Toronto Film School Valedictorian Anthony Feor Says Chase Your Dream
Published on May 1st, 2014. Last updated April 20th, 2023.
When it comes to a career in the film industry, “If you don’t chase it, it isn’t going to chase you,” Anthony Feor said.
This 23-year-old budding screenwriter has every intention of laying chase to his dreams and encouraging his peers to do the same.
Feor will graduate from the Toronto Film School at RCC Institute of Technology’s Writing for Film and Television program on May 2. He has some big goals for his career, but with perseverance and hard work backed by a complete education from the Toronto Film School, Feor said he has no doubt he has a bright future in film writing.
Feor has been chosen as the valedictorian for the Toronto Film School campus. During his speech at the graduation ceremony at the Toronto Centre for the Arts, Feor said he wants to share some of his optimism for the future with his fellow graduates.
“It is not what the film industry is going to do for us, it is what we are going to do for the film industry,” Feor said. “We just need to get out there and make it happen.”
Feor said he has wanted to work in the film industry ever since he was seven-years-old and his father took him to see the epic James Cameron movie Titanic.
When he was a teenager, Feor would spend hours building sets and creating scenes and stories out of Lego®.
“One day my dad came downstairs and said, ‘Why don’t you start writing some of this stuff down?’” Feor recalled. “So he got me this old typewriter and I just started tip-tapping away.”
Feor started writing his own sequels to movies he had enjoyed. He started reading books on screenwriting and it taught him a little about the format and he would spend his weekends writing his own screenplays.
Originally from Thorold, ON, a little town outside of Niagara Falls, Feor started to set his sights on Los Angeles and realized if he was going to be serious about being a screenwriter he had to go to school and study how to do it properly.
“I’ve always been a big dreamer,” Feor said. “But I knew I had to grow a little bit before I actually got to go chase my dream.”
Which led him to the Toronto Film School in downtown Toronto.
“You can spend your whole life talking about writing or you can spend your time actually doing it and working on it and getting people to read your work, critiquing your work and that is what happened for me at (Toronto Film School),” Feor said.
During his schooling Feor had a couple of the short films he had written made, as well as some of the scenes he penned. He also had an opportunity to table read with actors, act in a film and work with production students.
“I tried to get myself out there,” Feor said. “If you are always improving and working and people see your hard work, I think those are the people who make it.”
After his classes wrapped up in early April, Feor took a trip to Los Angeles to mingle among the bright lights and glamour of Hollywood, and he said it solidified his goal to someday work there.
“It was the most amazing experience of my life so far,” Feor said. “I love how you can come up with so many stories in a city like Los Angeles.”
