Nick Barat Talks 'PACKAGES,' Filmmaking, and 20 Years of Fool’s Gold

For the last twenty years, the name Nick Barat has been synonymous with, frankly, a whole bunch of new, dope shit. You’ve probably heard of Barat through his work as Nick Catchdubs, co-founder of the legendary Fool’s Gold label with A-Trak, helping introduce artists like Danny Brown, Kid Cudi, and Run the Jewels to the world, or through his series of mixtapes with Wale. He’s DJ’d around the globe, created music for TV shows like Broad City, and even done graphic design work.

Would you be surprised if, in 2026, Barat added “writer-director” to the list? You shouldn’t be, as his new horror short, Packages, is available to stream right now over on nickbarat.com.

“I've never only done one thing,” Barat tells Complex. “I've never only been passionate about one thing. I wanted to do dope original high-level shit in every zone that I was interested in.”

In conversation, Barat talks about everything from his film festival experience and his approach to directing his first film to his process and celebrating 20 years of Fool’s Gold next year.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I loved seeing that you screened Packages at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Was that the first time you’ve shown the film?
Nick Barat: No, no, no. For New York.

So we shot this last year. It was funny, because it was during the Knicks-Celtics, and the City just had this crazy positive energy. It was like a reverse-Ghostbusters II. You know what I mean? It's sort of like the slime was making us happy. It was just a really positive vibe.

I wrote, directed, [and] edited. I was one of the producers. So because I was in charge of getting it to the finish line, I kind of locked the edit as fast as I could. I was just amped, and really wanted to get this going. So you go through the post-production process of getting the sound mixed and getting it colored and whatever, but then it's done, and you're sitting on it. So it's sort of like I empathize with all of the artists who are yelling at their label and stuff. “Why won't you let me drop?” And it's like, “Hey, trust the process.” So, the whole thing with festivals was very much me trusting the process, because I, naively, which I say positively, but I almost took for granted the fact that the acceptance rate for these festivals, even the out-of-the-way ones, is so minuscule compared to the amount of submissions that they get.

Yeah, it's real.
And so the first festival that we got accepted into was the Chattanooga Film Festival in Tennessee. And it's the thing where I didn't do a ton of festival research before starting this process, but I did like that Chattanooga was sort of off the beaten path, but also considered a cool film festival. And I think that this is true of a lot of the more genre-specific festivals, because it's like you have this idea of a “Sundance movie,” like there's a guy in a room, and he's sad. And this one is more like there's a guy in a room and his head explodes. So I can kind of pick up [on] that vibe, but I had a great time at the festival. Again, I have nothing to compare it to. I've only been to festivals on the music side, throwing events and DJing and whatever. And so it's very different as a filmmaker than as somebody who's going to South by Southwest to set it off and be a party maniac and whatever.

It was the sort of thing where, you know how there's Disney adults?

Yes, yes.
These are Freddy adults, Jason adults. And so it's like I'm not fully of that. I'm adjacent to it. But the fact that they responded to Packages in any way, shape, or form was really encouraging. And so I loved going out to that.

We did another festival in Newport, Rhode Island, called Nine Central. And then Brooklyn Horror Film Fest was the latest. I just felt very much like, “cool, let's go out on a high and keep the rest of this process going.”

New York Comic-Con was earlier this month, and every time I hit one of those events, it reminds me of going to raves. I like drum & bass, but I'm not a raver; I’m not a candy kid, but it’s ill to experience. Because, like the ravers, at New York Comic-Con, no fights. It was all PLUR, it was all love. You know what I mean? They're just there to do their thing.
No, it's cool. And you sort of take for granted that, speaking for myself, I dip in and out of a lot of different genres and subcultures and zones of people. I really appreciate that I'm naturally wired to have broad tastes and curiosity. But I think there's a lot of people where their one niche is the one place they feel truly at home and with their people. And so I respect that so much, and I really appreciate being welcomed by that world in any way, shape, or form. 

