I'm trying to write a TV show. Ideally it would be just a reality-TV show, getting the guy who played Eddie Winslow and Kirk Cameron to live in a house. The Jehovah's Witnesses would come to the house a lot or something like that. I kind of like the idea of Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses trying to convert Kirk Cameron.
You won't be surprised to know, therefore, that the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses are the same organisation at the top level where the Elders of the Mormons and the leaders of the Watchtower Society operate a very different agenda to the one their followers believe.
On the way here this guy steps up to us and says, 'Would you like to join Jehovah's Witnesses?' and Rocky (Graziano) says 'I didn't see nuttin!'
The idea was called Justin.tv. The idea behind it was, basically, to create our own live-video streaming show, like 'Big Brother,' about ourselves, these entrepreneurs trying to make a reality show. It was a little bit meta and we launched this show.
I'm not really any religion. I still study with Jehovah's Witnesses, so I say I'm Apostolic Pentecostal Jehovah's Witness Seventh-Day Adventist Jew.
All entertainment is an element of fantasy because you are seeing something that is not quite real. There is no such thing as reality TV. Reality TV would be to leave a camera on in front of someone's house. Just leave it on. Then whenever the person comes or goes walking the dog or getting groceries, that's what it would be like. Any time you make an edit, you've lost reality TV. You're either compressing time or extending. That's a term that's been overused and overexposed. I think it's fantasy movies that take the fantasy of movies even further.
Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.
I'm not a reality-TV kind of guy. But it's almost like we're living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America, and it's like a big reality show.
My family was Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a really tough religion. It kind of deterred me from religion for a long time. They still practice, but I don't. But I always remained spiritual, and had a belief that there is a God. I'm trying to find my way, you know?
I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.'
I heard that the guy who invented the Jehovah's Witnesses was a Mason.That kind of turned me off, because when something's mysterious, all you can do is be scared of it. "He's a Mason? Ugh. It must be evil!" I didn't know much about it, so I was scared. Now I actually admire those guys - they're pretty talented. They founded a lot of the world that we look at today.
I remember thinking all TV was black and white, but that was because we had a really old, broken TV. And then I went to a friend's house and I was like, woah, your TV is like, crazy! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That was my first show.
I would be involved in a show that was something like 'Run's House'... that's a different kind of show.
I learned from Jehovah's Witnesses that a fatalistic view is counterproductive.
Jehovah Witnesses don't believe in hell and neither do most Christians
When I got to 'Looking,' I didn't know that you could write stuff and they would put it on TV. That was that experience. My boss was Andrew Haigh and he came from film; he had never done TV. It was his first TV show, and he was running it. And I think he was like, 'Write it, and we'll put it on.' It was lovely.
I was able to make the jump to theaters without having a TV show. My passion for getting a TV show just plummeted. It was like I had already achieved what I wanted to achieve.