A little about myself

Andrew recently tagged me in the spreading-like-wildfire Eight Simple Things meme, the rules for which are as follows.

1. First, those tagged must explain the rules, as I am currently doing.

2. Secondly, share no more or less than eight facts about yourself.
3. Thirdedly, tag eight of your unsuspecting blogger friends, who are thereby contractually bound by law to do the same. If you do not comply, you will be fed to the crocodiles.

Anyhoo:

1) I share the same birthday (March 27th) as Nathan Fillion, Michael York, and Quentin Tarantino.

2) I made my first movie at the age of seven - a hand-drawn animation for a zoetrope of a man blowing up an enormous bubble gum bubble which popped all over his face. At the time, I had never actually chewed a piece of bubblegum in my life (it's not as easy to come by in England), I had only seen it in cartoons.

3) I met Meryl Streep at the opening to her husband Don Gummer's exhibition at MASS MoCA. She was very sweet and kind, despite probably having talked to the entire population of the Berkshires in a single evening. I, on the other hand, was a completely star-struck, shy doofus. Oh well.

4) There is a shot of Lizzie Straus's character pulling on her rubber gloves in Roads, the short film I made as my high school senior exhibition, which was a deliberate homage to Amelie. There was also a similar scene in my parodic sci-fi film Martian Invaders from Mars where Matthew Diamante's Leslie Neilsen-esque doctor pulls on his gloves before going to work on an alien autopsy. The unfortunate effect of this trend is that everyone who watches my movies now thinks I have some sort of sexual rubber glove fetish. Which, incidentally, I do not.

5) I have an embarrassing and unexplainable fear of aquariums, and more specifically, the big, ugly, scary-looking fish that lurk in them. I even have to tread carefully around the Ocean Creatures display at the New York Museum of Natural History, which is one of the many reasons I thought The Squid and the Whale was such a lovely, poignant little film.

6) As a child, I had a lisp so heavy it resembled a mixture of Hebrew and Klingon.

7) I'm not at all religious, just spiritual, but if there's anyone I think of as a "spiritual hero" it's Johnny Cash; a brilliant artist whose faith was inseparable from his work, but always presented in an unpretentious, honest, and never holier-than-thou manner. In fact, I think if the majority of the world's organized religious leaders "walked the walk," spiritually speaking, the way that Johnny did, the world would be in a helluva lot better shape.

8) Although primarily a filmmaker, I have been known to dabble in other artistic outlets, such as hip hop.

And for the passing of the torch, I tag Jules, Arran, Stacie, Kim, Phelpster, Tom, Paul and Wiley.