I watched part of your interview with Eddie Huang, and I love the idea that you talked to him about a feature film idea you had, and he's like, "Let's work on the short." My question is, did you know somebody who was scarlet-lettered because they stole a package? Where's the idea for Packages come from?
I try not to overintellectualize my process. I think the best things I've ever worked on have been very instinctual and the sort of thing where it's like, for whatever reason you get an inspiration, you get a little nugget, a little muse, and you just follow that. And so I think, specifically with this, my wife and I walk everywhere all throughout Manhattan. And especially right after COVID, every apartment building you walk past would have the flyer in the front, like “this guy is stealing packages,” “this guy is still stealing packages.” And then for whatever reason, I just had the idea like, “Well, what if you saw yourself on one of those?” And so it's interesting, people are like, "Yeah, so where do you come up with this persecution narrative?" And it's like, "Well, I don't know if I did that." But I do think that is the kind of thing where it's like we are wildly over-surveilled.

We are at the mercy of all of these different corporations and tech overloads. And so I didn't set out to necessarily roast that or even have a real commentary on that. If anything, I feel like my approach is more dreamlike and strange, as opposed to fist-waving.

I love that when I show this to different people, I get different reactions. Dave 1 from Chromeo—one of my best friends, also an intellectual cat, you know what I mean? He would teach at Columbia before giving his life to the funk. But his response was interesting. He's like, "To me, this was about the fact that, in the City, you're anonymous, and that it's sort of like, who knows who gets pulled?" Obviously, that's the sort of thing where it's like the dehumanization of us in a very extreme way with ICE and shit like that; that is a very real, very intense version. This is a more kind of playful, left field version of that. But I think that that energy is just out there.

Yes, exactly.
I'm picking up on something. I'm channeling something. As an artist, my antenna has to be up. 

I was going to say, it's not that you set out to do something; it's just that you're observant. I watched Faces of Death recently, and while that's a modern take on the infamous film, it's really about the timeline and doomscrolling and—
The new one with Charli.

Yeah, with Barbie Ferreira. It's really about the shit that is being moderated, or not moderated, that's making it to the timeline. I bring this all up because Packages, or rather the larger company in this, that's Google, that's Amazon, that's these conglomerates made up of all of these little companies. So your one transgression here can turn into 15 if you really look at how much they're intertwined.
Well, it's funny, specifically in the two genre festivals that this was in at Chattanooga and here, there was that undercurrent of a sort of uncaring corporate hand at play in a lot of these things. It's in the zeitgeist. And to your point about the millennial experience, I feel like since childhood, we've been shown all of this crazy shit in a very “this is fine” sort of way. I was saying to a friend the other day, it's like, “yo, they rolled the TVs out so that we could watch a spaceship explode in first grade.” You know what I mean? And so from that point on, it was like Desert Storm.

Desert Storm!
Now, it's not even these milestones every couple years. It's like every day you literally witness a horror and just have to go about your shit. I feel like there is a sense of, like, “oh, you have to be engaged, and no one's coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.” But that vibe is just out there. I think that the fact that I deal with it in a sort of playful manner is very true to me, but I think it is speaking to just this general shared trauma that we're all just passing back and forth like a hot potato.

It makes me wonder, though. I don't know what your process is, but I mentioned that feature that you shared with Eddie. Do you have a plan to get more things under your belt before attempting a feature-length project? Or is it more like, it has to feel right? Because knowing that you wrote, directed, edited, and were a co-producer on this, I'm not surprised, but I do wonder how many of these you got to get under your belt before you're like, "Okay, I'll do one that's like 90 minutes now."
My natural instinct is just to get busy. And coming from a DIY approach to music and 20 years—literally, Fool's Gold is 20 years next year—of just getting stuff across the finish line and being involved with things on every level of creation and distribution, dissemination. It's the kind of thing where, a) certain technical things are demystified, but b) the sense of, like, "Hey, I might not know how to do this one thing, but it is figure outable." The thing that you can't sort of teach yourself is taste and ideas and artistic POV. That kind of has to come from you naturally. Everything else is learnable. Even going back to the first video we ever did for Fool's Gold was Kid Sister’s “Pro Nails,” and that was Ruben Fleischer, who then immediately went on to do Zombieland and Venom and all of these major things.

