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I don’t have a career of any kind. I held my first and only job as a part-time dishwasher back in 2008 until I was laid off; social anxiety disorder has been the major stumbling block preventing me from seeking employment since.
As with Dek, I, too, desire to become a filmmaker. It’s a interest I came to only gradually, over many years. It began in 2002/2003, when I started writing Evil Dead fanfiction; I wrote a few short stories and ended up imagining certain contemporary actors playing certain OCs. I then took a shot at writing a screenplay for an Evil Dead sequel (It wasn’t very good; it was mostly just a rehash of Evil Dead II.) From there I graduated to imagining how books I read would work as movies; I’d imagine who would play the leads, what changes would be made to the narratives to make them work better in film, etc. I still had no real aspirations to become a filmmaker at this time, though.
Filmmaking took on a new dimension for me around '05/'06. After I was expelled from high school, I took to watching more TV (in particular, these three channels). That’s when I became familiarized with Roger Corman’s Poe films, Charlie Chaplin, The Bride of Frankenstein, and this short film. They all inspired me to begin viewing film as a bona fide art form rather than just a form of visceral entertainment. My interests in film plateaued until '09, when I got TCM for the first time. That’s the channel that introduced me to a whole lot of classic films; The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney, Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings, and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in particular left marked impressions on me. A year or two after that, I got my first Netflix subscription; that’s where I watched Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Lost Highway all for the first time, finalizing my interest in David Lynch. My desire to become a filmmaker was cemented by 2012.
I haven’t had much experience in filmmaking; except for an unfinished short documentary I was putting together at school prior to my expulsion and some shitty one-man home movies I shot with a DV camera in 2006, I haven’t made a single movie. Were I to rectify that – were I to manage to get the education/funds to get into film school or teach myself – I’d make art films – horror/drama/romance/spiritual/surreal art films, all set in period or timeless eras, often with themes of unrequited/hard-won love, nostalgia, and the search for God present. One-fourth of my films would be shot in high-contrast, grainy, black-and-white; another fourth would be shot with red-and-cyan colour grading (to resemble two-colour Technicolor films from the '20s and '30s); another fourth would be shot to recapture that '80s look; and the final fourth would be shot in various different styles.
As for my hobbies, when I’m not binge watching a crap-load of movies or TV – when I’m not working on a dozen screenplays all at the same time – I read. On occasion I’ll work on a collage or drawing, but neither rouses my interest much anymore.
