50 Years of Filmmaking

“My filmmaking career began in 1976, making children’s films for Churchill Films in Los Angeles. I thought I should start by directing kids and work up to adults.

The budgets and crews were small, but I made my own films which I could shoot and edit in the Bay Area; and it gave me the template for how I wanted to work for the rest of my career. My first film, A-m-e-r-i-c-a-n-s (1977), a 10-minute documentary about ethnic diversity, was broadcast nationally on CBS and was such a big seller the company let me do a short drama next. But then politics intervened, as it seems to regularly, in the form of California’s Prop 16, and the educational film business collapsed. My plan, which I’d hatched in film schoool where I made a hybrid drama/documentary children’s film to get me a job in the children’s film world, had unexpectedly fallen apart. I floundered for two years playing in punks bands at the Mabuhay Gardens and doing PA work on commercials, industrials, and local PBS shows. Luckily the rent on my fantastic apartment in Berkeley was only $140 so I could get by if my friend Bob Shoup called with a few days of PA work.

50 years later, I completed my last film for HBO Documentary Films, Heroin: Cape Cod, which was screened for the White House and helped bring the oxycontin/heroin crisis to national attention; and Mifune: The Last Samurai, my tribute to my boyhood hero, Toshiro Mifune, which I had the privilege of making for Toshiaki Nakazawa, one of Japan’s great producers.

At that point, that craving I've always had to make the next film disappeared.  My favorite part of filmmaking was thinking about what I might do next.  Ideally, I'd take a year or a year and a half on a production, then move on to the next.  Even my two most ambitious projects, Black Tar Heroin and White Light/Black Rain took just two years to complete because they required it.  I don't know how people work on one film for six years.   Each film is a different challenge, a different experience, so you want as many experiences as possible, right?  But when I finished Mifune, I finally felt done, as far as filmmaking was concerned."