Bauhaus Roots
It's hard to imagine a better formative environment for a creative person than the one I had growing up in Westport, Connecticut.
Connecticut was home to Bahaus teachers & artists like Josef Albers at Yale, Marcel Breuer in Litchfield, as well as creative luminaries like sculptor Alexander Calder, architect Philip Johnson and many others.
To this day, my mother Barbara Bernstein remains a prominent area artist.
I grew up in rapt fascination with pure impressionistic visuals - color, form, composition, and especially light. Light, prisms, lenses were magical totems that ultimately led to cinema.
I made Super-8 movies in high school, editing the original in my small viewer. But my very first film was a 16mm "scratch job" in 5th grade. We took old 16mm film stock, scratched the emulsion off, painted on the film, drew with magic markers, and then projected our work. That painterly, architectonic approach remains at the core of my understanding of film.
In addition to being a nascent artist and filmmaker, I was known as a writer from childhood, spinning stories that captured the attention of my teachers and the imagination of my classmates.
