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When I was twelve my mother bought my father a movie camera for Father's Day. He'd take the camera out on family camping trips, and then we'd have to endure his photography. So one day I said, "Dad, can I be the family photographer?" And he gave me the camera. I dramatized everything. My dad had to wait for me to say "Action!" before he could put the knife into the fish to clean it. That was my first PG-13 moment. My first real movie was of my Lionel trains crashing into each other. I used to love to stage little wrecks. I put my eye right to the tracks and watched the trains crashing. My dad said, "If you break your trains one more time, I'll take them away!" So I took his camera and staged a great train wreck, with shots of the trains coming in different directions and shots of little plastic men reacting. Then I could look at my 8-mm film over and over and enjoy the demolition of my trains without the threat of losing them.
I hated school. From age twelve or 13 I knew I wanted to be a movie director, and I didn't think that science or math or foreign languages were going to help me turn out the little 8-mm sagas I was making to avoid homework. During class I'd draw a little image on the margin of each page of the history or lit. book and flip the pages to make animated cartoons. I did just enough homework to get promoted every year with my friends and not fall to the wrath of my academically minded father. I give my dad credit for singlehandedly keeping my math grades high enough so I wouldn't be held back. My other worst subject was phys. ed.; I failed that three years in a row in high school. I couldn't do a chin-up or a fraction. I can do a chin-up now, but I still can't do a fraction.
At school I felt like a real nerd, the skinny, acne-faced wimp who gets picked on by big football jocks all the way home from school. I was always running to hide in my bedroom, where I felt safe. I would actually call out, "Safe" to myself. When I was about 13, one local bully gave me nothing but grief all year long. He would knock me down on the grass, or hold my head in the drinking fountain, or push my face in the dirt and give me bloody noses when we had to play football in phys. ed. Once he threw a cherry bomb between my legs in the school toilet. I got up before it exploded. This was somebody I feared. He was my nemesis; I dreamed about him. Then I figured, if you can't beat him, try to get him to join you. So I said to him, "I'm making this movie about fighting the Nazis and I want you to play this war hero." At first he laughed in my face, but later he said yes. He was this big 14-year- old who looked like John Wayne. I made him the squad leader in the film, with helmet, fatigues and backpack. After that he became my best friend.