Quote

When I was a kid, we would build pillow forts. My pillow fort was always like Ice Station 9 in Antarctica. The other kids would come by and be like, 'Oh! The wind and snow is blowing.' From a young age, I wanted to be out there and surviving. I'm a high-strung, hyperactive guy.

Since I was a kid, I liked construction.

As a kid, I was always building things. My father had a shop in the house, and we built things - we were kind of a project family. I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema, and in cinema, you get to build so many things, or help build them.

Imagination and invention go hand in hand. Remember how lack of resources was never a problem in childhood games? Shift a few pieces of furniture around the living room, and you have yourself a fort.

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.

People have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years: using whatever is available to build shelter. If you ponder what could be used, then building materials are everywhere.

I grew up in a house my parents built together on a mountain in Tennessee. When we moved in, the walls were still going up, we didn't have hot water, and we turned it into an amazing adventure.

As a child, I had always wanted to know what lay at the end of a corridor or behind a door in a picture, so I did a floorplan and elevations of Angelina's house and learned my way around it. The idea was that children should start to feel at home in it.

Until I was six years old we lived in the projects, then my two brothers and three sisters and I moved to a three-bed that my mother's father built.