Brooklyn-based filmmaker Christian Hendricks creates intimate short films that are raw, stylish and a little dangerous, capturing a specific kind of queer, creative life in Bushwick. Brooklyn Paper recently sat down with Hendricks to talk about his work, his process and the stories that draw him in.
Hendricks, who has worked in media production for the past 15 years, studied photography in college and gravitated toward portraits and images that depict people in real-life scenarios.
“I was always drawn to people,” Hendricks told Brooklyn Paper. “I thought a lot about what portraits can tell you — but also what they can’t.”
To delve more deeply into the psychology of a single subject, Hendricks ventured into filmmaking, a genre that offered more opportunities to portray humans full of contradictions and nuanced character traits that are difficult to capture in a single still image.
“The thing about people is that they’re filled with contradiction, and that’s hard to unpack in a single portrait. So filmmaking became a better tool for me to start to explore the contradictions that people are filled with,” Hendricks explained. “I think portraiture eventually evolved into character studies in film that really dig into the psychology of a single subject; both of which my first two short films do,” Hendricks elaborated.
Hendricks’s first two short films — shot guerrilla-style in Bushwick and elsewhere in Brooklyn — are part of a trilogy.
His narrative debut, “Keyholder,“ is a 16-minute psychological mystery with a queer twist, starring Pedro Lopo and produced by Ty Dalyrmple.
The suspense film premiered last October at NewFest, New York’s largest LGBTQ+ film festival. It follows a young man who moves into a new apartment and quickly becomes entangled in a series of strange, invasive events he can’t seem to escape — and isn’t sure he wants to.
The opening scene is the only one with dialogue. The rest of the film unfolds in eerie silence, driven by Lopo’s performance, striking cinematography, and a haunting score by composer Carlos Aguilar.
The project was born from a mix of personal experience, cinematic obsession and a spontaneous birthday resolution after rewatching “Gone Girl” in October 2023.
“The first question I asked myself when I wrote the movie was, ‘What am I scared of?’” Hendricks said. The first thing that came to mind was an online stalking experience he had a few years ago.
“It was kind of weird, but nothing happened. But that always freaked me out, that [the stalker] could somehow get into my apartment. That was the scariest thing that could happen,” he explained.
Still, the stalker premise alone didn’t offer enough of a twist.
“It is interesting as a start, but it’s not enough,“ Hendricks said. “So I was like, ‘So what if this happened to a character, but he wasn’t sure if he didn’t like it? What if he was interested in it?”
Hendricks’ second film, “Gains,“ is a 13-minute psychological horror short that recently wrapped production and is expected to premiere on the film festival circuit this fall.
Influenced by “Good Time” and inspired by Darren Aronofsky’s production diaries from “Pi” — another guerrilla-style thriller shot in New York — the film marks a bold new direction for the filmmaker.
“It’s spooky, it’s weird, and it’s kind of ambiguous,“ Hendricks said. “But at the core, it’s about what someone does when something dark happens to them.”
“Gains” follows Phil, a wannabe personal trainer who gets swept up in hustle culture — and gets more than he bargained for. The film reflects Hendricks’ ongoing fascination with hustlers striving to get ahead.
“But not like rich finance guys,“ Hendricks told Brooklyn Paper. “I’m not interested in that. I like real people who are not good at what they do, because that’s more realistic to me. And it’s more interesting when people are messy, impatient and sloppy. Those people are very interesting.“
Hendricks admires Brian De Palma’s camerawork in “Dressed to Kill” and draws inspiration from the high-art “trashy” films of the ’80s and ’90s — movies like “Basic Instinct” and “Single White Female,” which he watched as a kid because his dad didn’t filter what he watched when Hendricks was around.
“So I have real old memories of trashy, pulpy 80s and 90s movies,” he said. “And that was the era that was producing the high-art trashy movies I’ve come to love, like ‘Basic Instinct,’ which I personally see as a prestige film, even though it’s in the gutter in terms of its premise.”
While shooting “Gains,” Hendricks experienced a “fountain of creativity” and wrote his first feature, a gay crime thriller set in New Orleans.
“So that’s actually kind of been a little more of my focus, and so I’ve been trying to get that together to shoot that next year, if I can,” Hendricks said. “It depends on if I can get the funding and find the actors. But that would be my dream.”
