Hollywood-based producer and director Matt Aaron Krinsky, a 1996 graduate of Peabody High School, will be returning to the area to film his independent movie, “All Saints Day.”
Krinsky, who grew up in Peabody and attended Cohen Hillel Academy in Marblehead, will begin filming in Chelsea this winter. Krinsky has strong local ties to the city.
His grandparents, the late William and Doris Waxman, were well-known in Chelsea – William, as the owner of the Waxman Insurance Agency on Broadway, Doris as a community leader and member of the Chelsea School Committee.
His mother, Debra Waxman Krinsky, graduated from Shurtleff School and Chelsea High School and became a teacher at the Shurtleff School, while his father, Marty, was a beloved teen director at the old Chelsea YMHA on Crescent Avenue. His uncles, Ronald, a board member at Temple Emmanuel of Chelsea, and Steven, a Chelsea firefighter, are still active in the city.
Matt has fond memories from when he was a child and would visit his grandfather William’s insurance office “right next to the fire station.”
“We spent hours there as kids, and also on Cottage Street [where the Waxman family lived],” said Matt. “Those were great days.”
His darkly comedic movie, All Saints Day, is about four estranged siblings from an Irish immigrant family that come back to Chelsea and try to get their oldest brother on to a better path in life.
The story unfolds on All Saints Day, a Christian holiday that is celebrated on Nov. 1.
Launching his Filmmaking Career
Considered one of the rising stars in the filmmaking industry. Krinsky said he “got really lucky” when he was hired as a production assistant at Quentin Tarantino’s production company.
“I observed and learned a lot in that position,” said Matt. “Then I moved on and took a two-year acting conservatory program at the Baron Brown Studio in Santa Monica. I went to one audition and I realized I didn’t want to be an actor. The experience in acting was incredible, though, because now one of my strengths is directing actors. I can speak their language. I understand their process and I have the utmost respect for their craft.”
In 2005, he produced his first large-scale film, “An Eye For An Eye,” starring Sally Kirkland, a past winner of a Golden Globe and a nominee for an Academy Award.
During his career, Krinsky has directed several short films and worked with playwrights to develop new works in theatrical production.
At Brandeis, he set the Foundation to a Career in Film
Matt Aaron Krinsky is a 2000 graduate of Brandeis University, a highly prestigious academic institution in Waltham where he majored in psychology and minored in film studies and art history.
“I was pre-med at first, but during my sophomore year I got an epiphany that I thought maybe I wanted to do something a little bit more creative,” said Krinsky. “Basically, I ended up picking psychology as my major because I thought, how could an understanding of the human psyche not help a film director?”
He also attended a summer semester program in film studies at New York University (NYU).
Off To Hollywood
Following his graduation from Brandeis, “I somehow convinced my parents to let me move cross country to Hollywood,” related Matt. “I had no job, no friends, not a lot of money. My mother and I had an epic road-trip adventure across the country. She helped me look for an apartment for about a week, and then I stayed here, and she boarded a plane back home. That was 22 years ago in August.”
Bringing All Saints Day to the Big Screen
Krinsky said his current film project, “All Saints Day” was seven years in the making.
“It started as a play. I know the playwright and she asked me to direct the first staged reading of it,” recalled Krinsky. “We did one performance and as I was standing in the back of the room, I realized that this play lent itself well to a lower-budget indie film: a small cast, one main location, incredible dialogue, and lots of heart and humor.”
Krinsky said he asked the playwright if she had any desire to adapt the play into a screenplay and do a feature movie and the playwright agreed to join him in the project.
“It took about five years to put the project together, and the last two years, we started really getting ready to shoot it,” said Krinsky. “We’re aiming to start shooting in December.”
Matt Aaron Krinsky, once the little kid who used to visit his grandparents in Chelsea, is now poised to bring some big-time Hollywood excitement to greater Boston. He hopes to shoot some of the film’s outdoor scenes in his hometown of Peabody.