We recently had the chance to connect with Brandon Lowe and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Brandon, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: When was the last time you felt true joy?
I think the last time I felt true joy was when we got to watch one of our films on an actual theater screen, in front of an audience.
Back in January I joined the IFCKC (Independent Filmmakers Coalition, Kansas City),and as soon as they announced their first big film challenge (The 1 3 5) I signed up and started working on a story we could tell. I don’t know how this came to me, but we ended up on a story about this disfigured teenage boy who is a burn survivor. He’s heavily bullied by the school baseball players. But who doesn’t bully him is a girl he meets named Vienna, who just like him is disfigured. She’s missing her legs, and his face looks like a burnt pizza, which lands him the name PIZZA FACE. Together they learn each other’s darkest secrets.
Anyways yeah, that played in a theater full of people, and it felt so freeing. We had so many fears going into it about mistakes we made, and insecurities we had about it possibly being a hot piece of garbage ripped up by raccoons and left on the sidewalk by the trash can it once lived in waiting to roast in the morning sun………
But all of that went away the second people actually started to react to the film. They were laughing in the right spots, they were groaning in disgust exactly where I intended them to, they were confused as all hell…….it was beautiful……………. And now no matter how much time has passed, we’re the Pizza Face people…………….which honestly……I’ll take.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
Hi! I’m Brandon Lowe, yes like the hardware store…… but before you ask, I prefer Home Depot or Menards……………
I’’m an artist and Filmmaker, but let’s be for real, they’re the same thing. And I try my absolute best to be an actor. Listen…..I CAN DO IT!! I swear!! I feel like I’m pretty convincing……..but just don’t expect much range from me…….lol………. Wait is it unprofessional to use lol in an interview?? Here I’ll try again……. But just don’t expect much range from me……..laughing out lou…no it just doesn’t work…….no one who says lol is actually laughing out loud….. anyways I’m off topic…..YES!! I’m a filmmaker. Technically you could say Film director, but I feel like I do way more than that so I try not to use that label. But I’m heavily inspired by Goosebumps the tv show, and vintage horror movies. I love the old look of movies like The Evil Dead, or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I wish I lived in a time where I could make a film like that, just raw painful filmmaking in a time where a lot of things were still very new to audiences. I want to give people those feelings with what I make, it’s typically something you’ve seen before, but I try my best to make you feel like you’re watching something new and you never know what’s going to happen next. I hate to settle for less, because less usually means boring. Which I strive to never be.
Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
100% lack of communication……………… Now I’m not going to pretend like I’m a perfect saint who always speaks my mind. But all I’m saying is, a lot of issues through out my life were caused by the lack of communication. I try my absolute best to talk through any issues I have with people, whether they caused it, or I did (usually me) as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the longer you’ll both be miserable. It genuinely irks my soul having to watch friends ignore each other for things that could be easily fixed if they told each other their sides of how they feel. I have to stop myself from trying to fix it myself with the info I’ve received from both sides. But I will say it’s interesting to observe humans in this state of life. It makes movie plots where problems are caused by no communication or misunderstandings so much more believable.
Is there something you miss that no one else knows about?
I can’t necessarily say no one else knows about it, because everyone was a kid once. But I miss the innocence of being a child. The creativity that soared through my veins when I was left alone in my own world. I 100% had friends growing up, but for most of my early childhood my friendships never left school. It wasn’t until like 5th grade I actually had friends who came over and made weird things with me. But before that if i wasn’t with my grandma (NaNa), I was by myself with no limits to my mind.
I had neighbor friends at one time, but they got taken away by a swat team.
I’d make dark caves in my room with blankets and big rolled up carpets that acted as crevices/ tunnels I had to crawl through.
I got really into Egypt at one point……for some reason……… so I turned my walk in closet into an Egyptian tomb . It had “torches” on the wall and hieroglyphics. I built a sarcophagus that also acted as my toy box. I would lay in for hours, and just think, imagine, dream.
I once turned my entire room into a wizards lair after I became obsessed with Wizards Of Waverly Place. I painted bricks on my wall accompanied by a dungeon door. I’d make “potions” and I had every spell from the show written down and memorized. And I created a top secret language that had its own dictionary.
On the theme of being obsessed, if we fast forward to middle school, I became obsessed with being a spy (secret agent) after watching that old tv show Get Smart. I’d carry around a briefcase with random things I could need like drink coasters, and toothpaste (this was IN school by the way). Much like Maxwell Smart, I had my shoe rigged up to open up on the bottom……but it wasn’t a telephone down there, it was a dental floss dispenser………….the door was held on by a screw which stabbed my foot 24/7 for months. My jacket had a working clock built in alongside a radio, every pen I could need, and a calculator. We recruited other secret agents with these badges I got from the dollar tree. The school stepped in and stole all of our stuff claiming I was running a GANG…………
I was obsessed with puppets in 3rd grade, I always had them on me. Low-key…….I miss Fireman Dave……Mr seahorse……. And Blah Blah……….. my teacher at the time was furious about it, she hated I had them in my backpack even though I wasn’t playing with them.
