Filmmaker Profile: Constantine Papanicolaou
Jan 19 2007 / Park City, UTI grew up in Jersey, 30 minutes or so from the city. I didn’t care much for the east coast. I graduated high school in the spring of 94, moved out to the Bay Area and started college at UC Berkeley in the fall.
I didn’t major in film or anything like that; I was actually an Applied Math major. I was into other things though. I spent my weekdays geeking out on the computer and my weekends shredding pow up in Tahoe. 
It was around 96 or 97 that desktop digital video started hitting the consumer market. I remember walking through Fry’s in Palo Alto one day (I used to love killing time at Fry’s) and noticed a video capture card that allowed me to record video from a VCR into my computer. I had been into ski films for years so I bought this capture card and started editing ski footage that I had shot with an old Super-8 camera. The next year, after I finished my degree, I moved up to Tahoe fulltime with the grand idea of being a ski film director.
I spent two seasons in Tahoe and directed two ski films. People seemed to like the films, but I was jaded. My parents were on me pretty hard about getting a life, and I couldn’t figure out how to make enough money to support myself doing films. I sold out and moved back down to the Bay. It was the height of the Dotcom boom. People were paying serious cash for guys that could program a computer, and I got sucked in by the easy money.
I worked as a software engineer for four years, first in SF for a few startups, then for Amazon.com up in Seattle. It was brutal. Working at Amazon was especially rough, wearing a pager, getting woken up at 3AM to fix software glitches, having to stay home on holidays and weekends in case something went wrong. I tried to pursue film projects in my free time, but I didn’t really have much free time.
In 2003, I left Amazon and went back to school at USC to get an MBA. It was the best decision of my life. Making a film is easy; it’s making money of a film that’s the tough part. The MBA is like a philosophy degree in capitalism, and it helped me get over my business issues from years past directing ski films in Tahoe.
During my final semester I produced and directed a short narrative film titled "The Flying Cross" about a young skier who tries to become a member of a secret society of hardcore locals. “The Flying Cross” won the best short film award at X-Dance 2006 and gave me the opportunity to direct Tanner Hall and CR Johnson in this year’s X-Dance film “Show & Prove”.
That’s about it.
CP: Los Angeles, CA
Lat34: Age?
CP: 31
Lat34: How many years have you been
CP: The word filming dumbs it down, please don’t use this word for me.
10 years
Lat34: Favorite location to shoot?
CP:British Columbia
Lat34: How many films have you made?
CP: 5
Lat34: What is your Current project(s)?
CP: Tanner Hall in “Believe”, August 2007
Lat34: Athletes or teams you’ve worked with
CP: Oakley, Red Bull, Tanner Hall, Seth Morrison, CR Johnson
Lat34: Favorite
CP: I’ll give you some of my favorite films/directors instead?
“The French Connection”/William Friedkin
“The Thomas Crown Affair”/Norman Jewison
“The Conversation”/Francis Ford Coppola
“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”/George Roy Hill
“P-Tex, Lies & Duct Tape”/Greg Stump
“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”/Peter R. Hunt
Lat34: Are you excited for 2007?
CP: Sure.
Lat34: What’s one thing people should know about life?
CP: Stay alive long enough to procreate.
