The first movie that I remember seeing inside a theatre was Disney’s “The AristoCats” back in 1970. I was a first wave Gen X, a naive little 5-year old at the time and I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie for days and days. I played it back in my imagination over and over again with the absolute certainty that it was real. That bad butler! Those poor kittens! I saw magic, but didn’t know what it was.

Fast forward 8 years and I was still kind of naive. My immediate family wasn’t overly religious, but a large portion of extended family were definitely on the zealous end of that particular spectrum and they were solidly in the “thou shalt not” crowd. Thou shalt not do this; thou shalt not do that; thou shalt not do all this other stuff. They weren’t Netflix documentary religious types or anything like that, but I was well informed about the “not” list.

Thou shalt not go to the movies - which I’m sure you already guessed - was a big one. That caused me some abject terror when I was told to take my younger brother and our cousin to see “Battlestar Galactica” in 1978, but much to my surprise and relief I did not burst into flames.

A lot of things have happened and a lot of things have changed since then, but I still love “The AristoCats” and I can belt out most of the song “Everybody Wants To Be A Cat”. “Battlestar Galactica” is awfully dated by today’s standards, but it got a pretty cool remake and I think that somewhere along the line I did too.

I made my first film somewhere around 2010 to give my US coworkers a look into an event I was part of here in Fredericton. I didn’t really think about it as a half hour documentary at the time, but it was and I loved doing it, so I did it again the following year.

Filmmaking just sort of happened after that. It was a squirrel with a shiny object and I chased it, eventually arriving at the NB Filmmakers’ Co-op looking for more.

I already have a career, so filmmaking isn’t a job for me or something I have to do to pay the bills. It began as something I did to have fun, to relax and to be creative, but I eventually came to see it as something else as well. In a film, I can explore ideas and questions that I am not sure how to articulate otherwise and along the way I have been fortunate to meet some great people who wanted to do some crazy things. Together we have had a great deal of fun telling scary stories and they became important parts of my life and I love them all very much.

I think I finally laid aside the naivety of my early life although it lasted longer into adulthood than I care to admit. Some of it I shed on my own and some of it was carved away by others, but when I make a movie I feel connected back to the awestruck little 5-year old boy I used to be.