I was a musician in a former lifetime, and playing in bands was a blast — but it did something kind of sad: It killed my ability to get lost in music and just “be a fan.” I remember listening to records with religious fervor, getting lost in a magical world that inspired me to be a part of it. But doing that for real meant stripping away a lot of the gloss; pretty soon watching even a favorite band live felt more like homework than a magical experience. I played way more than I listened, and the bands I loved shrank down to a handful. Then years later when design replaced music for me, I helped publish a local alternative music magazine, and the hipsters writing and editing the mag — including my girlfriend at the time — turned me on to all kinds of amazing music… We were able to catch many of these acts live and in small venues, and at some point I realized it was back: I was able to be a fan again!

Some time after that, a similar sort of inspiration moved me to try my hand at something else: I wanted to be a filmmaker. Many years — and literally thousands of screenplay pages + several short films later — here I am with my first feature. Getting here involved making a study of film; watching any movie (even a “bad” one) was interesting and very often enlightening. My fear, of course, was that the process would render me unable to “just enjoy” movies as I once had.

But fortunately, this has not been the case. Sure, it’s a little more difficult for a film to successfully pull me in, and I have a sharper reaction to crappy (or even un-awesome) filmmaking — but when it clicks, damn, it clicks even bigger. It’s like gaining some idea of just how impossibly difficult it is to scrabble something together that even works a little has made it that much more exhilarating when a film actually fires on all cylinders. I have somehow retained the capacity to be utterly blown away by movies. I’m still a fan!