Quotes

Ultimately, "The Commune" is a stepping stone to helming my life mission: "Pistoleras." It has won big screenwriting awards like Creative Screenwriting Expo's best action script, and already has fans, and is anxiously awaited. It's a franchise, it's a video game, and it's a way of life that could help change the world. My team just needs a few more investors and celebrities whose missions align with ours, and then there will be a new sheriff in town to take down the global epidemic of sex slavery.

I adore a smart psychological thriller, but their audiences are sophisticated and too many modern filmmakers are lazy copycats instead of talented mix artists with film knowledge beyond 1995. You have to come up with a new thriller/horror idea that isn't "someone who you think is dead isn't" or "someone is schizophrenic and doesn't know it!"

Ultimately it's a filmmaker's job to be controversial and outspoken and make audiences think. Artists are supposed to be sacred guardians of their society's conscience, and when they aren't, historically, is when a society falls. We're at a point when indie filmmakers have taken over the means of production, but there's little creativity. This golden opportunity is being wasted in timid and soulless material. It's our job to tell original, notorious tales that push film and our audiences forward instead of aping a Hollywood blockbuster or whatever was hip at Sundance last season. With the exception of Crispin Glover, why aren't filmmakers making subversive pieces a la "The Night Porter," "The Magic Christian," "Holy Mountain" or "One Eye"? You're not a cog in the Hollywood wheel, so grow some balls and stop ripping off "Saw." Write and direct something audacious and educated with a point that isn't for a paycheck, and the world will be a better place.

With The Commune my entire goal was to make a movie where a horrific rape happened to a girl we empathized with and cared about, so that instead of taking the violence for granted the audience was impinged. 1 in 5 women will be raped in their lifetime, with a startling number of these rapes committed by relatives. Yet you can't turn on nightly TV without seeing a top-rated procedural show whose bread and butter is making sport of violence against women and desensitizing audiences to the reality of the dangerous world we aren't taking responsibility for.

I'm a thinker, so I ask a lot of tough questions of myself, of others, of life. But "The Commune" isn't about any particular religious practice and I'm not against organized religion. I'm against zealots and hypocrites.