Kansas City artist and filmmaker Jean-Jacques Corbier inside The Ship in the West Bottoms, where he relaxes and visits with creative people like himself (photo by Jim Barcus)
The Kansas City filmmaker, winner of ArtsKC’s 2024-25 Teri Rogers Screenwriting Award sees film as a way to “bring us all together”
“Something I’m inspired by is art and people who normalize diversity of humanity,” says filmmaker Jean-Jacques Corbier, whose script, “High Value,” received the 2024-2025 Teri Rogers Screenwriting Award from ArtsKC.
Humanity is foremost to filmmaker Corbier, whose winning script tracks the efforts of Sherman, a lonely man attempting to overcome his lack of social grace by following the advice of an online dating guru.
Corbier talks about the traits that men are supposed to ascribe to — “being isolated, stoic, mysterious” — as the core of what contributes to toxic maleness and prevents real connection and acceptance of others. “Community,” under this mindset, “is devalued.”
Film, he says, can “bring us all together to combat loneliness.”
This sense of connectivity and his commitment to storytelling have been the foundation of Corbier’s career path thus far. In 2023, he wrote and directed the short films — the poetic “CATharsis” and the ruminative “When I Sit Down.”
Corbier says he “glommed onto screenwriting” while studying film media at the University of Kansas, where he graduated in 2018. In that first semester, he says, “I realized this is what I want to do with my life.” Part of that pivot can be attributed to screenwriter and teacher Kevin Willmott, whose work on the screenplay for Spike Lee’s 2018 film “Black KkKlansman” won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
A salient lesson came in Willmott’s classroom. “A technical skill that stuck with me was the double beat,” he says. The double beat, Corbier explains, is a repetition of a visual element or bit of dialogue that establishes something to the audience as important. And, as Corbier suggests, the practice presupposes the audience isn’t perceptive enough to follow the plot without the hints.
“Studios have algorithms,” says Corbier. “They don’t understand the art. People making it, the artist, the director, etc., know they can trust the audience.”
Corbier honed this belief in his audience when he spent the summer of 2018 working on the PBS docuseries “Flatland.” While working on the show, Corbier met director Morgan Cooper, who was so impressed by Corbier’s questions about the filmmaking profession that he offered him an opportunity to work on the trailer of the 2019 film “Bel-Air.” And Corbier continues making connections by reaching out to others in Kansas City’s arts community.
His latest project is his Instagram series “The Artist Mark,” in which an artist poses or answers a question with their art (www.instagram.com/theartistmarkseries/). In one episode, Kansas City’s first Poet Laureate Melissa Ferrer Civil talks about her discovery of poetry to break out of family pain. Letting people share their stories of how they came to be artists fuels Corbier’s aim to “normalize our differences and fully realize our similarities.”
He mentions Sherman, the troubled character of his winning screenplay. “I think Sherman is pretty analogous to men feeling entitled,” says Corbier, “(to) Women’s attention, time, in worse cases, their bodies. When men get a no, they wonder what’s wrong with the universe.”
To be an artist in times like these, Corbier says, “it behooves us to counteract all that.”
Relationships are essential to filmmaking, and Corbier continues building them as he looks ahead, still inspired by the award and hopeful for Kansas City’s film future.
Corbier says he wants to direct when funds become available, and he has planned a trilogy of short films related to romance. The first part, he says, will be “the honeymoon phase.” The second will be the couple “going through the motions.” And the third installment, he says, will be the “break-up, an amicable one, centered around a game of chess.”
He shares another lesson from Willmott.
“After he won his Oscar, another student and I were hanging out in the classroom, and Willmott said, ‘I like you guys. I’m going to show you something.’ Then he unzips a bag and pulls out the statue and asks us if we wanted to hold it, so each of us did. It made me think about how not to look at awards the way he had it in a backpack in a corner of his office.”
Corbier says, “I want to have an impact other than awards.”
As for the day-to-day, Corbier, who admits to being an introvert, “heaven,” for him, “is an empty theater on a Tuesday.” For Corbier, connecting also means recalibrating, whether it’s walking in a park or taking himself on a movie date. And one-on-one coffee meetings give Corbier the opportunity to process new ideas.
Referring to a recent conversation with a friend, Corbier says he sees himself as an advocate with his filmmaking. “We can be embracing the differences in all of us.” Whatever the screenwriting award yields to Corbier, the receipt of it has given him inspiration.
“I still have a long way to go in my journey,” he says.
