On Directing Before You Are A Director

I am nineteen and I have not directed a feature. I am also not waiting for permission to think like a director, because the thinking is the part you can start today.

Directing, in the small version available to me right now, means deciding. Deciding where the camera sits and why. Deciding what to cut even though it took a day to get. Deciding what the piece is actually about before I turn anything on.

Taste is just a long record of decisions you were willing to defend.

So I make small things constantly, and I try to make each one about exactly one idea. Most of them are not good. A few of them are the reason I know what I want to make next.

I am designing my own major at Duke through Program II to keep doing this deliberately: filmmaking, storytelling, creativity, and technology, held together instead of taken as separate subjects.