In the Gobi Desert, the thrill of shooting an ultramarathon rapidly devolves into the problem of surviving in a minus 10-degree Celsius wilderness, where a sudden sandstorm smashes the camera into 30 pieces, which needs to be fixed right now.
Next up: A shot requiring an expensive, highly sensitive camera to be dragged through a roaring fire—lens and all—without completely destroying it. Experts are consulted, the lens manufacturer is asked if this is even possible. “ABSOLUTELY NO!! DON’T DO IT—EVER!” they say. The shot is done. “Awesome, right?!” the director gushes.
The focal point of all this madness is Scottish producer-director Matt Brown—featured in his own Meet a Scientologist episode on Scientology Network—a man who thrives on the impossible, rides it like a bronco and eventually tames it before going on to his next project that can’t be done.
“I think it’s about doing things that nobody else can do,” he told Freedom. “I think that’s the thing that I love. It’s that problem-solving in the creative arena. It’s doing those things that are really hard.”
Matt Brown’s MO is: He sees something he likes, decides he wants to do it, decides that he can do it and then does. It’s a rather guerrilla way to live, but that’s his style. Like how he got into the film and TV industry: He showed up on set and made tea for everybody. “I worked across every single department. I was desperate to get an understanding of how to make films. After about six months of doing that, I kind of realized that the people that make all the money in film and TV are the producers. So I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll be a producer!’
“And it was just basically me in a tiny, horrendous office in a converted lighthouse. And at that point, I was like, ‘I’ve got a business.’ I had no idea how to start it, but I was like, ‘We’ll have to start somewhere.’”
And start somewhere he did—employing people, shooting band videos on location, running through the streets filming, then quickly editing, employing more people—until, at age 23, his big break: filming and doing production work on the Scottish TV series The Green Room. He was, as he describes it, “living the dream.”
And then it crashed.
When Matt is told, “Nobody’s ever managed to make it work,” he responds: “We’ll make it work.”
The parasites he’d surrounded himself with sucked the business dry while his business partner finished off the job, running off with all the money and leaving Matt £2 million in debt, homeless and nearly bankrupt.
It was then, at the very bottom, that he confessed his problems to a woman named Gillian on their first date. She told him she was a Scientologist and that Scientology might provide some of the answers he was looking for.
She had him read The Problems of Work by L. Ron Hubbard. “It was amazing how I read the first page and I was like, ‘This is my life, this is what I’m going through,’” he says. “It was like, ‘Here are some of the solutions that I can apply to fix that.’ It changed my whole viewpoint on who I was and what I could do and what I could be.”
Rejecting the idea of bankruptcy, Matt attacked his financial catastrophe the way he attacked other impossible tasks: head-on. He took every job that came his way and some that didn’t—knocking on doors, doing work no one else would do. The one thing that kept him going was, “I wanted to create a stable environment for Gill, because when she met me, I was like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve lost my house.’ She stuck by me through everything and supported me, and I wanted to make sure that I would always be able to be that stable person for her.”
Matt still attacks his life and his work guerrilla-style, but with the firm grounding of Scientology Technology, the application of which has helped him raise a family with Gillian and build a thriving production company, Matt Brown Productions, to support his impossible-but-actually-possible projects.
The latest can’t-be-done project involves 24 cameras in the cloudy, damp and limited daytime of the Scottish Highlands, all cameras coordinated and “talking” to each other, taking photos at five-second intervals to cover a construction crew spread out over the length of a road as they expand it from one to two lanes.
“Our job is to install camera systems in the middle of nowhere that will document the construction of that, which is incredibly difficult because there’s no power,” Matt says. “We’re in Scotland, so there’s no sunlight. So in the night and the winter there’s snow, there’s ice, it’s minus 20. It’s like: How do you get these cameras to work and function?”
As Matt tells the construction people who’ve hired his team to film in these impossible conditions, “We’ll make it work.” And then, when Matt is told, “Nobody’s ever managed to make it work,” he responds: “We’ll make it work.”
Matt has been making it work over a career that now spans two decades, encompasses 55 countries and includes 800,000 still shots and some 3,000 video projects.
“Using the tools and the Technology of Scientology, it’s allowed me to really follow my dreams and to flourish and prosper and to create and to be an artist,” he says.
“I like one day being in the mountains and the next day being in a studio, or one week being in Afghanistan, the next day covering something in glitter,” he says. “My job is just to capture that and to show the world.
“And THAT I really love.”
