Filmmaking is the greatest job in the world to me. It’s a business and art and I am the entrepreneur and the artist. I know there will be mistakes made along the way and I’m OK with that. I’m still going to do my best to keep pushing these results further.
Why do I get out of bed every morning and why should you care? I get out of bed every morning thinking that I have much to do and very little time to finish everything. My life becomes a series of adventures that I must pick and choose which ones are the most important. I wake up as Indiana Jones and I’m on a mission to go out and make some deals to not let the bad guys win.
What is in this for me personally though? I’d have to say inner peace. As a kid I’d always felt like I needed something and that it was missing from my life. I’d spend hours watching movies and listening to music with friends, instead of doing homework. I’d do the homework the morning of on the school bus. Making movies is the biggest sense of accomplishment out there for me as of now. It’s the perfect job for me. I get to sit at a desk or on the couch surfing the internet for a while and write out stories that come from ideas I get when reading news or seeing posts by other people or by watching a movie and I see a character I like and would want to see more of on screen. When I can’t sit down and write anymore, I go out and film anything that is in my personal blog or notebook of ideas. Then when I’m done filming I get to sit at the desk or couch again with laptop on and work on editing these ideas together, adding music scores and sound effects, cutting up scenes to make sense and rewriting the story again through editing. It’s a beautiful process and it really does put me in a zen state of mind.
What’s in it for you as the audience member? Communication in community. I’m building communities of people who love or hate my work and who love or hate me. Whether it’s the former or the latter, you the audience get that real emotion that others can relate to or disagree with, causing conversations to start with other people who have the same or differing opinions. Our ability to communicate through speech and language which uses our minds to comprehend and analyze data is part of that extraordinary process of building our lives together.
I believe in myself and I have to do it again and again. I have to keep going and pursue that destiny in storytelling. The oldest artform. The current state of affairs is great for movies. There’s a nice balance of films out there, from comic book movies to indie-dramas. And I want to present variations of them that are always old-fashioned but with something new.
Am I going to be able to work my dream job forever? Possibly. I do want to make movies and work with others that believe the same things I do. Working smart not hard, but also work hard. Work that extra hour, work that extra day. Change lives for the future to be better. All by having you getting to a movie theater or at home on your iPad for an hour or two. I’m not doing this for the money. Nor the recognition, and definitely not for celebrity, though I’m certain that will come. I do this because I love my life. I've lived a great life so far. I have a way with people that is understanding and can get a smile. It's a lost art. Filmmaking I’ve had to learn through trial and error. The way I can connect with people is a skill I was born with. I want to teach and lead people who want to be the same type of leader. Not because I’m a great leader. There’s better than me wherever I go. It’s because I’m true to myself, to my art, my family, friends, and to my audience. I don’t go about making spectators, I make people a part of a community. My community, your community, our communities. You reading this right here, right now, are in that community.
Things didn’t always go as I’d assumed. I never thought I’d be working in the movies. The thought never crossed my mind. I remember seeing Home Alone, Fievel Goes West, and Robocop, and Rocky as a kid, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life growing up. I had dreams of being in a rock’n’roll band as a teenager but I think that was more to meet girls. It worked back then, but that was me having more style than substance. I’ve had a decade of leveraging the two to a delicate balance. The reason movies have become such a huge impact on my life is that I can tell stories and people will be captivated to see what happens next. There are countless stories being told out there right now and I believe my stories are different. I’m different. My upbringing was different. I want others to see what I see, to know what I know, to feel what I feel, and to act on their ideas as well.
Living in Los Angeles makes a filmmaker jaded from seeing what really is successful. Too many people around you are doing the same thing and getting multiple awards for their work, but still they struggle, whether financially or artistically. That struggle is part of us and puts us in one world. I think we can come together in our daily struggles. I want to lead people to being true to themselves and to their community and their world. Sure, I want to make a splashy Hollywood blockbuster here and there. I’m only human. But I also want to tell the story of people that are human. Possibly the story of a cyborg with artificial intelligence too.
I end this journal with the casual quote which moves me forward. It’s simple yet means so much and also can easily be observed and analyzed deeply. It’s the words that I seek from others as a colleague and as a friend. It’s the people I like to be with that say this to themselves and aloud, and it brings out ways to do things that others say are impossible:
“Why not?”
Filmmaking is the perfect job for me because I am expected to make mistakes. Not only that, but I get to learn from my mistakes.
In my journey learning my craft, I have come to understand what people love, what people hate, and what people are willing to take as acceptable. This also explains the Studio's approach to filmmaking also.
So at this point I can either start making acceptable art that is at every movie theater or I can push the limits and possibly be hated. The opposite of that though is that it will change the entire industry, be imitated like no other and bring about international recognition. Doing either of those will not make me feel happy as an artist. I am choosing to make experimental film that will possibly have mainstream success. I am not looking for fame. I am looking to touch the top of the universe by a mistake.
