Steve Dildarian’s short film “Angry Unpaid Hooker” has caused quite a stir in our current touring program. There is dialog in this short that crawls into your head to wait and spring forth at inopportune moments. Lunch with family members: THEM “This coffee is so expensive” YOU “I know, half the blow job money is gone!”.. Ok, I’m not doing it justice but it’s damn funny stuff. Writer and archivist Taylor Jessen chatted with Steve recently and had this to share…
THE ANIMATION SHOW YEAR 4 Theatrical
Steve Dildarian
Animator, “Angry Unpaid Hooker” (2007)
Interviewer: Taylor Jessen
Date: 5/30/2008
Via phone from Los Angeles
Animation Show: A quick life story please, a short precis of where you’ve been and how you got to where you are now?
Steve Dildarian: Oh, I’ve always done advertising until recently – grew up in Jersey, went to Glassboro State and then School of Visual Arts in New York. I’ve forever been doing TV commercials, a lot of beer commercials. Budweiser’s been my main thing for a long time, and then through that, got some other opportunities, and started drawing, and then a bunch of different things that led me to making this short animated film. So, kind of series of events lead to me stumbling into animation by accident, almost.
AS: When did you say to yourself “Good grief, I gotta get into advertising” and when did you say “Hey look at me, I’m in advertising?”
SD: You know, honestly, I knew in high school that I was going to do comedy writing of some kind, and went to college actually to try to get into TV writing, then just kind of switched. I think it seemed more realistic for me to go to New York instead of L.A. at the time. So I thought advertising made sense, and before you know it, I started doing well in some of my classes. So in the back of my head, writing TV shows was always plan A, but once advertising kind of took off, it was hard to turn back. I started doing Little Caesar’s commercials when that was popular – “Pizza Pizza.” Then the Budweiser lizards thing caught on and that ran for years. So, you know, I was enjoying it enough, and getting enough creative freedom, where I never missed not doing TV. You know, a lot of the advertising I ended up doing was more like comedy writing and sketch writing. So I had no complaints.
AS: That’s really interesting that you felt more free. I mean, weren’t the client breathing down your neck at all?
Entire Interview here
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