Filmmaker Statement

A critical through line in all my work has been the imaginative and at times playful exploration of masculinity as it collides with the contemporary American experience. This is my “point of entry" for The World Takes. My films, though fictional in nature, tend to start with a personal, autobiographical experience: a perspective — a way of seeing the world; or, in the case of The World Takes, a major personal event: when I was a kid my family was evicted from our childhood home in Trenton, New Jersey. Once I have the initial spark, I then build story and characters, like scaffolding, around that experience so that I can establish a foundation to support an in-depth personal investigation. I find this approach — distancing myself from my reality by inventing story and character — offers me the opportunity to re-write a personal history. With The World Takes I have a chance to say goodbye to my home and my childhood, something I feel I never had the chance to do.