I'm a writer-director originally from Rhode Island, now living in Los Angeles. I've spent the past eleven years working with a writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and am now making the transition into feature directing thanks to this script we wrote together and our incredible producer Jordana Mollick.
My writing partner, Joni Lefkowitz, and I love studying girl friendships in particular because they seem defined by a combination of codependent intimacy and subtle, constant passive-aggressiveness.
Since I have spent many years of my life living in Los Angeles, and since I'm also in the music business, I know that much more is talked about in Los Angeles than ever really occurs.
I've lived all over the country - Michigan, California, Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, now, Maine - but I never understood springtime until I spent 25 years farming in the Ozarks.
Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.
For 'Hey Monday,' there were songs that I co-wrote with songwriters or producers, but our last EP, the whole band did everything together. I've had a lot of experience with co-writes, which is basically what I'm doing now. I am writing things on my own, but I really believe co-writing makes you a better writer.
I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.
Rhode Island has become a second home to me after being involved in its cultural life for over 61 years. I look upon it as a privilege to be inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame.
I think that what kind of is making this different is the creative group of us that has come together and we're all kind of on the same page working towards the same goal. So it is a real collaborative effort of our hearts more than it is oh you have the writer, you have the director, the producer, whatever.
I am proud to be in Los Angeles. I have a lot of fans that love me here. When you talk about the Meccas of boxing - Las Vegas, New York - now you have to talk about Los Angeles.
I think I'm an extremely conscientious producer and now equally as a director and it gives me the opportunity to look at the entire movie and really allow the movie to be the creative vision of the actors, the writer and myself, because I'm in charge of it from a producer and a director point of view.
Directing was easy for me because I was a writer director and did all my directing when I wrote the screenplay.
I love to read scripts. But I am very happy right now to say that I am a working actor. In this town of Los Angeles, the phrase 'I'm an actor' is overrated. So, I like to say, 'I'm a working actor.'
I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.
Everytime I read a script now, I am able to imagine my character in multiple ways, which I present to the director or the writer, and we take it on from there.
I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.
Being in L.A., it was really hard to find a country writer and producer. I eventually - years of searching - found this guy, Dan Franklin. He's an incredible musician and producer. We write so well together... It's been a really cool experience.