There was a film class in my high school in Northfield, Minnesota, which was very unusual. I saw my first Buster Keaton film there, aged about 15. It made a gigantic impression on me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I had done student films for the School Of Visual Arts and for NYU and all these schools in New York, so those were my first film experiences, but they were student films, so I guess they don't really count.
I did my first film when I was in the final year of my graduation. At that time, I was still a kid, and I couldn't read the industry very well.
I didn't see many films until I was in college teaching.
I'd been an actor in high school, and when I got to college, it was all about film.
I never studied film formally at school, but as a kid, I spent most of my time in cinemas.
There was a year between school and getting going as an actor when I basically just watched films. Video shops were the new thing, and there was a good one round the corner and me and my brother just watched everything, from the horror to the European art-house.
When I was little it was a great time for film-making, with stuff like Mike Nichols' 'Silkwood.' The films you see in that pre-secondary-school stage stay with you in a very particular way.
When I left Ohio when I was 17 and ended up in New York and realised that not all films had the giant crab monsters in them, it really opened up a lot of things for me.
It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great.
In many ways, I was a typical young guy out of college. I was at Oxford, where every night there'd be a late showing of some great film.