I was always fascinated by engineering. Maybe it was an attempt maybe to get my
father's respect or interest, or maybe it was just a genetic love of technology, but I was always trying to build things.
I watched a couple of really bad directors work, and I saw how they completely botched it up and missed the visual opportunities of the scene when we had put things in front of them as opportunities. Set pieces, props and so on.
If you wait until the right time to have a child you'll die childless, and I think film making is very much the same thing. You just have to take the plunge and just start shooting something even if it's bad.
It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.
It'll be all of our efforts together. It won't won't ever be exactly the way I imagined it. And that is, I think, an important lesson as well, is that in any group enterprise it's going to be the sum total of the group.
My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.
Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as director. Now you're a director. Everything after that you're just negotiating your budget and your fee.
So much of literary sci-fi is about creating worlds that are rich and detailed and make sense at a social level. We'll create a world for people and then later present a narrative in that world.
The film industry is about saying 'no' to people, and inherently you cannot take 'no' for an answer.
The films that influenced me were so disparate that there's almost no pattern.
I certainly didn't think of myself as gifted. The standards for being gifted in my environment were if you were good in Little League or if you were good in football.
I do an awful lot of scuba diving. I love to be on the ocean, under the ocean. I live next to the ocean.
I had pictured myself as a filmmaker but I had never pictured myself as a director if that makes any sense at all.
I had read tons of science fiction. I was fascinated by other, other environments. For me, it was fantasy, but it was not fantasy in the sense of pure escapism.
worlds.