. Since that fateful moment, I’ve been pursuing creative ventures with the same reckless abandon as a redshirt in a horror movie.

Filmmaker life: How did you get into filmmaking?

My first foray into filmmaking was when I used my dad’s old movie camera to make a short film tackling life’s greatest mystery – if a vampire bites a zombie, does the zombie become a vampire or does the vampire become a zombie. (Spoiler alert: turns out the answer, like so many of life’s big questions, is unknowable.)

I loved making movies and when my college business professor told me that making documentaries was the best way to get rich, I was sold. It turns out that the professor had misinterpreted the data, but the pin had been pulled and there was no putting the genie back in the grenade.

Filmmaker life: Tell us a little about your films.

Among my award-winning documentaries are “Collecting America,” about the joys of conspicuous consumption, “Sex, Drugs & Democracy,” about the cold war between morality and freedom, and “Sex, Drugs & Bicycles,” about the benefits of spicing up democracy with healthcare and exercise. I also made “Anarchy TV,” a comedy about kids who love freedom of expression and taking over TV stations.

Filmmaker life: And how did you get into educational software?

It was while making a documentary about Holland, that I learned Dutch kids know English better than American kids. In fact, 2 out of 3 kids in America have trouble learning to read, and more than 1 out of 5 adults are functionally illiterate. Tormented by the notion that foreigners were outdoing Americans in the one subject where we have home field advantage, I dove headfirst into the waterless pool of creating educational software. My solution? The Reading Kingdom, an HI-powered (human intelligence) program that teaches kids to read – the idea being that we should use our HI to help children before AI enslaves them.

Filmmaker life: What are you working on now?

Currently, I’m working on a docu-comedy called “Bible All-Stars Reunion Tour.” Using cutting-edge time travel technology developed by a team of students who flunked out of Stanford for trapping fraternity pledges in an alternate dimension, I conducted exclusive interviews with biblical heavyweights like Moses, Noah, and Adam & Eve. Finally, the world will learn where the Garden of Eden apple fits on the food pyramid, how to do the workout routine that enabled Noah to build the ark at 500, and why the word “psalm” is spelled with a “p.” As noted prophet and part-time movie critic, Ezekiel, wrote on MovieProphecies.com “If you’re going to see one movie about the Bible this year, you could probably do worse.”

Filmmaker life: What advice would you give aspiring filmmakers?

My path to success has been “as smooth as silk – if you take into consideration that 20,000 silkworms are boiled alive to make a yard of the stuff. This is because I follow three key principles:

– Diligence – because laziness pays off too quickly.

– Research – because ignorance is bliss and who wants that?

– Cooking with wine (and sometimes even adding it to the food) – because … do you really need a reason to drink wine?

Filmmaker life: What are your future plans?

My mission is simple: forestall the zombie apocalypse while wearing psychedelic sneakers. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I like to create movies designed to help make the world a smarter, funnier, and weirder place. My future projects include a documentary about how tacos can save the world and a concert film about the sound of one-hand clapping. I’m rooting for global enlightenment but buying options on the apocalypse to hedge my bets.