I always wanted to be a feature filmmaker and tried to treat that experience as some sort of elite film school where I could learn the craft, and got paid to learn the craft.
I do believe that there are auteurs, in the sense that there are filmmakers with very strong voices and their voices are communicated on to the screen without a lot of compromise.
The trick is falling in love with something enough, and being excited enough by something, to want to make that year and a half or two year commitment and wake up every morning at 5 to go deal with a whole day full of problems to get it up on the screen. You really need passion.
I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.
Actually, the British boarding school experience turns out to be not that exotic.
In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.
Music videos were this lucky career opportunity. They were assignments. I was providing a service, and they were meant to be punchy and gimmicky and fun.
All the director wants is their idea of the movie to be believed in.
I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.
I have these ideas that people go 'Oh, that's cool. I'd pay to see it, but I'm not gonna give you $25 million.'
I err on the side of a kind of optimistic agnostic sense that there's something that put us all here - some energy or something that we are not in a position to understand.
I'm of the school that I will direct you if you request it - if you have a question.
I learned that when you're lucky enough to be surrounded by such talented people that you really become more of an orchestrator of this talent - you're just trying to harmonise everyone's contributions.
Here's my tip: Have your production hire the best hair stylists on the planet to do your films and commercials, then casually hint about how great it would be to get a trim during lunch break.
From a personal standpoint, I'd say that, yeah, seeing how quickly children grow, you realize how fast life goes by.
