Photos x Chad X. Ali
Rob Hardy has become a household name as a is a well-known film director, producer, screenwriter, and television director for projects including Stomp the Yard, Grey’s Anatomy, and The Quad. His newfound passion for production is based on his commitment to give back to the next generation of filmmakers through his Amazing Stories Foundation.
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Seeing Spike Lee was the first time I thought about filmmaking. Around that time, Robert Townsend came out with Hollywood Shuffle, so there were like all these Black folks that were coming out doing stuff. My dad was like, that ain’t no real business, so when I went to FAMU, my plan was to get my degree in engineering and transition my summer internships into special effects, because that’s filmmaking.
So we did a movie at FAM called Chocolate City. I wrote it and directed it. We got some kids from Florida State Film School to do the technical, and we got our family you folks to do everything else. So it’s me it’s me, my man Will Packer, Jay Carter, a few other folks put that together. All of a sudden, we were the movie guys. We convinced our parents to let us not get jobs for five years, and we were going to move to Atlanta to pursue this film dream.
I came from true independence, I was just happy to be there doing whatever I could do. That was my mentality at the time, we were starving artists. Will and I grew in filmmaking, and it was our productions. We could hire who we wanted to, so we always had diverse crews. But when I started doing TV, we’re in Adamsville, and this crew didn’t really reflect what the city looks like. I started to notice that then, and what I kept getting was, ‘You know, we can’t find anybody.’ That’s where the seed of Amazing Stories started.
I got intentional about getting good people who want to be trained and preparing them to go into the business. That doesn’t mean just having a program and you get money and you put out numbers, I genuinely want to see this community do good economically through giving its people a job. That’s the intention.
If you are government workers, or in politics, then you can side with that mission and say if you want to shoot in my county, if you want to shoot in my city, we would prefer that you consider X number of people from these programs. We’re not going to force that on you, what we will say is that we’ll give you incentives. So the more of these people that you hire and you pay them, the more incentives that you get. The reason why that’s important is because if I’m just some person coming in from another state, I may or may not care about that community. I do personally, but somebody else may not. But what I do care about is my bottom line. So if you incentivize those people and you’re confirming that these people are trained and vetted, why not? I may not fill my crew with them, but I’ll take one or two if it gives me X, Y, and Z. But again, that’s buy-in from the reps. If the reps are on that, and there are the programs, that’s how you can create a pipeline.
