I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
I'm in college at North Carolina State University. I'm about to start my sophomore year and have an apartment on campus with three buddies I've grown up with. I get to be normal when I'm there, and then I tour Thursday through Sunday.
In real life, one of my friends was killed in a car accident during our sophomore year.
Growing up in Huntington Beach, you were either a traditional sports athlete, a skateboarder, or a surfer. I got my first skateboard when I was five and skated off and on over the years, did a little BMX racing as a kid, and then in my freshman or sophomore year I started getting a little bit more into skateboarding.
I'm this high school dropout. I quit in my sophomore year, when I was 15. I worked for a while in a deli, and when I was almost 17, I got married.
I attended the University of Louisville my freshman year, transferred to what was then Western Kentucky State Teachers College for my sophomore and junior years, and then graduated from the University of Louisville in the summer of 1961.
And then, when I left Princeton in the middle of my sophomore year, I went into the navy.
Eleven years old is not an early age to set your sight on the Olympics for a gymnast, because we normally peak in high school. I first qualified for the Olympics team during my sophomore year in high school, when I was 15 years old.
I learned hard lessons in life; I had to because I had so much happen: My mother died my sophomore year in high school. The next year, same day, my brother dropped dead. Two years after that, I got married because my girlfriend got pregnant. The year after my wedding, my father - who I had only recently met - died.
I was a sophomore in college, and I did an industrial video about how to use the Internet - that dates me! It was with John Turturro, somehow they had gotten John Turturro to do this thing, and I was so excited and so nervous I probably drank 10 cups of coffee that morning.