Philip Thompson ’21 owes a fair chunk of his interest in film to a cowboy and a space ranger. “I watched Toy Story incessantly. By the time I was three, I’d memorized the lines,” he said. “And that’s how I learned how to speak. By age five, I was obsessed with film and television.”
His mother picked up on his interest and bought him his first video camera when he was eight, which he used to shoot skits with friends before posting them to his YouTube channel, which eventually had a thousand subscribers.
Thompson’s work—some of which was made when he was still a student at Ithaca—garnered acclaim. In 2023, Filmmaker magazine named him one of the 25 “new faces of independent film.”
“[Film] is a full creative expression, where you can create a piece that can take an audience on an experience in two hours,” he said. “On TV, you can’t kill off the main character because he must make it to season eight, but in film the main characters can die at the end. It combines, art, writing, music, performance, and design.”
Majoring in cinema and photography, he took classes with Joshua Bonnetta, an associate professor of media arts, sciences, and studies who is credited by Thompson with “enlarging his frame of reference” by eschewing the idea that films are a product and instead exposing students to the work of experimental filmmakers. “He treated movies like art,” Thompson said. “That sounds pretentious, but it shifted the way I thought about the whole [medium].”
During his junior year, Thompson made and starred in a film called I’m at Home, where he played the host of a children’s show who grows progressively more withdrawn due to creative burnout until he ends up staring catatonically at the camera. Since it was shot during the early stages of the pandemic, Thompson wasn’t able to follow the traditional filmmaking path of holding auditions or using varied locations. Instead, he cast himself in the main role and shot the film at a studio space in downtown Ithaca that still had a half-built set. “Because we weren’t [attending classes] in person, there was this sense of creative freedom,” he said. “We didn’t know where this film was going to end up. It’s just a weird art thing we’re going to make.”