I learned English reading Shakespeare and Neil Simon. Shakespeare, I have never met, despite my having gotten a full scholarship to LAMDA, London, and visited his hometown. I was a bit late. Neil Simon, however, was a joy. It was not an easy time in my life, dealing with government bureaucrats whose sole business concern was this unending curiosity as to where I was born. I asked the same question to Neil Simon, to which he responded he did not know where his parents came from. He basically said he didn't want his kids to know. We spent a good couple of hours in his Manhattan apartment with lots of stories to share from his early life, laughing the hours away.
Among all the subdomains and numerous areas of interest, storytelling is where I plant the flag of expertise and studied to exhaustion. I worked as a consultant for many creatives, the first of which won best film in Brazil in 2012, and the other who achieved green-light status after several years of struggle. I had executives, head of TV drama and film production at a major network as students and continue to grow and evolve as a creative, now with the vertical depth that depth psychology, archetypal psychology, and mythology has to offer. The need for story is one of those fundamental aspects of the human psyche for growth, depth and the process of individuation, not only of individuals, but of whole societies. We shape the storied and they in turn shape us. Variety is important to feed the psychic energy and vitality of a culture.
Hanging out with Marcelo Galvao and Halder Gomes at the Brazil Film Festival in Los Angeles.
While at UCI, I ran a weekly meeting to discuss some modern screenplay theory and managed to develop the seed and concepts for eight exciting projects that are likely to keep me busy for the next ten years.
