My very first film in Hindi - 'CID' - was with Dev Anand. I was a big fan of his. So you can imagine my excitement and nervousness at doing a film with him. On the very first day on the sets, when I called him 'Dev Saab' he turned around and said 'No no, call me Dev.'
One would marvel on the screen the way Shammi Kapoor walked, Dilip Kumar cried, or seeing Dev Anand's style. And then, one day, you are in the same space with them. It's very unreal.
I was born on Dev Anand's birthday so I believe... the older I get, the better I become.
I did my first apprenticeship when I was 15, then joined the union when I was 17. I worked every summer in high school and college.
I worked at my high school newspaper at Andover, which came out weekly, unusual for a high school paper. Then my first day at Penn I went right to the 'Daily Pennsylvanian' and pretty much spent most of my college career working both as the sports editor and then editor of the editorial page.
I was a teacher. I also worked at Harlem Children's Zone. I moved back to Baltimore and opened up an after-school, out-of-school program on the west side and then worked in two public school districts, in Baltimore and Minneapolis.
I went to film school at Columbia and did that for a couple years and really thought I was going to be a filmmaker, and then I kind of drifted over to the acting side after that. I'd been an actor in high school, and when I got to college, it was all about film.
When I got out of college I worked for DC comics. I worked on staff there and I also freelanced for them for about a decade. I spent two years on staff as an editor right out of college. I'm from Los Angeles and I came back here after a couple of years in New York, to go to Graduate School at USC. I wasn't thinking specifically about animation although while I'd worked at DC.
Dev Anand was extremely cooperative towards a newcomer. He never made me feel that he was a big star and I, a newcomer.
I'm a product of the '60s and the '70s - slightly rebellious back then in college, not so much in high school, when I got to college I think I was. And I think a lot of where I'm at right now is rooted in a lot of hypocrisy that I recognized back then that I never wanted to be personally.
My paternal grandfather worked in the mill all his life. My father worked in the mill almost his whole life. I worked in the mill while I was going to college in the summers. And then, for one stretch, I quit school and worked one year.
When I went to college, it was so easy. And I worked two jobs while I was in school all the way through; I put myself through school. But working and studying was easy for me because I had worked so hard in high school, studying all the time. Taking only three classes and then working was an easy life in comparison.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.
So I never had trouble getting work or working or doing - I always worked. I worked when I went to college. I worked after school.
The first film I watched was 'Soldier,' and then 'Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam' and 'Bade Miyan Chote Miyan.'
I wasn't the kind of kid like Spielberg or Lucas who knew to go to film school. I didn't know at 12 what I was going to do; it took me until I was about 23. I studied journalism in college, but after school, I got a job in public television and I never worked as a journalist for one moment.