I did my first play in fifth grade. This same fifth grade teacher asked me several years later what I wanted to do when I grew up. I knew the most fun I'd had was doing the play in her class, so when I told her that, she began to take me to local theater auditions and became my mentor and friend, and to this day continues to be.
I want to be in fifth grade again. Now, that is a deep dark secret, almost as big as the other one. Fifth grade was easy -- old enough to play outside without Mom, too young to go off the block. The perfect leash length.
I started off making backyard movies. I think it began in fifth grade - I'd get the friends together and we'd make little home movies. I always wanted to make movies but I didn't know how. It was always something really fun to do.
I started writing poetry when I was in the fifth grade, just rhyming in class.
Writing screenplays is incredibly hard. I can't call it joy. Writing Novels? Joy. Directing? Joy. Writing Screenplays? That's where you pay all your dues.
Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.
The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan's first term.
When I started writing screenplays, as early as I started writing anything, I hadn't seen any ordinary screenplays. I saw movies and figured out how I thought they should be written.
The idea of directing was something that I always had in the back of my mind, and writing as well. I began to write screenplays when I was in my 20's.
It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.
My mom actually taught fifth grade, so... I'm good with fifth graders. That's, like, my specialty.
I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.
I taped the autopsy photos from Marilyn Monroe's death to my lunch box in fifth grade, and I would write stories in which someone inevitably died.
The first song I wrote, in fifth grade, was totally ripped from Jeffrey Lewis. My aunt's boyfriend gave me bass lessons, and I played drums for a year in sixth grade. Around seventh grade, I got a guitar and forgot everything else.
And I wanted to do a movie [Moonrise Kingdom] about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.
I was a paper boy, beginning the summer between my fourth-grade and fifth-grade years.