Young Jewish Filmmaker Celebrates John Hughes in New Doc

Toronto native Matt Austin directed "Don't You Forget About Me," which was released this week on DVD.

By: Ilan Mester
From: ShalomLife (November 4th, 2009)

Not many directors get calls from CNN or receive mention in The New York Times for their very first documentary, but Matt Austin-Sadowski is one of them. The 31-year-old’s film Don’t You Forget About Me is out this week on DVD. It documents his journey along with his neophyte producer friends to get an interview with John Hughes in Chicago.

After the filmmaker behind timeless megahits such as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off died this past August, there was an overwhelming outpour of interest in Sadowski’s documentary. While he wanted people to know about the film and Hughes, he never expected it to happen under these circumstances.

“This isn’t the way that we wanted the film to come out,” Sadowski admits. “It was a tragic turn of events. What we were trying to do in our film is get people to talk about John Hughes again and for him to be taken seriously as someone that really did contribute to cinema.”

Originally, the documentary consisted only of interviews with prominent figures in the film biz, people who were truly connected to Hughes like Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Mia Sara, Roger Ebert and many more. However, when they screened the film to an audience, most of them loved the movie but had two suggestions.

“Everyone kept saying two things, they kept saying ‘I wanna see you guys, I wanna see why you guys are so passionate, I wanna see why you guys put four years of your life on hold for this movie,’ ” shares Sadowski. “And the number one question we kept getting asked was ‘okay, you’ve got Jason Reitman and Judd Nelson, did you get John Hughes?’ ”

Oddly enough, a road trip to Chicago (where Hughes lived) was Sadowski's original plan for the movie. “So we ended up four years later kind of where we began,” he laughs. “Just instead of a school bus it was a van.”

One of the reasons the film took so long to wrap up was the lack of grants they received. “We applied to every kind of grant that’s available to an independent filmmaker, but they just didn’t seem to think it was a viable Canadian film I guess… it’s cliché in filmmaking but the first quarter of the film was spent on our bank accounts and credit cards and going into debt,” says the director, who points out the film wouldn’t be possible without his co-writers and producers Lenny Panzer, Kari Hollend and Michael Facciolo. “It’s a team effort and three out of the four of us are Jewish.”

But with so many directors to profile, why did Sadowski pick Hughes? “His movies for me, personally, really spoke to me in a way that very few movies have,” explains the Toronto-native. “I saw most of the movies when they were brand new releases on VHS and they really spoke to me. Now as a filmmaker, I kind of look at the landscape of other people that are making movies and I really felt like there was a void there.”

Before the documentary came into mind, Sadowski was thinking about making a Hughes-style feature film. “We realized that so many people got it wrong, because what [Hughes] did was amazing and really hard to duplicate in an original way,” says Sadowski.

That’s when he had the idea of making a film about Hughes instead of a film like Hughes. With the release of the documentary, Sadowski once again is considering making a feature film that’s set in high school. You can catch another one of his films – this time a short called “The Butterfly and the Bee” – at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, where it was selected to be featured.

Whether he’s making documentaries or shorts, Sadowski’s goal as a director remains the same. “My goal as a director is to make films that people have conversations about afterwards.”

To continue the conversation, visit: http://www.dontyouforgetaboutmethemovie.com