Colin West is here!

Colin West is an award-winning writer & director from a cul-de-sac in Ohio now based in Los Angeles & NYC.

His feature film credits include LINOLEUM starring Jim Gaffigan & Rhea Seehorn, which world premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2022, and DOUBLE WALKER co-written by and starring Sylvie Mix, which was released in 2021.

His films have been screened internationally at festivals including SXSW, BFI London Film Festival, Fantasia, San Francisco International Film Festival, among many others. He was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Cinema prize at SFIFF in 2022 and was an Annenberg Foundation MFA Fellow at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

You can see the trailer for LINOLEUM by tapping the banner above.

Hey everyone!

Welcome to this little week-long journey into my filmic inspiration…

I had such a great time putting these clips together (really (it took me forever)) — every clip on this list is a direct inspiration for my latest feature film, LINOLEUM, which comes out February 24th only in theaters. You can see the trailer and screening times here: https://www.linoleummovie.com/

So, uh, okay, let’s do this!

Let’s start things off with the beginning (or rather, A beginning).

This is the opening title sequence of Lola, an incredible film by the unmatched Jacques Demy. The whole movie is no doubt worth a watch, but this setup is so wonderful — deliberately staged to start a mystery… Who is this man, clearly an outsider, arriving in this coastal town?

The first two minutes of a film are simply the most important and this introduction hooks me to no end. But Lola also inspired Linoleum in a different way — it was a big inspiration for the ensemble structure of our film.

Though the introduction scene in Lola is good, it just gets better and better from here. It unabashedly jumps around in time with overlapping narratives that intertwine and weave together a tapestry of a place and tone — my goal with our film.

If I can make a film half as good as Lola in my career I can die happy.