- Michael Aloyan is an Armenian filmmaker who was raised in Los Angeles. Born to Armenian immigrants who fled the nation as it was shaken by war in the face of the Soviet Union's collapse, his father was an ambulance driver (a graphic designer back in the home country) and his mother was a social worker (an aspiring concert pianist back home). Enthralled with films from a very young age, and supported by his cinephile father, he started making stop-motion animated films with his dad's Hi-8 camera at the age of eight. With his father serving as character artist and Aloyan writing the scripts, the two built the clay puppets and miniature sets together.
Over the years Aloyan shifted towards live-action filmmaking. Seeing his passion for storytelling, his mother got him his own camera for his thirteenth birthday. That summer, he gathered his friends and made a 45-minute film. Aloyan rented out a local theater and charged $5 for admission, screening to a sold-out audience. He took the profits and invested them into making another film (an hour-long film noir) over the following school year. He continued to shoot shorts while in high school, casting his friends and classmates in a variety of films. His younger brother, Arman, began composing the score to all of his films. In his senior year, Aloyan directed a short called "Subhuman (Untermensch)", which screened in over a dozen film festivals, winning several international awards and acquiring distribution in over 40 countries across the world. In his sophomore year of college, Aloyan penned "String", an original TV pilot that he optioned to 20th Century Fox Television before his 20th birthday.
A graduate of UCLA's MFA Film Directing program, he has been a finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Academy Nicholl Fellowship, Warner Bros. Television Writers Workshop, Disney/ABC Writing Program, ATX Television Festival, and his most recent work, "The Dive," was a featured script on The Black List.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Renee Missel Management
- Some of his favorite films are The Godfather Part II (1974), Some Like It Hot (1959), La Dolce Vita (1960), Goodfellas (1990), Inception (2010), Apocalypse Now (1979), Babel (2006), Mulholland Drive (2001), No Country for Old Men (2007) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
- Parents: Karren Aloyan (father) and Vardui Tigranyan (mother). Siblings: Arman Aloyan (brother).
- One of his biggest influences is Martin Scorsese. In his high school years, he spent countless hours studying Scorsese's films. Other major influences are Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, Alfonso Cuarón, Denis Villeneuve and Paul Thomas Anderson.
- The music for his films is always scored by his brother, Arman Aloyan.
- [on Scorsese]: His films are not just stories and plots. He handles his characters with so much detail that after you watch a Scorsese film, you walk out of the theatre feeling like you personally know Travis Bickle or Henry Hill.
- When you look at the masters of film, like Hitchock, Scorsese and Fellini, what they are doing is leaving behind a study of the time they lived in. Filmmakers are like historians. It's up to us to record our generation.
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content