I feel like I'm a graduate of the Roger Corman School of Filmmaking. I went and visited Roger on the set of Dinoshark and that's in the movie. That's where I really got a big whopping taste of what it's like to be on one of his sets.

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].

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.

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.

Because I didn't go to film school, I had a collection of books that were inspiring or taught me how to make movies, shorts with my friends back in Brooklyn, and one of those books was How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime which is Roger's autobiography. After reading that, I realized that oh my God, this guy is behind all my favorite Pam Grier movies. Oh my God, he made the Vincent Price Poe films that ran on television when I was little. He did Grand Theft Auto. He made Death Race 2000.

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.