When you do scenes that are just exposition, they feel false.
— Gavin O'Connor
From when I was 7 until I was 22, I played football. That was always my struggle as a kid. I always wanted to be an artist, but my parents were divorced, and my dad really wanted me to play sports, and that's how I got to see him. He would come pick me up or take me to practice, and he was always at my games.
I want to re-mythologize 'The Green Hornet' in a contemporary context, with an emphasis on story and character, while at the same time incorporating themes that speak to my heart.
As a kid, when most of my friends were into Superman and Batman, there was only one superhero who held my interest - The Green Hornet.
I always intended the title, 'WARRIOR,' to be about spiritual warfare and warrior lives outside of the cage.
The thing about Moby Dick is that, at heart, it's a very simple plot - there's only one white whale in the ocean. When you're a boy growing up in a hostile home, you imagine it's unique: it's happening only to you.
The script is just a blueprint.
Being a dad is like - there's nothing more important. So the exploration of that in stories, with parents and fathers and brothers, siblings, I just think that you're always in the terrain of love, whether it's absence of love or the giving of love or the desire for love.
With the rights now in our loving hands, I'm beyond excited to bring 'The Green Hornet' into the 21st century in a meaningful and relevant way: modernizing it and making it accessible to a whole new generation. My intention is to bring a gravitas to 'The Green Hornet' that wipes away the camp and kitsch of the previous iteration.
Sundance is going to be a defining moment in my life. But the unfortunate thing about Sundance is, when you have a film there, you can't have the opportunity to see other films.
At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.
The thing I learned from 'Pride and Glory' is that people like to feel a little better leaving the theater than they did coming in.
I'm going to go do a Netflix series. It's straight-to-series, 10 episodes, probably go for three seasons. I'm going to direct the pilot and hopefully the last episode of the first season. The show is 'Seven Seconds.'
I remember, after 'Tumbleweeds,' my friend and I wrote 'Pride and Glory.' I was just about to get it going. I had some really great actors attached, and New Line was going to make the movie, and 9/11 happened. And it was over. By September 12, it was over. And rightfully so. I understood that.
The Green Hornet was a human superhero. And he didn't wear a clown costume. And he was a criminal - in the eyes of the law - and in the eyes of the criminal world.
Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to make films. That's really all I ever wanted to do.
I always say to my agents, you go through one of these big kind of movies, everyone makes money, but like, I said, 'I'm the one who's gotta go make it, and if I don't have my heart in it, and it's like a love affair, I'm not going to do a good job. Then, and I don't want to just get paid. I just, I don't want to do that.'
My brother and I were separated when I was a child; we went with different parents.
