There hadn't been one done since the late 70s. I was living in Brooklyn, had no connection to Roger Corman, to no one in this movie. I didn't go to film school. I'm like the person who should have never made this film. But I just decided to put one foot in front of the other. I was writing film articles for magazines at the time. I convinced an editor from one of the magazines that I was working for to give me a shot to do a piece on Roger. This was an excuse to go meet him.

Films are a very tangible thing. It's making something with your hands. I think all of these guys - Roger and the whole cast of this movie - what they did was they were willing to make mistakes. They were willing to make movies that were really bad. But they learned.

I'm a big genre fan. I'm a big science fiction nerd and horror film nerd. I'm obsessed with Pam Grier. I wanted to be her for all of my teenage years.

Francis Ford Coppola didn't come out of the womb with The Godfather. He had a whole build up until he got to that point. I think it's okay to fail. That's how you learn. I think that's hopefully what people can take away from this movie.

If you take a movie like Easy Rider which everyone counts as the beginning of New Hollywood, that is a big movement. And then, when you really dissect that film and the people that were behind that movie, you realize that it has Roger Corman written all over it. Easy Rider is a hybrid film, taking The Trip and The Wild Angels and making a new explosion. And the people that were making it, guess what, they were all [people who had worked with Roger Corman].

I shot a lot of stuff that no one will ever see. That was my student work. What also happened was there was a big jump in technology.

Peter Fonda was just this clean, cookie-cutter kind of a guy. Roger Corman turned him into the motorcycle man with The Wild Angels. Jack Nicholson, all of them, they all had these images that Roger Corman fueled, and Easy Rider, it was a big surprise to understand how much creative influence Roger had. A lot of people dismiss him as just launching famous people's careers or being a penny pinching producer, but he's so much more than that.