My success really started with a short film I made at TMU.
My third-year thesis film, David Roche Talks to You About Love, helped me figure out who I was as a filmmaker. It won the Norman Jewison Award for best student film in the country and played at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
My first feature, Eclipse, was very low-budget. I wrote it, raised the money for it and it got into Sundance and the Berlin International Film Festival. I then made a second Canadian film, The Five Senses, and that led to more opportunities in television like Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under. Suddenly, I had a career.
Prestige TV
When I saw the pilot for Six Feet Under, I’d never seen anything like it before. Along with The Sopranos and The Wire, it felt like a TV revolution. HBO was creating television that was more edgy, more cinematic, more novelistic than what the networks were doing. I was one of the first independent filmmakers that moved into TV directing. I really believe I was in the right place at the right time.
At that point, I had made two small features, low-budget contemporary dramas. Then suddenly I was asked to direct Rome. I never in a million years thought that someone would ask me to direct a Roman epic in Italy with an incredible British cast and an enormous budget. It was the most expensive TV show at the time at $10 million an episode. I had been making movies for $2 million.
Included in the archive are handwritten notes of Podeswa's, as well as mark-ups to scripts.
Jeremy Podeswa worked with professional artists to create storyboards, like this one from Game of Thrones.
