The Child is Father of the Filmmaker.

The first time I walked onto a set, it was to watch the filming of a “Lark” cigarette commercial at El Morro castle: I got to cue an actor by kicking him from a perch on a giant cannon. I was 8, I was living in Puerto Rico, and my stepfather was an art director at J. Walter Thompson.

 

It was exciting beyond description.

 

At 12, I got a Super8 camera and on the very first day employed my friend and two of our pets to make a tale of a fugitive dog sleuthed by his sibling and owner, edited entirely in-camera, including titles written on posterboard.

 

The feeling of anticipation waiting to get that film back from the drugstore was only surpassed by the horror of having the film catch in the projector and melt when I finally got to watch my epic.

 

By 13 I discovered editing, and used a little movieola to cross-cut between my father’s friend participating in an amateur car race and me and my friends crashing kid’s wagons and Big Wheels, which I displayed while playing Elton John’s “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” on the record player.

 

I felt an indescribable rush as my Dad’s friend crashed his car at the end of the piece to gasps from the audience: my first surprise ending.

 

At 16, I discovered girls and friends and partying, and everything else just faded into the haze of hormones and pot smoke.

 

But every so often, right up until my junior year in college, I’d whip out that old Super8 projector and the big reel of films I’d spliced together, and enjoy a silent homage to my childhood and the pure joy of filmmaking at its most basic. Claymations, dramas, adventures, sci-fi (disappearing people, my lord!): it was all there. Sometimes there was even an audience.

 

Unfortunately, during that junior year, someone apparently liked the films enough to steal the projector and movies out of my room. It wasn’t a huge deal then, but now, if for no other reason than to go back and look at how ingenuously and energetically I approached every project, I would pay almost anything to get those movies back.

 

But perhaps they are better gone, growing in esteem in my mind and pushing me forward to my next film somehow.

 

At least that’s story I tell myself.