Oren Peleg grew up in Orange County in what he calls “white bread, cookie-cutter houses.” Yet as a third-year film student, he still finds experiences to draw from.
“I’m too young still to have a whole lot of dramatic experiences in my life. I didn’t live in a radical city where people are getting shot in the street corner by my house,” Peleg said. “I write what I know about. The relationships are usually stable, that’s what I know.”
He doesn’t find that the healthy relationships in his story detract from its substance. For the online Apple film festival “Insomnia,” he wrote a two-minute film about a young girl who finds different worlds under her bed and in her closet.
Peleg also wrote a script for Campus MovieFest, a short film competition for students. His script for “Romania, California” describes a student who thinks he has become a vampire.
In each of his films, Peleg notes, the plot, rather than inner emotional turmoil, drives the tale. In each script, characters interact and seem to care about each other, while the locations serve as blank canvases.
“Both (locations) seem very generic places,” Peleg said. “If seemed like if you put (the films) in New York City, it would have changed the story.”
Peleg is currently working on a full-length script about the boredom and mundanity of high school. He says he does not feel his background influences his decisions about films, in the way he sees classmates screen projects that play like pages from their journals.
“I find my own personal life very boring. It’s not something I’m so eager to put out. For my own catharsis, I can write it on a piece of paper,” he said.
Rather than rely on his own background, Peleg tends to imagine situations for regular characters to be placed in.
“I’m more plot-driven than actual character-driven. The characters seem to be more bland and unexciting until something happens to them,” Peleg said. “It’s a generic character. It could be anybody.”
After collaborating on student projects at UCLA, Peleg decided he would like to stay behind the scenes, but not in the director’s chair as he once imagined. Peleg aspires to run his own production company and plans to call it Pinewood Creek, a derivation of his name’s Hebrew meaning. Though still in school, he is applying for a corporate license so he can begin developing a base of clients of mostly friends.
Although his parents immigrated from Israel, Peleg does not plan to network with his status of being Jewish in Hollywood.
“I feel like nobody really cares in this business (if you are Jewish). Everyone is inviting everyone else over for Passover,” Peleg said. “It’s not really a novelty ““ maybe if I was a farmer. I don’t know too many Jewish farmers.”
He has found, though, that his religion has given him a dry sense of humor that he incorporates into his films.
“Being Jewish lends itself very well to that style of humor. I’m not exactly sure how, but it’s very easy,” Peleg said. “Being the outsider, being observant, it’s easier to see yourself like that.”
He sees his humor as modeled somewhat after the shows “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“”˜Seinfeld’ it seems like, yeah, we are Jewish, but we’re not making fun of that. It’s what influences our background,” he said. “I don’t really like the whole style of just pure minority jokes. … It’s just really empty to me: “˜Ha-ha, Hanukkah last night,’ not so many people would get that.”
Peleg describes his work as taking his own experiences and imagining them to the extreme.
“I don’t feel like my life is mundane, but I have no desire to be one of those nutso people that tell stories about their life,” he said.