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.

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.

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 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.

There's a rumbling with young artists and young filmmakers that are dying to get different points of view, different stories, out there. It's all changing and happening and they're able to maybe not play their movies in theaters but get them on the internet. This is the new wave, the new world.

First of all, on a cinematic [level], the film answer to that is that Roger Corman was creatively responsible for a lot of cinema history.

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.