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I started making music videos in my twenties and made my first feature, 'Guncrazy,' at 29. I then spent the greater part of my thirties directing features.
When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.
Lord of the Rings was something I always wanted to do. I read the book when I was about 25, and I was always hoping if it was ever made into a feature film that I would be involved in some way. And then I finally got it, and I was over the moon. It was fantastic news.
For Scary Movie 2, we had a due date and had to work fast. And though there's a lot of pressure, as artists, we just block it out. So really, the pressure comes from us. That's how the first movie happened. There was no outside pressure: we wanted to hit the audience hard.
I never wanted to retire. I wanted to kind of shift my work pattern so I could stay fresh and invigorated, and use the experience that I had gained in 30 years, but in a slightly different direction.
'Scary Movie' has lost its way as a franchise. It has turned into 'Disaster Film' and 'Epic Movie' and 'Date Movie' and that isn't what I wanted. I wanted to do a movie that was just grounded in a reality that went to crazy places.
When I got laid off, I would write my friends these 15-page-long emails. This was before people had personal emails, and my friends would tell me that I was going to get them fired if I kept sending them stuff, so I started a website.
I want my kids to experience passion. I want them to see that I have things I feel passionate about because it is such a great feeling to really love something.
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.