Would you say that you’re in love with filmmaking?

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean all my life. I started making films when I was 13, and I never had my own camcorder until I was probably in my 20s. So whatever school I was at used to loan me their school camcorders. So I shot a lot of movies on an old full-size Hitachi VHS camera. You were never allowed to leave the school grounds, so I shot all these movies at my school. I’d shoot horror movies where, you know, stuffed animals would chase my friends though the hallways, and I’d try to make them all bloody... and my teachers would play victims. It was a lot of fun.

I’d do a lot of little shorts and stuff when I was growing up, and I just shot them that way–or if I had a friend who had a camcorder, a lot of (them) would just run out and shoot something. They’d always have it, but they’d always look very unprepared. So when I watched their movie, I’d say, "Hey, how come all your cops are wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts?"

As an independent filmmaker, how many production hats do you find yourself wearing?

I’m not at the point where I can just hire a lot of people to do jobs for me and just throw money at my problems. I wish I could. Right now, I’ve got probably the most amount of people working on [SEG/ME/NTS] than I’ve ever had. Having a couple of composers, having a sound mixer, usually I end up having to do a lot of those jobs myself. I don’t write music, but I would always do sound mixing, sound effects, foley work, ADR [automatic dialogue replacement]. So we actually ended up hiring out help on that one, because there was just a limit to the amount of work I could do myself on this film. But yeah, normally I take on a lot of jobs. We had a crew of three when we made this whole movie. So the fact that it even got made at all is a bit of a miracle.

What influences you as an artist?

I was 10 when I saw RoboCop. That changed my life. That was when it first came out and everyone was talking about it. I’d never seen a movie that had that kind of violence in it before. And I’d never seen a movie that was that witty and that bitter. That left a really big imprint on me actually, movies like RoboCop and Predator. A lot of those movies were pretty unapologetic with their violence. They were such solid stories–were really well done and had such balls. They weren’t afraid to take risks and chances. I think (those are) the kind of films we’re making right now. Hollywood would never make a movie like [SEG/ME/NTS]. I think if you’re going to make an alternative to the Hollywood system–if you’re gonna do independent cinema–then you have to give them something they’re not going to find somewhere else.