But at the end of the day, that was my first time being on set with cameras and everything. That was this thing that we just bootstrapped and made it happen. It's very powerful to have experienced that, even if you're not cognizant of it in any sort of way. So with this, I knew that I could make this happen. My goals for the short were kind of more process-wise, because I'm getting into this a little bit later in the game. This isn't me coming out of film school with a bunch of film school friends. This is like, “You know what? I'm probably older than many of my contemporaries from a film standpoint.” So I was like, "I got to cut the line a little bit. I want to jump directly into the deep end. I want to work with a pro DP." I want to work with experienced producers. I want to deal with these different department heads. I'm not trying to one-man band a short film the way that I have in the past with music videos. It's like I want to learn about the collaborative process, the iterative process.

Eddie was very sage in terms of the advice that he gave me with doing a short first, because I think that the undercurrent of our conversation was like, "Yo, see if you like this." You might be like, "This is not for me, but I can't get enough of it." You know what I mean? My nose was open. And I think that the reality is we shot Packages in New York for three days, and if we were to make a feature, the process would not be that different, other than it would take more days and therefore more money.

And the sort of schlep that you do with a short, it's kind of like there's very little financial upside. It's like you sunk all of these resources into a thing that you want people to watch. Obviously, for me, it's a career stepping stone. I can't charge admission for this necessarily. Ultimately, I don't want to. I want as many people to see it as possible, but it's like if I made a feature, the sort of opportunities for a) talking about it, b) selling it, even if it were a straight-up Tubi movie, that is a source of income. You can do direct-to-consumer on Vimeo and Letterboxd. There's so many more opportunities for a 90-minute, professional-enough-quality piece.

So that's a roundabout way of saying, yes, I am down to do a feature as soon as possible. I would love to get a couple more reps in the gym before doing that. I have another script for a short that's basically ready to go. And even doing early pre-production for that, I've applied for grants, and it's the kind of thing where even if those grants don't come through, at least I kind of have a number that I can shoot for in terms of cobbling together the financing to make it happen. Even with Packages: the only real reason I have savings—I live as check-to-check as everybody else in our world, but I had a song in a commercial, you know what I mean? That gave me some just sort of rainy-day shit. And this felt like the thing where it's like, “You know what? I want to do this. I want to do it as soon as I can. I'm just going to pull the trigger. I don't need a Kia Sportage.” [Laughs] I would rather have an artistic creation that is as good as I could possibly make it with the abilities and resources that I had at the time, because you learn so much each go. And it is getting reps in the gym. It is a very expensive gym.

Membership is crazy. I will say, being from Jersey, it was good seeing Fatboi Sharif and Boogaveli in there. You also mentioned a DP and Jersey connections, but I was also wondering about the hardest things about being the person behind the camera, and whether there's a scenario with that DP that ties into any of that.
Definitely. I mean, the reality is that I have so many music friends, music connections. I don't really hang with actors like that. You know what I mean? It's not out of disinterest. It's just not my day-to-day lifestyle. And as we crewed this out, both this sort of on-screen talent and all of the craftspeople behind the scenes, it's like Zoom dating. It's like, "Hey, I've never made anything like this. I'm going to have to talk to you and sell myself and make you as engaged." Because as much as once you aggregate everything together, it's a big expense for me; that's cut over 30 odd people. Everybody else, they're doing this at favor rates. Ethical favor rates, but favor rates nonetheless. And so you're doing these Zooms, you're trying to get a feel for everybody. And I'm on the Zoom with Mike [Gomes], who would go on to be the cinematographer, and we're just talking, and I don't know if it was him or me who said this, but he's just like, "Yo, where are you from?" I'm like, "What?" He's like, "Bro, where are you from?" I'm like, "I'm from Elizabeth, New Jersey." He goes, "Get the fuck out. I'm from Elizabeth, New Jersey.” We went to the same high school eight years apart.

That's crazy!
And so I'm like, "You know what? You had a great reel, but this is the universe saying we have to rock together." And so it was just great to have somebody that you could have a shorthand with. And I feel like I have good leadership qualities. I'm not a yeller. I have a vision, and I want to stick to it, and I want to inspire everybody to get there, but I do it in a gentle enough way. You know what I mean? But you read all of these horror stories about directors who sucked, and people were like, “Their insecurities just make them kind of owners.” I'm like, "Look, everybody here I want to theoretically work with again in the future. I want this to be as enjoyable a process for everybody." So it was great to have somebody who I already felt such a kinship with to make that easier. 

