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.
Alex StapletonFilms 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.
Alex StapletonI think being really open to this new world of online and what it means to be online. Also, understanding that maybe it's time to let go of the 90-minute experience and realize that all of the content that comes on top of the 90-minute film experience, [that] there's a lot of that, especially with documentaries.
Alex StapletonThere's all of the DVD extra material and all these other pieces of information that don't fit into a 90-minute experience, but it's still content and people still want to see it. It's being open to [the fact that] the business is changing and being open to how you can make money to afford you to stay in business to keep making new things. I think you just have to have an open mind and be really smart about stuff and not be so locked into the conventional way of how the process used to go.
Alex StapletonThere 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.
Alex StapletonThere'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.
Alex Stapleton