the method maker.
prashant vallury, aka the hyphenate one
i try to live life as a living, breathing embodiment of calvin and hobbes.
every day ripe for adventure.
i was often in my head, daydreaming, which meant that teachers found me frustrating and disruptive. and like everyone else in this class, i was an easy mark for bullies.
that led me to ping pong between honors classes and detention. hating school. and as the son of a strange and wonderful marriage - a mom born in india but raised on the south and west sides of chicago and a dad who never planned to immigrate to america but has called the chicago area home for nearly 50 years - my experience was shaped by people who grew up in different worlds but shared a fundamental perspective. be good to others, always.
in trying to be good, i could be awful. playing the bully back. engaging in the minor crime capers that were common amongst my friends - mostly stealing baseball cards from the supermarket. nothing gave me a sense of belonging. i had two ways of battling back against the bullies and the growing sense that i didn’t belong - i could daydream like none other and shut the noise out. or i could make people laugh.
sophomore year of high school was the year i cracked the code. 1997. some friends and i decided to make a movie instead of a book report.
suddenly, there was a path to expressing the things i had learned in spite of the teacher’s belief in my fossilized brain. that first film was awful. but it lit a fire. and it gave me a reason to look forward to coming to school.
by senior year, i had a small crew - a dedicated cinematographer, i was co-writing, directing, and unfortunately, starring in a series of short films that by the end of high school led to packed premiers where students from other classes were granted special permission to skip their class and see the latest short film from my merry band of outcasts. i would find ways to ace the assignment by integrating spanish vocabulary into the plot of a james bond spoof. turning a boring lesson into a ridiculous dive into slapstick. teachers would pull me aside and say “do whatever your voice tells you to do. but don’t tell anyone else that i told you to do this.”
i thought i would be a writer. of film. my classmates were convinced i would be on snl.
i wanted to be a writer. nothing more.
but as a latchkey kid raised in a family of scientists, i filled out my college applications in secret - checking the “other” box for my intended major and writing in screenplay. my guidance counselor missed this time in my life because she was pregnant. her substitute was old school. a great guy who didn’t know me at all. so i just visited him as an excuse to skip boring classes.
so film school was something i learned about once i had nearly graduated from Illinois with a degree in journalism.
and by that point, i was fully possessed by music. touring with my band. flirting with major label deals. awards. possible mtv reality shows. touring the world - playing for our military. those journeys led me to strange places like guantanamo bay, where i had my life threatened on more than one occasion by soldiers who thought i escaped camp america. these were never stressful situations. just premises that i would explore in music. characters that were represented by instruments.
i took another detour and went to law school, thinking it would buy me three years to figure out music. i was a terrible student who somehow managed to pass the hard tests and remain enrolled in spite of yet another counselor’s expectations. i studied european common law in the czech republic. i went to israel and palestine to study human rights. and again, added a few more life-threatening experiences. i took my camera on these trips and reengaged with photography and on occasion, instigating chaos and filming it.
but these were hobbies. i fell farther and farther away from doing what felt natural to me - a collision of all my creative skills. writing screenplays allows me to think like a musician. inject my absurd sense of humor and ground each tale in the values instilled in me from my bifurcated upbringing and my time traveling the world.
i started my own law firm and grew it with some partners for whom “shady” doesn’t even scratch the surface. I quit and embarked on a wandering decade as a freelance artist. i shot music videos. stumbled into being a dp on two documentaries, and found myself finding the set and the moving image as worlds that i felt natural in. i’ve spent 15 years working on one album. one that i hope to finish in the next few months.
and it wasn’t until i was in my early 40s, a father of two young boys and married to the world’s most wonderful human, that screenwriting found me, again, in the form of an instagram ad that broke up my doomscrolling.
my goal is to celebrate the glory of human expression. to write stories that plumb deep themes without preaching our punching down.
today i make mini documentary films profiling people and missions that color outside the lines. that think about community instead of maximizing shareholder value. that laugh at convention in pursuit of a better path forward.
this has not only been a way for me to pay the bills, but a way for me to collect new characters. to explore greater truths. and to piece by piece, put together the kit i intend to film my next movie with.
Our Films
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short documentary films, made by listening first.
based in Evanston, IL. serving the globe.