English

Sundance Film Festival 2023

In 1998, I’m 14. I live in a shithole. My brain doesn’t talk to my mouth. Sometimes when I try to say my name it’s just S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S… S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S-S, etc until I give up.

School is violence, home is violence. Mom’s dead, sometimes dad throws me across the room, sometimes he just screams in my face–Hit me! Hit me! Hit me!–because otherwise he can’t justify throwing the first punch. We don’t have electricity, I do homework by kerosene lamp. I come home with concussions. In 1998 I don’t use words like trauma and abuse, but I sure as shit know I’m fucked. More than fucked. Cursed. There’s no way out. Someone on the bus says life’s a bitch and then you die and I realize that’s the truest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the world.

When I start attending a new school, I make a choice. I’m not going to be weak anymore.
I make a rule for myself: I’ll fight anyone who makes fun of me, no matter how big they are, no matter how scared I am, I will fight them. I follow the advice my father taught me, the advice he learned in jail: It doesn’t matter if you win, it just matters that they hurt the next day.

I lost a lot of fights. Then I won some fights. I still wasn’t cool, but at least I was crazy. Crazy is scary and scary’s a hell of a lot better than weak.

Line by line, I learnedthat ancient masculine cadence. How to use your voice, your posture, your walk, your jokes to intimidate people. No one’s gonna respect you til you make them. Women like assholes. The only way to seem dangerous is to be dangerous.

Piece by piece, I hardened myself. Cauterized the soft parts. I forgot how to cry. I thought I hated my dad. I became my dad. The first time I felt attraction to a man I subjected myself to a shame so intense that I wouldn’t experience those feelings again for 15 years.

But, fuck. In a way, it worked.

I fought my way out. Went to Bible college in Chicago. Used plastic trash bags for suitcases. I had never been on a plane.I lost God, found art, dropped out, became a designer, then somehow, a director. I turned all that rage and shame into the singular goal of not sucking. I worked harder, worked later, I didn’t have a life. I stopped sucking.

I got represented. I got into Sundance. I live in LA. I’m a working screenwriter. I have a beautiful family who I don’t spend enough time with. I have famous people in my phone. I still stutter, but I can kind of hide it. I use the meditation apps. I read Lao Tzu. My high school friends are mostly in jail, in recovery or in poverty, my dad’s still wasting away in that shithole cabin, but here I fuckin am. I ‘made it.’

But also, right now, as I’m typing this, my seven year old son is asleep in the next room. He’s beautiful. He’s wild. He’s the most tender creature I’ve ever seen. And it scares me, because I was tender like that too. So was my dad. My grandfather. I see it in pictures. Little boys, goofy and genuine and half-cocked, smiling absently at a world they don’t yet know to fear.

I want my son to stay like this. I don’t want him to harden. I don’t want him to put the armor on, but I also know, no matter how much I meditate, and go to therapy and forgive myself and keep my sobriety and get good sleep and limit my social media… I know no matter what I do, the person most likely to fuck up his life, the person most likely to flatten him and prune him down and harden him? It’s me.

It’s generational. It’s a curse. And that’s what this film’s about. How can a sweet kid face the terror of male rage without becoming it? Why do young men become the things we hate? Can Damon make another choice than the one I made? Is there a way out for him? For my son? For me?

I have a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers, but this short film represents the first time I’ve ever put my childhood on screen. It was hard to make. It was good to make. My collaborators and producers made this better than I could have imagined. Alex is only 20, and he’s one of the best actors I’ve ever seen.

But. As difficult as it’s been, the process of making this film has given me hope.

Because my son isn’t scary yet. In the last shot, the boy revealed? That’s him. That’s my son. He’s still tender. I want his help, and he needs mine. 1998 was a long time ago, but we’re still trying to break this curse.

Thanks for watching,

-Samm