Drew Heriot Discovered the Power of His Heart
DREW HERIOT is an Australian-born director which launched onto the world stage as the Director of the Secret, which, in 2006 and 2007, became the highest-selling DVD in the USA. DREW HERIOT began his professional career directing films, commercials and top-rating primetime television shows for the major networks “down under.” Heriot co-directed The Elevate Film and Music Festival at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, featuring elevating works from popular artists including Alanis Morisette, India.Arie and Missy Higgins. DREW HERIOT is committed to ‘inspir-active’ entertainment that fuses inspiring content with real-world action and will be breaking new ground with Superhuman.
An Interview with Drew Heriot on Discovering the Power of the Heart
DIRK TERPSTRA: Talking about inspiration… what inspires you in life, and what are your core values that also form the foundation for writing and directing films?
DREW HERIOT: It’s interesting you mention ‘inspiration’ because since the success of the film The Secret I have been contemplating of how the work that I do will be most effective. I realize that while inspiration is wonderful and the film is fantastic for them, it’s still a very passive media form. It’s not a media form where people take action. So ever since then, I have been formulating projects that I am calling ‘inspir-active’ projects. They are a fusion of the inspiration and action. I think that’s the direction things are going across the board. My passion is fusing the traditional media and the digital media, but allowing us to integrate the production value of film and television, and the interactivity that’s possible digitally and online.
DIRK TERPSTRA: Do you feel that the public is ready for your inspir-active projects, or is it something you feel inside you want to do it this way? DREW HERIOT: I think as filmmakers, we ought to be true to ourselves, and like any others, we have to make work that we want to see and work that we want to experience, and then we hope that others feel the same.
Whenever you’re creating, as soon as you trust or believe more in an audience’s instinct than your own, or an audience wants more than what you want, you get lost in the journey. So I am always paying attention to what would I want.
DIRK TERPSTRA: We already mentioned the movie The Secret. What do you think contributes to the biggest reason for its huge success in the US?
DREW HERIOT: The Secret is unique because it’s supporting people in creating whatever it is that they want. I think that everybody has wants and desires. It was offering some pretty fundamentally important and powerful knowledge; that could apply to anybody in any situation. So I think that’s part of what was so magical about that project. So many people who have seen that film said: “It felt like it was putting a voice to something what I intuitively knew and felt.”
DIRK TERPSTRA: Your latest film that was being released in the fall of 2014 is called The Power of the Heart which features Maya Angelou, Paulo Coelho, Eckhart Tolle and many more.In both of these films, the heart plays a very crucial role. Why are you so fascinated by the human heart?
DREW HERIOT: It probably started with my own personal experience of the heart. We all experience it all of the time to some degree. But when I walked the Camino through Spain in 2001, I had the most sustained, fulfilling, surprising and even frightening intensity of heart that I had ever had. I felt like life was breathing through me. It was really amazing.
Since then, I have been fascinated by that feeling and wanting to know how to reconnect with that, and what its role is in our lives. It wasn’t just me. Other pilgrims on that walk through Spain experienced similar things, so I got very interested in the heart.
As you know, being a HeartMath trainer, the Institute of HeartMath has been doing some incredible research, and it finally brings science to the feelings that we experience. I feel that it is an important time to take another look at the heart and see how it can fit in with all of the other neuroscience and neuroplasticity. Without the heart, these things all mean very little.
So I wanted to make a film that could show how we can reconnect with our heart, how to remind us that our heart is the master and that our head can be the servant to that master. Our mind is very capable and very smart, but ultimately, if we just live from the head without the heart, then the world can actually be quite frightening. And likewise, if we just live in our hearts with our heads, we really don’t get much done, so the fusion of both is really what The Power of the Heart is all about.