Somebody like Sharif, we were already friends for music and it's sort of the thing where it's like just that comfort level goes such a long way. And ironically, this process made us better friends. We started working on music after the short. So now it's the kind of thing where it's like we have this and we have this EP that we're tying up and I'm already having visual ideas for; we've already established this kind of audio-visual connection. Let's make that something cool in the future, too. But the reality is that I think everybody who had a good time on a set describes it as summer camp. You have to become fast friends with everybody, and it's this really sort of intense thing, and you enjoy it, and then you go off on your respective school years, and then maybe next summer you all come back again.

So it's going to be out on your site. They paying a fee, or they can see it for free?
No, it's just going to be out for free. It's going to live on my site. I think it's nice to just have an easy link. You know what I mean? You don't have to be like, "Go to Vimeo/wifi password." But the reality is that as much as filmmaking is my primary passion and creative focus at the moment, I still do everything else. I still DJ, I still produce, I still write, I still do graphic design. I am a multitasker. I wear many hats. And it's really interesting: when I first started doing stuff professionally, there was almost low-key shade against that. This idea that you're sort of a dilettante, a jack of all trades (said disrespectfully), as opposed to you're this one thing; you only do that. 

And what's crazy now is that now you have other generations coming up after you who feel no shame, feel no way about any of that stuff. They're not even that good at it. And so it's like, man, if I'm objectively pretty good at all of these things, why shouldn't I say it with my whole chest? And so even just sort of directing people back to my website, which is essentially a portfolio site in a lot of ways, it's like, "Hey, you can watch my thing. You can read my bio. You can see the accolades." And even just the history stuff is really interesting now that we're in this kind of permanent anniversary world, this sort of permanent nostalgia world.

Forever nostalgia.
I'm super down to celebrate stuff that, a) it was important to me and b) it was important to an audience, you know what I mean? That's so priceless. If somebody comes up to me and is like, "Man, I love listening to your Wale mixtapes when I was in high school," that doesn't make me feel old. That makes me feel happy that anybody listened to it ever, let alone have it stuck with them. After BK Horror Fest, we were having pizza at Stretch, which is a restaurant that my wife and I have been going to forever, and it's our favorite pizza spot. But the guy didn't know anything about me professionally. He was just this sort of server that we had a good vibe with. And he was like, "Oh wait, you did Fool's Gold? Oh my God. When you guys would do the parties out on the waterfront, that was the first time I took acid." You have these relationships with people.

The Alife Memories Instagram keeps posting the t-shirt from when we did the Danny Brown XXX release party, which I DJed, and it was also ASAP Rocky's first show ever.

Crazy.
People post the shirt, and I'll repost it. It's a super cool moment in history. It's a super cool thing that I'm proud of, but I'm even more proud of the fact that that's not something that I feel the need to rest on. To be like, "Oh, hey, remember when we did that?" I think that that is the first level of being washed. There is a direct line from “I used to” to “unkness.” I think that you have to always have a new challenge. You have to always have a new thing that you're excited by. Releasing music, you do that over and over again, and you get a Groundhog Day quality to it. You still want to do as good a job as possible, but it is what it is.

Filmmaking is the most collaborative, hardest level of difficulty, most expensive form of expression, but I feel so energized with every little detail of that that it's the thing that I'm most passionate about continuing to pursue.

I love that. Actually, it's funny to ask you this, but you talk about 20 years of Fool's Gold; in hearing you talk about nostalgia, what's your approach, then, to “20 years of Fool's Gold”? How do you approach celebrating two decades of memories of people dropping acid?
I think in a very Tony Soprano way, as long as you can avoid “remember when,” you're golden. And I think that you want to appreciate stuff. And as somebody who was there, it's easy to almost overlook the fact that there's somebody who wishes they were there. You know what I mean? So I want to be respectful of that, where it's sort of like, “this is something that you've had aspirations towards and have a sort of real fondness for.” So yeah, let's celebrate that. Let's embrace that. But let's also say that the whole point of this even existing in the first place was to support the new, to push the different, to create things that you want to see because you don't see them anywhere else. And that's the attitude that I bring to filmmaking. It's like I don't want to be a Xerox of somebody else's shit. 

I want to create something that feels distinct to me and feels different. I know that each time I go out to do that, it's going to be a better and better distillation of that impulse.

You can stream Packages right now over on nickbarat.com.