Actually, I started falling in love with the films of Brian De Palma. He was the first filmmaker I ever loved, he always made genre films. They touched me more, they felt warm, and human, and unsettling. There was always his vision behind them.

Well, there were, you know, several poses that was known for everybody, that is known for certain poses. And to me it was the three-quarter back pose. And it was a very difficult pose to do, to twist your body and to show the small waist and to show at the same time your wide shoulders, your back. And you also see the front and you see the abs and you see the calf and the thighs and all of those things. But it was a difficult pose to do. Very few bodybuilders could master it. I copied basically Reg Park, who was my idol and who won three times the Mr. Universe competition. And he was known for that pose in a kneeling position and in a standing position. And so because he was my idol, I was, you know, absolutely fanatic to copy his poses and then to kind of improve on that. And that's exactly what I did.

Truffaut, Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, they were the great directors of the Nouvelle Vague. They found the freedom to make exactly the films they wanted. Chabrol was important because he was able to make very strong portraits of women and very complex portraits of women. He was very clever and he had a lot of joy and pleasure. He didn’t have some big theories about his work, he just enjoyed making films. I try to work like that.

Thrust into my profession without any training whatsoever, I had to just flounder and just find my way. It was an agonizing experience. It’s like jumping off a diving board in the Olympic contest without knowing how to swim or dive, and I just had to find my way. So one day, I said to Jimmy Cagney, “Jimmy, what is acting?” and he said, “I don’t know.” He said, “All I can tell you is whatever you say, mean it,” and I thought that marvelous counsel.

Well, we give a lot of books as presents because we’re always evangelizing and proselytizing for plant-based nutrition, for the environment and sustainability and things like that. Suzy, every year, makes up a gift bag on a theme. But usually, the theme is around sustainability. And there are always some books in there. So we give out a lot of books.

There was. The critical moment for me was in the 11th grade. My biology teacher, Mr. McKenzie, decided that what our school needed was a theater arts program and we didn’t have it. There was wrestling, basketball, football, it was a very jock oriented school and there was no theater program whatsoever. So we started a theater program from scratch. We bootstrapped it. He taught it, and I think he might have done it for nothing. We had to build the props and the scenery and the costumes and do everything ourselves. We had to turn the stage into a proper working stage. It took a year, but we started putting on our own productions. I think that was really a pivotal moment. My biology teacher was our muse at that time. And I think the fact that we were having to do everything, that it wasn’t handed to us, may have created a kind of a work ethic that paid off then in independent film production because it’s the same thing. You know, you’re finding scraps and bits and pieces, and putting it all together and putting on a show. And it’s that sense of being able to create some moment of glory, some showmanship — out of nothing, out of baling wire — that is maybe a lesson that was learned there as a result of this man who just decided to have a theater arts program.