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.
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 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 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 StapletonWe need to take a step back and realize that what happened in the 1950s, when he started his career, is exactly where we are today. Everything goes in a cycle, and right now, distribution is changing. Audiences might be kind of sick of these giant blockbuster movies with all these special effects where blue people are running around and the hero is some non-human entity. These are all great movies, but I think that there's definitely room for new voices to come out.
Alex StapletonPeter 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.
Alex Stapleton