I don't have a typical filmmaker background. I didn't grow up with a super eight camera or a video camera. I didn't start cutting movies when I was four or five.
When I was younger, me and my brother got a video camera, and he used to direct and I used to act. We used to make these silly, stupid short films, which, looking back now, were probably horrible.
If there were teenagers who had a video camera and saw what I did on a daily basis, they'd be bored out of their mind.
Sometimes you're not always on or at your best, especially during auditions. So if you go in and you don't nail it, even if they're like, 'We don't need to see you again,' get a friend, get a video camera, and film you doing the stuff again.
Rodney King is a progenitor of all these cell phone videos that we have. It was unusual that a person had a video camera to take a picture of the Rodney King beating. Now, of course, everybody has a phone, and that has been one of the key factors in all the new attention to the issue.
I was going to make movies. I was the one in the family who was always rolling the video camera, making movies of my brothers around town, and then screening them for my parents. I still would love to make movies someday... that's something that really means a lot to me, and I know I'll have the chance to do it one day.
No one was jumping up and saying, 'Yeah, let me give you money.' I had never held a camera in my hand - a home video camera, nothing. I had not directed.
Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.
The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.
I'm not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that's the greatest challenge that I have.
