Nicole Brice
Sep 20, 2026
Ephemera is the product of creativity beyond boundaries.
The art of filmmaking, and what goes into constructing a masterpiece, is subjective. Conventional methods tell us to draft the script first, then shoot each scene. But what if you did the opposite? What if you took the footage you already had, pieced it together into a film, and then realized the story had essentially written itself based upon what you captured? Sometimes in life, you have to go backward to move forward, and that's an excellent way to describe what has happened in the creative life of Bil Richardson.
Located in the panhandle of Florida, Bil is a seasoned filmmaker who found himself at a crossroads after a life-threatening infection landed him in the hospital. With an innate need to create, he crafted his latest film, Ephemera, while in that same hospital; it is reminiscent of films like Blade Runner and Ready Player One, but unlike anything you've ever seen. It's more complex than what's in front of you, and it's the product of creativity beyond boundaries.
With a mind that is both complex and visual, Bil is a storyteller, through and through. His unique creative perspectives and methods are needed today to challenge us to see art differently, and his body of work speaks for itself. Bil challenges one to tell the story. Change the story. Mix it up. In addition to being a visionary filmmaker, Bil is a professor, author, artist, and historian. He’s written both fiction and non-fiction, and he’s also designed cover art for books, movies, magazines, and graphic novels. His documentaries are shown as teaching tools at top universities like Carnegie Mellon, UC Berkeley, and Marquette. You might have heard him on NPR’s All Things Considered or seen him on TV shows like American Pickers, Mysteries at the Museum, CBS This Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, America Fact vs Fiction, Discovery Network’s Blood Feuds, National Geographic Channel’s Diggers, and plenty more. He’s also worked as a consultant for PBS NewsHour, Pawn Stars, and How the States Got Their Shapes.
What has Bil not done? A true Renaissance man, he has also been quoted in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, the London Daily Mail, and hundreds of other newspapers. He even created a 16-episode series for the History Channel, and the National Endowment for the Arts has supported his work. We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Bil to chat about his new film, Ephemera, and his storied career. Learn more below.
*Edited lightly for clarity
MaM: I noticed there are two different spellings for your name, and the one you use professionally as your author name has one “l”. Is it one “l” or two?
Bil: Well, I go with one “l”, and the reason for that is that there is a former presidential candidate from New Mexico, and he has the internet eaten up with the name, and if you Google him, there are like twenty pages of that guy, so I needed a way to sort of differentiate, and that’s where it came from. It’s sort of a screen name, I guess you could say.
MaM: That’s clever. When I was researching you, and I typed your name in with the one “l”, I was able to pull your stuff up pretty quickly. Smart thinking. You’re an author first and foremost, correct?
Bil: Well, you know, I am a storyteller. I mean, that is the common thread. I’ve written books, screenplays, poetry, and short stories. I’m a visual artist, so I’ve done comic books, too. I think the one common theme through all of that is that I’m a storyteller.
MaM: I’ve authored a couple of books, too, and so I consider myself a storyteller as well. I love drawing inspiration from everyday life. They always say life makes the best inspiration for creative endeavors. Let’s dive into these books of yours. You’ve got a solid body of work. Do you prefer writing or do you prefer making films? What is your preferred medium for telling your stories?
Bil: Well, what I will say is that every medium has its own things that make it attractive. The thing about prose, and you’ve written prose, is that the good and the bad thing about it is that it is a blank page, and with a blank page, you can do anything you want. There is no budget. There are no constraints. Whatever your imagination creates, you can create it on that page. The downside is that it is a blank page.
(laughter)
MaM: Yeah (laughter)
Bil: And sometimes you are responsible for bringing everything to it, and that can be challenging. I rarely ever have writer's block and all that kind of stuff, but what I enjoy about some of the mediums I do, like film, is that I can bring together other things to support my creativity and help me tell the story. Another thing: film is a collaborative medium, and that's both a pro and a con. You get other people who, if they are better than you, make you better, but if they’re worse, they make you look worse. And when you’re just telling prose, it’s all you, baby.
MaM: I agree
Bil: Yeah, it’s just all you. I'd say that, first and foremost, I am a writer. If I could, I’d spend my entire life writing novels. Just because that’s how I started at fifteen years old. I read a Stephen King book, and it made me think that I’d like to try that, and I’ve been telling stories in one way or another ever since.
MaM: That’s amazing. Do you think writing has always been kind of woven into the tapestry of who you are as a person? I feel like it was for me. I had a journal at a young age, and I was always writing in it. When was it that you realized you had such a gift for writing?
