From a very early age, Star Wars meant THE WORLD to me. Truthfully, that’s never really changed.

Sometime when I was around 7 years old, I was at home with my mom watching Star Wars for the umpteenth time on VHS. It was “The Empire Strikes Back”, to be specific. At this point in my very young life, I had already experienced my first adventure to the movies and the revelation in reading class that I had the right to create stories. So these things were moving about in my DNA, but there was one piece still missing: What am I going to do with all this?

Well that evening, as I was watching Star Wars, it really began to hit me how much I loved these films and how amazed I was with what I was seeing onscreen: the worlds, the characters, the effects, the music, the story and emotion, it was all becoming clearer and so overwhelming to me. What was really occurring was a transition; a transition from just purely loving cinema to an overwhelming desire to be “a part” of whatever was inside of that frame. God knew exactly what He was stirring up that evening.

I didn’t have any kind of context for filmmaking. Sure, I played with my toys and action figures in a manner where I was creating scenes and story arcs and repeating them until I got it just right, even placing my eye in different spots around the toys to see where it looked the coolest, but that was all subconscious. I had no idea what filmmaking was and I didn’t grow up in a family that was a part of that industry at all. So any notion of doing something creative like that was pretty foreign to me.

But this night was different. The pieces and moments that came before of giving me a pure love for cinema and storytelling were all colliding on this repeated Star Wars viewing. By the end of the film, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I called to my mom in the next room and asked her the big question:

“Hey mom, who made this?”

After a moment, she replied, “A guy named George Lucas”. BAM! I sat and soaked in what she just said, and I thought and said to myself, “That’s what I want to do. I wanna be like George Lucas and make that”. It was done. From that moment on, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to be a filmmaker. I had no idea how that even worked or how it was even done, but it didn’t matter to me. We’d figure that out along the way. All I knew was that I loved it deeply and I would spend the rest of my life pursuing that dream, no matter what.

And to this day, I’m really just still that kid, having just watched Star Wars, wanting nothing else but to be like George Lucas and make movies.