- Hi there, my name is Jeremiah Wenutu, and I wrote and directed "How to Live With a Friend If You Have To".

So "How to Live With a Friend If You Have To" is a pseudo how-to video that explores the trials and tribulations of living with a housemate, from everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, to how we grow as people.

So at the time that I made this movie and I wrote it, I was looking back retrospectively at years of living with friends in my early 20s, and I wanted to kind of explore what it is to have this relationship with a housemate that's completely different from any other friend you might have or relative, it's like, it's its own biome relationship you have with someone you live with.

So I started looking at, okay, what are the things that, you know, are the great things about living with a friend?

What are the terrible things?

And, ultimately, how does it affect us and affect each other?

And while compiling that list and sort of looking at it, this narrative started forming, which eventually would become "How to Live With a Friend If You Have To".

So we were supposed to shoot it in 12 days, and being that we were all working filmmakers, constantly busy, it took three or four years of principal photography and then COVID hit.

But I think that allowed us to do something really unique and interesting, which was also watch each other grow and evolve as we were making this movie.

So it holds a very special spot in my heart.

Our production company, West from Center, was based on where I lived at the time on West Center Street in New Paltz, and it was formed with my two friends, Steven Teeter and Matt Brunner.

And Matt Brunner actually came to be a roommate, ended up not being a roommate, but we ended up making this movie together.

And tragically, as we were in the final legs of editing, our good friend Matt Brunner passed away very suddenly and it was a big surprise.

And that was very, very tough on all of us because we, of course, worked so closely together and we have such a strong relationship as friends.

So we had to try to figure out, you know, how do we finish this movie, you know, and really do our best for Matt?

So this film is dedicated to Matt, Matt Brunner was loved by everyone in his community.

He worked at Marist and had friends and colleagues in the film industry and the city and here, and the outpouring of love as we were making this movie was tremendous.

So this is for Matt Brunner and all of his friends and family.

We hope you enjoy it and we love and miss him very much.

"How to Live With a Friend" has not seen much audience yet.

It did get to screen with the Asbury Shorts Concert in Rosendale last year, which was right when we finished actually editing it and putting it together.

So it was the first time seeing it in front of an audience and I think it's always fantastic to sit way in the back and just kind of watch and see how the film is being received and what resonates 'cause on paper as a filmmaker, I'm like, "Oh, this is funny to me, will anyone else get this?"

Or, "Oh, this is something me and my housemate have had, is this universal?"

And I was delightfully surprised to see that there was a lot of laughs at like familiar concepts and mechanisms of their relationship and their storyline.

So, so far we've had a lot of universal similar feelings from various audience members relating to our movie with their own lives.

So as a filmmaker, that makes me very happy.

Typically, I do like to direct or act, but with "How to Live With a Friend" I decided to take on both, mostly because there was only a handful of us that were part of this film and we sort of divvied up roles.

So my friend Steven Teeter, who also served as our executive producer and prop master, is also the roommate in that film.

So really it was the ragtag three of us running through and kind of making it up as we went, and we decided, you know, our schedule is so crazy, we don't know when we're gonna get shoot days, let's just play the main characters so that we don't have to, you know, confuse and traumatize any poor actors.

We also had, of course, we did cast, we had Ryan Orso, who is our narrator, and we had a day in the studio with him, directing him, and he did the whole narration.

And it was really great to just step away from the camera for that one day to just focus on directing.

And it is a bit of a task to try to focus on the whole picture while also focusing on what you're doing.

I think I'm gonna try to stick to either just acting or directing, but for the sake of "How to Live With a Friend", it all worked out magically somehow.

So I've worked on some bigger pictures as well, I do, as part of my day job, I will act, I'm a SAG-AFTRA actor, as well as set dress and do art department.

And there's this interesting thing that happens when you get into a bigger and bigger production where everyone is very specifically, they do exactly what they were hired to do, and you have a lot of team members, there's like 100 crew, 200 crew, everyone has their job.

And when you rewind and you go all the way down to the, you know, three person team we had for this short film, there's almost surprisingly a little bit more of like breathing room and a breath of relief, because there's not a strict, okay, this day is gonna cost $500,000, we have 32 background, we need to hit this and this and this.

We could really like take our time like, okay, today, we're doing these scenes, we're here now, let's have fun, let's play with it, let's see what we like, let's explore with the camera.

And, you know, Matt had shot lists and we put together an entire animated storyboard before this, and we had a lot of meetings to kind of discuss what we wanted the film to look like and how we wanted the shots to play, how we wanted it to edit together with the narrator, with the voiceover.

So before we even had our first shoot day, we were very like all well versed in what our final image was gonna look like, and had an idea and then would come to the table with, "Ooh, you know what I think would help that as well is this and that."

And sometimes we'd like run out and like get a prop in the middle of the shoot day because we thought it'd be really funny.

That's kind of like the joy of passion projects, I think, and these DIY short films is no one's getting paid, you know, you're all here just for fun, you're here, you're doing it because you love doing it, so you don't have to meet anyone else's expectations but your own.

We did an Indiegogo campaign for "How to Live With a Friend" and as part of the perks I would mail out to donors, I wrote a letter, just like a thank you letter signed by all three of us.

And at the very bottom of the note, I remember writing, "I hope you laugh, I hope you cry, I hope you watch it with the person whose dishes are in the sink," and that's kind of my sentiment for the film.