It led to meetings where she expressed to my grandma and the principal that she thought I wasn’t normal, and I was underdeveloped. She said it made no sense for a boy my age to be playing with that. My principal. Dr Bird. (Who also helped my grandma adopt me) Shut her down and said she thinks boys playing with “dolls” will make them more gental and better parents in the future. She wasn’t happy…..how much you wanna bet shes a die hard republican?
I know this is already too long, but I wanna leave this off by saying, these earlier years is when I became fascinated with making films. The second I got a hold of a camera, I was making what ever came to my mind. I had a miniature living room I built in my closet where I made my own knockoff episodes of the Gumby show. I’d take it on the road sometimes when NaNa would sneak me into work. I’d make the episodes on her flip phone while she paroled a building, and then I’d show her the videos when she was done. In my mind there was nothing I couldn’t do, and I was so naïve that I believed I’d be famous by the time I graduated………..if only I knew how much work it would actually be.
I miss how simple and exciting it all was.
Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. Is the public version of you the real you?
Yes and no. I’m not afraid of admitting every part of my life, baring it all in front of hundreds of people. I do my best to be real. But I feel like a catfish. I used to have a lot of TikTok fans, and I don’t know if they’d still think I was hot if they knew how fat i actually am below the camera. It’s not even that go out of my way to hide it………most of the time………..but you just genuinely can’t tell from the shoulders up, or the…. crotch…down…. Here’s what I think happened……….so I have Marfan syndrome……… it basically makes all your joints double jointed, and often gives a curved spine, which I had straightened, but it also makes every part of you lanky and thin. HOWEVER………despite the majority of my family being skinny, that all goes down the drain when you consider my Grandpas genes….. his genetics causes anything it enters and creates to be BIG. Like big big, So I believe the Marfan syndrome and grandpa Kenny’s not so Sydney Sweeney genes, are fighting each other for first place. And that’s why I look like a skinny tall dude wearing a fat suit filled with potatoes.
My voice also goes deeper than it is when making TikToks, but I swear it’s not on purpose.
Okay, so let’s keep going with one more question that means a lot to us: If you knew you had 10 years left, what would you stop doing immediately?
For 6 years I secretly thought I was dying of some disease. I was too afraid to tell people, and I was afraid of knowing for a fact if I was really dying, because I thought I’d become empty and un motivated. But just in case I lived every day making sure I’d be remembered if my time was really limited. No matter how dumb a project was I pushed through like it was the greatest thing ever, there was no room for error (although there was a lot…or errors) I was so afraid of dying before I could finish and release films I was working on, so I stressed myself out working 24/7 on things to make sure they’d get done.
Every day of high school was like my own personal one man show. If I was gonna die, I wanted people to never forget me………….. which is pathetic….I know….but not as pathetic as me truly believing I was dying, because of poor dental hygiene that left me with tonsil stones, and what I could assume was the start of my body developing a poison ivy allergy.. there were plenty of other dumb reasons, but none of them mattered because it was never real……………..I finally broke down and told a bunch of friends who made a doctor’s appointment for me. Probably the scariest 20 minutes I ever spent waiting on a doctor. A doctor who finally informed me after 6 years that………I’m a delusional idiot, who was just obese and unbelievably un healthy.
I spent all that time counting down the days google said I had left…………….6 years worrying for nothing, and not only that, worrying the couple people I let in on the secret along the way……………
So how about this…………….. if I knew for a fact that I was dying in 10 years…………. I would just live……… live like it was any other day, every day, until my mind drifts away for eternity. I mean don’t get me wrong…..the job search would end immediately…………if anything I think it would be cruel to make a dying person work for the rest of their 10 years.
I’d probably stop taking things so personally, and let things go more. Last thing I want to do is get into an argument with my girlfriend where she accidentally tells me to drop dead, and then I do the next day….Id hate for her to have to deal with that guilt that could of been avoided if I just let her be right for once.
(Disclaimer that was a completely fake scenario, she would never)
But most importantly I’d make films that I’d be proud to be my last, things that people can find in years to come and fall in love with, find peace with, relate with. I wanna know that my last works are the embodiment of my self, making it impossible for me to ever truly die. But all of that pretentious stuff aside, I just wanna have fun…………… not everything needs to be perfect and it’s ok if I don’t finish a project, things are left unsaid, never to be said all the time………my work will be no different.
The difference between this scenario and my real life experience, is I didn’t know how much time I had………….with this I’d know exactly how long. So why worry about it……….I can’t change it, all I can do is make the best of it. Which honestly………. Is just life in general.
Make the best of your life and have fun…..you only get to do it once.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weird_brandon_lowe?igsh=Zng0MzBybmJvc20x&utm_source=qr
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@beetvproductions?si=k-kmxM73zPnbQxtd
- Other: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-make-our-first-feature-horror-comedy-movie?utm_medium=email&utm_source=product&utm_campaign=p_email%2B4803-donation-alert-v5