Bil: I started writing poetry and songs when I was seven. I have a cousin who is now a professional musician, and we would get together to write songs and make up silly poems. That was when I started. I started wanting to express myself with words.
MaM: I actually had a teacher in second grade who recognized that I had more of an overactive mind than most children, and to me, writers possess a different type of brain. We see the world differently. We’re more observant.
Bil: I say that the most important characteristic of a writer is empathy. It is the ability to put yourself into the shoes of another human being who might live in a different country, a different galaxy, be it a different race, a different gender – your ability to put yourself into that person’s shoes and tell a story from their perspective. That’s the most important thing a writer has the ability to do, and very few people can do that.
MaM: Let’s talk about your newest film now. You sent me the trailer, and it intrigued me. Tell me a little more about how this came to be.
Bil: The film came out on Amazon on September 4, 2026, and it will be everywhere else on October 2, 2026. It will be on Tubi and other places. Let me tell you the backstory. It’s a fairly long conversation, but it’s an interesting conversation. In 2022, I almost died. I spent basically a year in a hospital bed with an open wound in my body that was a foot long and six inches deep. The wound wouldn’t heal, and the hospitals kept giving me infections, and they were the kind of infections you would only get in the hospital. They were these superbugs that were almost impossible to kill. So, they kept giving me all these drugs to combat those things, and I became septic, and other things happened. So, anyway, they didn’t know if I was going to survive. They wanted to cut off my leg and do all kinds of different things to me, and I just refused to do that. But during that year, when I was basically flat on my back, I’m a creative person; with all these things, if I don’t do something creative, I get uncomfortable. I get irritable. I get depressed. I feel like I need that outlet. Here I am at the lowest point in my life, and not only is all this stuff going on with my body, and I’m semi-conscious most of the time, but I’m not getting to do anything that feeds me.
And so I wanted to find something, and I had been experimenting with stock footage. I went to this stock footage site and started getting clips and cutting together music videos just for fun. Just to do something. And I noticed during that process that a lot of the clips, especially on one of these sites, had enough that I could make a scene out of that. I could make a car chase or a bank robbery or whatever happened to be, and so I just ran with it, and I started playing with those and cutting those scenes together, and pretty soon I had ten of them. Well, the average length of a scene in a movie is about three minutes long. If you’ve got thirty of those, you’ve got a ninety-minute movie, and I thought, heck, I’ve got a third of a movie here. I just started playing with that idea, and I've done things in the past where, to spur my creativity, I used images. The Of Demons and Dragons book is basically inspired by this guy's art, and it inspired me to write a story based on the images of that guy’s art. So, I did something similar before. So, I thought, let’s take these scenes that we’ve got and see if we can string them together and find a plot that brings them all together.
I made the movie in reverse. I started with all these scenes, and then I developed a story that brought them together. Normally, you start with an idea, and you build all the pieces to tell that story. I started with the pieces, then developed a story that brought them together. What I liken it to is if you had a hundred of these puzzle pieces, and you took a handful out of each box, and then put those together into a completely new scene that was seamless, and people couldn’t tell you had done it that way. That’s the sort of writing challenge, the creative challenge this posed, and I was so enthralled with the idea of doing this completely backward, and it became the distraction I needed that got my mind off all these horrors I was going through and allowed me to do something that was hopeful and fun and interesting. After that, my health turned a corner; I started getting better, and I decided to see if we could make this really happen.
When the film was done, I started writing the logline for the film, which is just a short line description of the film, and in that process, I realized that the plot I came up with for the film, writing it backward, was actually what I was going through in my own life. The film is about a woman who is strong, capable, and at the top of her game, and something happens to her that damages her physically, and she’s no longer the same person. Then she goes through all these medical treatments to get her life back and get back to where she was before, which is exactly what I went through.
MaM: It’s amazing how art imitates life without you even realizing it.
Bil: I had no idea. And think about it: there is no way I could have consciously said, "I want to tell my story," and then found all these little pieces of footage and brought them together. I don’t think that’s humanly possible, but my subconscious did it.
And this is where we end this interview for now. Bil and I spoke more at length, but because of the length of this piece, we are going to leave you with those parting words. Ephemera is the product of a man searching for the will to live through a traumatic battle with life. Through that battle, he opened his subconscious mind and told his own story through the puzzle pieces of art he found in a collaborative piece that is both original and truly thought-provoking. Art imitating life, no doubt.
To watch Ephemera:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B0H29DL6W6?ref_=atv_dp_share_cu_r
To learn more about Bil Richardson:
Amazon.com: Bil Richardson: books, biography, latest update
