Matthew Cooke
Matthew Cooke Survivors Guide →
Matthew Cooke

"A story is the most powerful weapon in the world."

Los Angeles · UK · France

American Origin Stories

American Origin Stories scene one

American origin stories

Top 30 5-star Apple podcast

"history by a master storyteller"

"turns familiar tales completely on their heads"

"seriously brilliant mind"

"the history we should have been taught"

Listen at Survivors Guide to Earth
"Stories are like magic maps. Useful if accurate. Deadly if not. And if held too tightly, mistaken for reality itself."
Matthew Cooke
Matthew Cooke filming with Bernie Sanders and Mark Ruffalo

Documentaries scene two

Documentaries, award-winning

No.1 Highest rated documentary of all time
on Rotten Tomatoes
  • Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker
  • Films on HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu
  • Best-writing awards · over 100 critics' "best-of" lists
Learn more

Filmography · selection

How to Make Money Selling Drugs

Eminem · 50 Cent · IDA Best Writing Award

Writer, director, editor, narrator, camera, graphic artist

Produced by Adrian Grenier and Bert Marcus. Featuring: Susan Sarandon, Woody Harrelson, 50 Cent, Eminem, Freeway Rick Ross, David Simon (Creator of The Wire), Arianna Huffington.

Best Writing Award, International Documentary Association. Audience Award, Champs-Elysees Film Festival. Audience Award, Newport Beach Film Festival.

Cooke conceived the film 10 years prior as a biting how-to, revealing the war-on-drugs to be a terror even worse than the criminal blackmarket itself. He scripted the film first, then acquired footage to replace the script.

The editing was the most challenging stage: balancing the satire with a deadly serious topic.

Deliver Us From Evil

Over 40 critics "best of" lists
Highest rated documentary of all time on Rotten Tomatoes

Creative producer, editor

Irish priest Oliver O'Grady admits to having molested and raped over 25 children from the 70s to early 90s. Written & directed by Amy Berg.

The job: editing over 100 hours of footage into a 1.5 hour film. Choosing the anchor characters, plotting the arc, creating tension and pacing. Filming new interviews and conceiving the resolution, filmed in Rome.

Survivors Guide
to Prison

Danny Trejo · Ice-T · Quincy Jones · Chuck D

Writer, director, editor, narrator, camera, graphic artist

Produced by Steve Devore, Susan Sarandon, David Arquette, Gina Belafonte, Adrian Grenier, Danny Trejo, Jesse Williams. Starring Bruce Lisker and Reggie Cole.

Featuring: Danny Trejo, Deepak Chopra, Patricia Arquette, Danny Glover, Cynthia Nixon, Ice-T, RZA, Busta Rhymes, Tom Morello, B-Real, Macklemore, Quincy Jones, Q-Tip, Warren G, Chuck D, Brandon Boyd (Incubus).

Crafted in the experimental style of Matthew's direct-to-camera social media videos.

The film tracks the stories of two wrongly-convicted men, who become tour guides to America's criminal system of justice, punctuated with celebrity pro-tips.

Bernie in Brooklyn

With Mark Ruffalo · Bernie 2016

Writer-director

In this short bio-pic, Mark Ruffalo takes Bernie on a tour of his hometown, Brooklyn New York, to learn how his childhood influenced his life and worldview.

Death of My Two Fathers

Creative producer · writer · editor

Creative producer, co-writer, editor

After twenty years, filmmaker Sol Guy confronts the six VHS tapes his father recorded before passing on. The tapes inspire Sol to go on a journey to reunite his broken family. A powerful, loving metaphor of America's fractured history.

The task: shaping over 150 hours of footage into a 1.5 hour film. The process involved filming new interviews of Sol, as the framework for writing a 90-minute narrated story. From that point the filmmakers replaced as much narration as possible with scenes and footage from Sol's journey.

Teenage Paparazzo

HBO · with Adrian Grenier

Creative producer, cinematographer, editor

An HBO Film. A 14-year-old paparazzo becomes famous for snapping photos of Adrian Grenier, who'd become a celebrity for playing a movie star on an HBO series about fame. Written and directed by Adrian Grenier. Edited by Matthew Cooke and Jim Mol.

Matthew acted as co-director during the development, production and post-production, weaving multiple layered stories and analysis for a deeper look at America's celebrity and gossip driven culture.

Tell Everything

Music by SIA

Editor, creative consultant, story editor, and graphic artist

Written by and starring Lorien Haynes. Music by SIA. The film tells the story of a woman's relationship history beginning in present-day and travels backwards to the start.

The feature version was composed of 23 short films directed by 21 women to raise awareness and support for survivors of abuse and assault.

Matthew's mission was editing the 21 shorts, reshaping them, and pacing the 21 emotional journeys into a singular feature narrative.

He envisioned and designed journal entries and phone call sequences, to pin and thread the story, and rewrote new portions of the central dialogue between therapist and patient.

01 / 07

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over

400,000,000

views · docu-essays · talks · films

Matthew Cooke with Larry King

Social Media Talks scene three

Social media talks

  • A worldwide audience for his viral docu-essays and talks (over 400M views)
  • Guest host for Larry King's PoliticKING on HULU
  • The most influential content of the Bernie 2016 presidential campaign
  • A formative part of social media culture and direct-to-camera advocacy since 2015
New talks
"If your identity is based on fiction; you will defend a fantasy as if your life depended on it."
Matthew Cooke
Science fiction artwork

Science Fiction scene four

Science fiction

Cooke's science fiction writing has been developed by X-Men / Wolverine producers and Amazon Studios.

Future PerfectIn development

White Mirror scene five

White Mirror

White Mirror

Winner · Numerous Festival Awards

A comedy series starring husband & wife team, Matthew Cooke & April Bowlby.

April stars as Rita Farr in the HBO MAX hit shows "Doom Patrol" and "Titans." She played "Kandi" on "Two and a Half Men" & Stacy Barrett on "Drop Dead Diva." And co-starred in top-10 Netflix film "Father Christmas is Back" with John Cleese & Kelsey Grammer.

Watch White Mirror
Early search engine design work

Cyberworld Design scene six

Cyberworld design

1999 First single-field search engine
(before Google)

Creative director for Capitol Records in the late 90's. A Best-of-the-Web Award from Print Magazine, a partnership with Intel, Time-Warner, and AOL, and a patent in digital content delivery. He taught digital arts at Otis College of Design, and still creates most of the effects and motion graphics in his films.

Matthew Cooke playing music

Music & Sound scene seven

Music & sound

Cooke sound-designs and scores most of his work. Played guitar and drums since he was 13. Bass player in the 80s Chicago hardcore band "Angerhouse" with Erik Funk and Patrick Costello, who later formed the Minneapolis pop-punk group "Dillinger Four."

Roots scene eight

Roots

Born in Washington, D.C.

Son of writer / urban development consultant Stuart Cooke and musician-turned-creative producer Marcella Cooke.

Went to Evanston Township High School in Evanston, IL, the alma mater of Ajay Naidu, John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Jeremy Piven, Seth Meyers, Michael Madsen, and Liz Phair.

Graduate of Pitzer College in Claremont, CA with a BA in Film Studies, magna cum laude.

Married to April Bowlby Cooke.

Los Angeles · UK · France

"Understanding the history of humanity as one shared story isn't just reality; it's the coordination strategy required to reclaim the tools of civilization (politics economics culture)."
Matthew Cooke
Survivors Guide to Earth

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Survivors Guide to Earth

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Matthew Cooke in front of an audience

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