Filmmaker Nirvan Mullick on How His Viral Hit CAINE’S ARCADE Is Still Changing Lives

Filmmaker and entrepreneur Nirvan Mullick reflects on the events leading up to his short film Caine’s Arcade, as well as what happened after the movie’s phenomenal viral success and how the subject of the documentary and thousands of other young people are still benefitting from an entire creative movement inspired by the film.

Mullick explains how the filmmaking experience literally changed his life in a completely unexpected way. He needed a part for his car, so he headed to East Los Angeles to search for a used parts store and found one in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights. It was inside this used auto parts shop that he stumbled upon the star of the film, then 9-year-old Caine Monroy.

“Caine took over his dad’s store with this arcade he made out of cardboard boxes from the back, and he asked me if I’d like to play his games. And I was curious, so I asked him how it worked.”

He explains that even at that age, Caine was tremendously entrepreneurial and had already set a price point for his customers - $1 for four turns in the arcade, or $2 for a “fun pass” providing him 500 turns. Needless to say, Nirvan opted for the fun pass and ended up playing the various arcade games for about 40 minutes.

“I didn’t realize until later that he’d spent all summer building this, and I was his first customer, I didn’t know that. So everything that he’d built and planned, I got to experience the first sharing of that,” Nirvan said.

Despite his excitement after getting a real customer, Nirvan said Caine also had to improvise certain things like the game requiring a ball, which he did not have. So the young businessman quickly crumpled up a piece of paper to create a ball and the fun continued.

“(His father) George said that the arcade was kind of like his babysitter. He couldn’t afford a babysitter, so he’d take Caine to work with him everyday during the summer and Caine would be out there in the front doing his thing. And he mostly does his business online now, because there’s not a lot of foot traffic in this part of town.”

The director reveals the exact moment he absolutely knew he had to share this remarkable experience with the world.

“When he crawled into that box, I literally went from running an errand in a store on a Sunday to being a 9-year-old kid again. It transported me back to my childhood, and the feeling was so intense – it was that feeling I had at that moment that kind of carried me through the whole film. I was like, I want to try and share this feeling with more people.”

He eventually returned to discuss making a film about Caine and spoke with the boy’s father, who told him at that time that Nirvan was his first and only customer, a revelation the filmmaker said “broke his heart” because he could see the boy’s intense passion for his project.

“When I found out that I’d been his only customer, then this idea of doing a flash mob to surprise him and make his day was hatched.”

After organizing and advertising on social media about a flash mob to Caine’s arcade, news of the event immediately went viral and the news media also became aware, leading to hundreds of cheering, sign-holding supporters showing up to the arcade and playing the games.

In spite of his obvious genius capabilities building and executing the operations of his arcade, Caine was considered slow by his teachers and had a stuttering problem. But according to Nirvan, those issues were completely changed for the better through the making of the film and the events that came thereafter.

About six months after editing the film, Nirvan decided to create a website to raise money for a scholarship fund for Caine, with an initial goal of reaching $25,000 at most. But after the film received more than 1 million views the first day, contributions to the fund totaled $60,000 in just 24 hours. Today, Caine’s Scholarship Fund has more than $239,000 in funds.

In addition, the film’s rapid success also led to the creation of the Imagination Foundation - a nonprofit aimed at fostering the creativity and entrepreneurship of kids – as well as the Global Cardboard Challenge. The challenge has grown to involve thousands of kids across the world who are invited to make whatever they can imagine using only cardboard and recycled materials.

Watch the entire interview to learn more about Caine’s amazing arcade creation and to find out what this young entrepreneur is doing now.