My filmmaking background has really just been making movies with my friends since I was 12 years old. That's how I feel I learned how to tell a story visually, by just going out with a video camera and making movies with my friends and family.
I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.
Contrary to what people think, I'm no politician, and when I have something to say I say it through my movies.
I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.
Making movies is an effort is an attempt to leave a trace of your existence.
I've always known that I've wanted to write, but I always saw myself doing that in the context of something other than film, so it was a really beautiful and kind of perfect moment in my life when I realized that I could combine this idea of wanting to write and tell my own stories with the environment I had grown up in and knew well - that I could make film as opposed to writing being a departure from what I knew.
One of the bad things about being a filmmaker, about being me, is I can hardly read a book anymore because every time I read something, I have a poaching mentality, like, 'Oh, can this be a movie?'
The whole point of making a film is to tell a story.
I write and film history; I don't make it.
I loved watching documentaries and had wanted to try making one for years - I'd just put it off as other opportunities arose. But I felt like time was running out for me if I wanted to do it.
The work is the work. The work is not me. I like the anonymity that directors can have about their films. Even though it's my voice, I'm a storyteller.
I love to act. And oh-so-love telling stories through film as an actor. Even on my 'days off.'
I felt film is art and there are people that constructed that art - and that made me want to be a filmmaker.
I can't point my finger on a 'dream role,' but the days that I'm able to fulfill the stories of the 'hood/barrio on film, those will be great days.
