“What’s in A Name? – A Versace Story”: Interview with Terence Gordon – SB Originals

Terence Gordon attended New York University’s film school. After graduating from Film, Video and Television directing at NYU, he attended Karate International Film Action Camp to study screen action and stunts.

Born and raised in Harrow, England, then schooled in Guyana, Terence then came to the United States in 1987. He then furthered his directing education by studying in person with Judith Weston (author of a director’s intuition) and later with Mark Travis on directing actors.

Terence was also mentored by former DGA Vice President & Director Gary Donatelli, at ABC’s daytime drama “One Life to Live“. Over the years Terence has developed an uncanny eye with versatility and flair needed to successfully direct numerous, cross-genre projects which include music videos, commercials, feature-length films and documentaries. He is also the creator of the Youthful Ambition YA brand and series and co-owner of TnG Films LLC and Black Ink Pictures LLC.

Here’s Some of Our Conversations with Terence Gordon Watch the Complete Interview above!

Welcome to ScreenBinge.com today we have a really special guest Terence Gordon.. he’s a film and Tv director and producer and I’m Adrienne Mazzone welcome Terence!

Hey! thank you very much Adrienne for having me here absolutely this is exciting.

Let’s let the audience get to know Terence um Terence can you tell us a little bit about what made you get into directing.

What made me get into directing? Wow! Well, it’s I started around uh 1999 so sort of a latecomer to the game. I would say you know most people; you know their story is… my dad bought me a high camera and I was making movies in the backyard with my brothers and sisters but well that wasn’t my narrative.

I sort of introduced myself I guess um to film at a young age but I don’t really realize it um from movies like uh Kramer vs Kramer and as a kid and what I do remember from movies like that was just that I connected to it on an emotional level and not realizing what that was. I just knew that here was a movie that I saw and it was kind of different from a lot of the other movies there were some old movies like um Cornbread Earl and Me with Lawrence Fishberg that probably nobody’s ever seen but it had these really cool scenes.

I remember this one scene about you know these guys were making a bet and running across this lot um…you know to see if he can get to his apartment building from buying this soda pop and they were on the lookout for… um someone had just stolen something and the cops matched this identity to this kid that was running across and he got shot.

And I just remember how the scene was shot and how he fell to the ground it was slow motion and so although I didn’t realize what I was seeing before me in terms of how I was connecting to a lot of the material I just knew that I was connecting with the material and as I got older and you know went down the wrap of you know my first college degrees were in engineering and working in corporate America and my bosses said you don’t really want to be here you kind of want to be making films.

Because at that time we were doing pocket PCs I don’t know if you remember that yeah building guest. Yeah, well Bill Gates since the bomber had brought their pocket PCs because Microsoft had the operating system on those to Morgan’s family and our integration engineer group was doing the engineering and integrating it into the business and we had to deliver a CD because Bill Gates was at Morgan Stanley and Steve Baumer’s giving a presentation and I made his whole mission impossible little video to have the CD delivered to the fourth-floor auditorium for this presentation and I had the guards I had you know some of the employees and we were doing this whole mission impossible thing just to deliver a CD so my bosses say you know that’s right where you need to be.

So, they said you know what we’ll let you go to school you know if I took the train from midtown you can go up to um to downtown Manhattan to NYU I got into the directing program there and I’ll just go back and forth as long as I was able to complete my work. My wife at the time said you know if you can do it just go to the best school and that’s kind of what I did and you know the rest is history.

That’s a great story wow! You really have um some interesting background there, what school did you wind up going to?

So, I went to NYU film stuff yeah with my college degrees before was in the Cuny Ba program so I was literally going between hunter college Brooklyn college city college and Medgar Evers college but my degree came from the graduate center and that was for my computer engineering stuff but when I went to

film school I went to NYU they had a directing program it was actually like a masters in film and something but they did this whole certificate course those two years from the master’s program in directing specifically and that’s what I did I just did the straight directing section of it for two years um had some really good quite a bit.

So why don’t you tell us a little bit about some of the projects you’ve been working on and directing or producing? What you’re actually doing with the projects?

Okay um well as of late um you know I’ve been you know some of the documentaries I’ve been working on um and a few of them that I just got back just minutes ago from um from Maryland, uh shooting um a documentary that’s a docu-series uh not titled yet with Billy Hunter um… Billy Hunter uh you know just a wonderful guy he was in the Versace documentary.

Alfredo Versace which is you know an incredible story about you know Mr. Versace and his life and building a legacy and then you know just to have his name taken away from him because of trademarks and competing and um and maybe him not keeping things the way in terms of accurate records in a certain way that you know that maybe the law expected and you know and fighting against that tied has you know resulted in him losing $ 250 million dollars of revenue a year and losing the rights to his own name um but you know the man still stands he’s still creative and you know we want to tell a story that’s in his own words.

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Mohid Moosani

Moosani is a night owl who is either binge watching his favorite shows or scribbling on his notebook writing short stories. Often showing up late at work and gulping down 6-7 cups of coffee is his usual practice.

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