Luke Matheny

During the late 1990’s, the dot.coms were generating mega-money, the stock market was rising to new heights, and college graduates were becoming millionaires overnight. For Luke Matheny, a 1997 graduate of Northwestern with a degree in journalism, getting a job during the internet revolution was easy and the money was good. While living in Chicago, he worked at several places headline writing and copy editing, but he had not committed to any particular career. “I’ve always been a film lover, but I never really thought of doing film. Growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, no one really thought of becoming a filmmaker.”

By 1998, Luke and three of his friends decided to make a movie and shoot it in Paris. The three-year plan was to save all the money they were making and shoot a digital video feature with characters based on themselves. Even though he was making a movie, Luke still did not consider a career in filmmaking. “The whole thing was designed to give us an adventure. It was definitely not a long-term thing for me. It was just somewhere along the process.”

The screenplay about three underappreciated losers from Chicago who quit their jobs, move to Paris, and become street musicians was finished in 2000. Soon afterward, Luke and his friends quit their jobs, moved to Paris, and started shooting the feature in May 2001. “It was weird; we hit the ground and started casting people off the street. We were hanging out with Parisian models. It was like this weird Cinderella experience. At the end of it we were all completely broke and living with our parents.”

They finished editing in 2002, and the film premiered at the 2003 Wilmington Independent Film Festival. “There’re probably 33 funny minutes in it, but we really had no idea what we were doing at all. And at some point I decided that I really wanted to keep doing this.”

Luke applied to the NYU graduate film program and was accepted in 2004. His second-year project, Earano, was based on the Cyrano de Bergerac story. “When I was a kid, Steve Martin’s Roxanne was my favorite movie. I always loved the actual Cyrano scenes of getting language from someone else.”

Luke was faithful to the Cyrano story with one major exception: he replaced the big nose with big ears. This updated version takes place in a library with Earano tutoring three kids and the character’s love interest a librarian. Luke decided to cast himself as the character Earano for practical purposes. “The conception was so simple, it was just easier to do it. If it was longer with a more complex role that a better actor could bring something to it, I would have deferred to that.”

In 2007 the NBR awarded Luke a grant for Earano. The film also won the King Award for Screenwriting at the 2007 First Run Festival, an honorable mention for the Fujifilm Audience Impact Award at the 2007 Angelus Student Film Festival, and won Best Student Short at the Dam Short Film Festival in Boulder City, Nevada.

His NYU graduate thesis film, God of Love, is about a love struck, lounge-singing darts champion whose prayers are answered when he receives a mysterious box of passion-inducing darts. In April 2010 the National Board of Review awarded Luke a student grant and the Marion Carter Green Award for his charming film. Months later he won the gold medal at the 2010 Student Academy Awards in the Narrative category; Special Jury Recognition at Aspen ShortsFest; first prize and the King Award for Screenwriting at the NYU First Run Film Festival; and in 2011 Luke won an Oscar® for Best Live Action Short for God of Love.

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