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Rising Stars: Meet Nate Lee of San Diego
Hi Nate, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m a commercial director based in Oceanside, making branded films and commercials for brands like Under Armour, Google, Wimbledon, Roku and Fujifilm. I direct projects for various production companies, agencies, and my own company, Leeward Productions.
I’m flexible on the size of the projects I direct. So I could be behind a monitor with a 30-person crew, or, depending on the job, shooting it, producing it, or cutting it myself. That’s not territorial. I came up doing all of those jobs and it makes me better at the one I do now, because I know what an idea costs in resources, time and attention before I pitch it. The skill I’ve actually built over the last handful of years is knowing when to hand a piece of it to someone who’s better than me at that specific thing in that specific situation. A director who can’t trust the creatives they hire is a liability to their own film.
How I got here is less tidy. I spent my twenties teaching myself filmmaking on travel shoots in the action sports industry, which turned into five years at GoPro and a Creative Director job running their board sports group. I went out on my own in 2017.
The last couple of years have been the most deliberate. I’ve rebuilt Leeward to run like a company instead of a freelance career, and the work has kept getting better, including a Telly Award Gold for Directing Craft on a film for Under Armour. What I want more of now is to work with brands that actually have something to say and aren’t afraid of a creative swing, and who’d rather lean into story than remake the thing they’ve always made.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I like to think of obstacles and challenges as opportunities to learn. There has been a lot of “learning” over the years.
The work got good before the business approach did. My assumption was that the logos would carry me. Land a few big clients, make something strong for them, and that proof keeps the phone ringing. You shoot for Under Armour, for Google, for Wimbledon, and you assume that’s the point where it starts to compound. It mostly didn’t. I’d come off a job I was proud of, for a brand everybody recognizes, with nothing lined up behind it. The gap has nothing to do with talent, and nothing to do with how good the last thing you made was.
What I had to accept is that the business side is its own craft and it deserves the same seriousness as the work. Reading a brief properly and understanding the client’s ask. Balancing my creative dreams for a project with scoping it realistically. Following up without becoming a pest. Staying visible to the two or three people inside a brand or an agency who actually greenlight things, including through the long stretches when they’ve got nothing for you. None of that came naturally to me, and I was bad at it for years.
Fixing it has been slow and unglamorous. In both my directing work and my company, I’ve put real structure behind the parts I used to improvise, and I treat the business side as part of the job now instead of the thing I get to after the job. That’s moved more for me than any camera upgrade or reel recut I ever did. I’ve gotten better, but it’s still something I’m working to improve. If I were talking to someone coming up, I’d tell them the films and the pipeline are two separate projects and you have to actually work on both.