Isaac Wright Combines Urban Exploring, Photography in Drift
Isaac Wright’s life has been overwhelmed by challenges. Drift seeks to tell the story of those challenges and inspire audiences to achieve the seemingly impossible.
It isn’t hard to find an aerial view of the world’s most major metropolises. The Empire State Building, Shanghai Tower, Lakhta Center, and countless other structures boast perfectly safe observation decks that provide birds-eye panoramas of the cities below. It is much more difficult to reach the true apex of those buildings, to climb to the very top with nowhere else to go but into the clouds. Despite the challenge, this is something that Isaac Wright, known under the artist name Drift and the subject of a new documentary with the same name, lives for.
Wright began coping with his PTSD through self-taught photography after serving in the United States Army. He combined his love of camera-work with urban exploring, specifically seeking the highest points of buildings, bridges, statues, and other institutions, often illegally and always with the intention of capturing unique and heart-stopping images.
“The first time I saw them, I was like, ‘This is absolutely incredible,’’ Deon Taylor, director of Drift, says. “But then when you realize there’s more excitement to his life than that is when you go, as a filmmaker, ‘Oh, I have to tell this story or I have to be a part of the story.’”
Taylor’s filmography is dominated by narrative features, boasting credits like Black and Blue (2019), Traffik (2018), and Supremacy (2014).
“Those features dealt a lot with telling human stories … I know this is a different medium, but I really believe I can tell this story in a documentary fashion,” Taylor says.
Roxanne Avent Taylor worked on Drift as a producer, a role she has filled on many of Taylor’s other films. The two have been married since 2014, eight years after they co-founded their independent film production company, Hidden Empire Film Group.
“When it first came to us, we went to his Instagram and these beautiful photos are just so captivating that it’s really overwhelming, and wondering why the hell he’s up there and what he’s doing was my initial reaction,” Avent Taylor says.
The documentary seeks to answer that very question through footage of Wright’s adventures and interviews with the man behind the camera.
“The documentary is a lot more than just my artwork,” Wright says. “It has to do with my life and what I feel like my artwork really represents and a full portrait of what I think the goal of life is and coming into who you truly are as a person, so it covers various different things I’ve gone through – which I think are a reflection of things we all go through – and how I found my way through that through my artwork.”
Among the events Wright experiences during the film are legal ramifications for some of his more illicit exploits. The documentary takes a dramatic turn into what Taylor describes as a “real-life Catch Me If You Can … with consequences and things that can actually kill you” that are unrelated to the danger of the climbs themselves.
“You realize very quickly that the climbs are more spiritual,” Taylor says. “They’re actually the safest thing that is happening in the film, because someone is playing with someone’s life.”
These themes take Wright from his position as an untouchable, superhuman figure and bring him back down to Earth for the rest of us to relate to.
“I had a spiritual connection first, to the human story and to the fact that someone is having to overcome adversity in life for real, and I believe that everyone could connect to the human story based on the fact that we’ve all been through something,” Taylor says. “We’ve all been misrepresented or someone has tried to tear down your character in some way, and I felt like this is a story that I believe people could really connect to.”
The film premiered in the SXSW Documentary Spotlight category and was met by cheers, tears, and laughs, according to Taylor. The next steps for the documentary and its subject are still unknown, but it’s hard not to predict the boldest and brightest of futures for both.
“I’m still engaged with the work, but also I’m branching into so many other artistic mediums, and so … I don’t necessarily know (what’s next),” Wright says. “I’m wide open right now, but I feel more creative than I’ve ever felt in my life. I feel the most in tune and aligned with myself that I’ve ever felt, and I believe that art comes out of a person, so I know whatever it is, it will be magic.”
Drift premiered on March 14 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival.