Usually for a movie, if you want a 13-year-old, you get a 16-year-old who looks 13, because 13-year-olds dont have that level of self-awareness.
We made four feature films with Sherwood Baptist. The wonderful thing was the church (members) volunteered. It was an awesome atmosphere of attitudes. The hard part was (that) all four of the first feature films we made take place in modern-day Albany, Georgia. We know that not all of our films going to be (set in) modern-day Albany, Georgia.
I'll say - I have four kids! I married a woman when I was 24 years old. She was 13 years my senior. She had been married twice before. I adopted them. I was 24 and had a 17-year-old son instantly, an 11-year-old daughter, a 5-year-old, and a child on the way. So I had to learn how to become a parent very quickly.
The term "rock" has, unfortunately, become appropriated by four-year-old girls and accountants. An accountant does something amazingly well on the stock exchange and his buddies high-five him: He's a rock star! A four-year-old girl learned to ride a bicycle: She's a rock star!
It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who get tickled till we wet our pants. We're the 13 year old shy kid with zits. We're the 16 year old no one asked to the prom, and so on. We walk around in the bodies of adults until someone presses the right button and summons up one of those kids.
My fan base is extremely random. It's the 14-year-old white kid sitting next to your auntie from St. Luke's Baptist Church, to the 20-year-old Black girl who probably would go to a Rihanna concert, but she's coming to my show.
If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.
I want all of my films to be grounded in reality, and I think 'Midnight Special' is the most grounded film I've ever made, in spite of its genre.
She is a 13-year-old girl who shares Amanda's name, and politely explained that she could not give up the website. Why? Because the younger Amanda plans to be president of the United States, and she's going to need the website for her campaign.
When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is persuaded to blow herself up, and in doing so she kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, we are watching the future itself die!
I thought, I hate the thought of a 12, 13 or 14 year-old girl seeing a picture of me and thinking she'll do what I did.
My four-year-old daughter regularly requests reading Book One [the March] at bedtime; the methods of reading, delivering, and processing the book's content vary according to a kid's age and developmental level, but she's deeply affected by the story, asking follow-up questions for days.
I'm blessed. I have a 13-year-old girl's eye and a 14 year-old boy's eye. I've been given the gift of sight by people who decided to donate organs. I try to do as much organ-donor work as I can.
One thing that did give me pause for thought, when I told my female friends now that I was writing about a 13-year-old girl, without exception they all said, 'I would not go back to being 13 for a million pounds.'
Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students.
Filmmaking is a great adventure. I'm as excited as a kid to be given tickets to fly suddenly to England, South Africa, America, everywhere. I'm still a 13-year-old kid, flying.