How Did You All Get Into Film?

[MayaDeren_fan]

Now I'm relatively new here, and I don't know many of you that well; before joining here I was following Lencho on letterboxd, and that was pretty much it. I'm still relatively young, only 16, so hopefully the question I'm asking is of some interest, seeing that most of you are probably much older than I. Anyways, what got you into the world of cinema? Whether it was an experience, a film, a director, a family member, etc, what got you on the path that you are on today?

[thoxans]

Now I'm relatively new here, and I don't know many of you that well

you should thank your lucky stars for that fact

before joining here I was following Lencho on letterboxd

lencho is legendary, so good choice in dat boxd follow

seeing that most of you are probably much older than I

truth. we're old af. papa jerry is so old that he doesn't even know how to post anymore

Anyways, what got you into the world of cinema? Whether it was an experience, a film, a director, a family member, etc, what got you on the path that you are on today?

actual serious answers to these q's will be forthcoming

[Curtis, baby]

Here's my brief cinephilia origin story:

In late 2007 at age 20 I decided I would watch all the major classics. You know, The Godfather, Goodfellas, like ten or twelve other movies. I quickly realized there was more going on...but still mostly focused on American movies from the present and recent past for a while.

In July 2010 that changed. I had occasionally gone to my local cinematheque for about 18 months at this point, since accidentally watching Truffaut's L'enfant Sauvage (I had thought I was attending a screening of The Wild Child starring Emma Roberts). But on July 9 2010, I had no idea I would be watching a Yojimbo/Sanjuro double-bill and have my life changed. It suddenly dawned on me that I would NEVER watch even close to all the "important classics", and it was so liberating! There was no end goal, just a never-ending journey. From that moment I was obsessed with foreign cinema, classic cinema, and basically all cinema! I attended the cinematheque and other rep theatres in the city religiously for the next few years, volunteering at VIFF so I could get a free pass and see 30 movies in two weeks, that sort of thing.

I've watched >100 movies in some months since then...and just a single solitary flick in others (but NEVER zero movies). But I would say since July 9 2010 I have been utterly obsessed with movies. Film is my favourite artform, by a country mile, and I'm so thankful that I get to spend the rest of my life exploring it.

[Wulff]

My earliest memories are of my dad taking me to see Bruce Lee movies at the drive-in and I've watched films ever since. But it has changed over the years. The most significant change occurred when I moved to the city in my twenties and started going to arthouse cinemas That was when I moved further away from the mainstream stuff and started watching a lot more independent and 'world cinema.'I got into attending film festivals around that time too. I've dabbled a bit with watching older films ( pre 1950s) but I haven't embraced it the way a lot of the regulars around here have. I could tell you why but I don't want to get taken to task over it

[greennui]

Some guy on a soccer forum recommended me Chungking Express ca 2009.

[Lencho of the Apes]

Welcome to the clubhouse, MDF!

Watching a Marx Brothers movie when I was 12 was my epiphany; I was just at that puberty-driven moment of beginning to understand art, and they made me see that flavors of artistry, unique creative voices, were available in film just as they were in literature and painting. And it wasn't even one of their good movies.

[rischka]

cable and TCM was my film education. film noir my first love. i'm still very fond of genre cinema: westerns, sci fi, kung fu, samurai, gangster pictures. from there to experimental and arthouse stuff. you'll never know how hard this was before the internet.

[Curtis, baby]

Rischka (and others) which famous non American directors were accessable pre Internet?

[rischka]

it was like bergman and fellini. haha probs why i don't bother with them now. actually i'm considering watching the magician for '58

i remember reading about a varda film in vogue: it was vagabond. and i dreamed if i'd ever get to see it rip

i had literally never heard of ozu til like 2007 when i joined flixster i'd watched seven samurai on TCM though

[thoxans]

serious answer (i.e. boring answer): been into film as long as i can remember. the three caballeros was my jam back in the day. we had two copies of it on vhs cuz i wore out our original copy, watching it over and over. we also had betamax for a little bit. used to watch disney's storybook classics, goofy over sports, and the wizard of oz on beta. my dad always liked movies, so that helped. i remember seeing (by proxy to him) chunks of stuff like goodfellas and reservoir dogs and natural born killers wayyy before standardized parenting would ever deem appropriate. for a long while, we'd see a new movie in theatres every weekend. i used to fanatically record movies on tv, and prided myself on my ability to edit out the commercials from my recordings by expertly timing when a commercial was the last commercial in a batch of commercials and the movie was about to come back on, and boom, i'd press that record button, and on the tape the movie would seamlessly pick up exactly where it had left off prior to that commercial break. booyah. i also used to religiously read the green sheet, which was a kind of tv guide that they used to include with the newspaper (we're really getting into some outdated shit now), and i'd read about all the movies that were playing that week, even if i'd never see them. i'd also remember every single star-rating of every movie, but that's just cuz i'm an ocd weirdo (and that's a story for another day). tmnt was obvs big. loved arnold schwarzenegger. terminator 2 was my fav movie ever when i was like seven. started to get into more 'serious' movies. kubrick, etc. then just got into other stuff cuz i knew other stuff was out there. growing up, i was lucky in that we had a little indie theatre and movie rental place nearby, so when i was ready for other options, i had them pretty well available (the rental place is amaze even to this day, if you can believe a video store still existing in 2019). i saw eraserhead for the first time on a grainy vhs cuz that was the only format it was available in. saw y tu mama tambien at the indie theatre, and the lady taking tickets that night happened to be one of my teachers in high school, and she def questioned my being there at that age. then, as stated above, the internet. got onto forums. learned even more. started watching more. so on and so forth. and after all of it, i'm still a n00b to this day...

[rischka]

i used to fanatically record movies on tv, and prided myself on my ability to edit out the commercials from my recordings by expertly timing when a commercial was the last commercial in a batch of commercials and the movie was about to come back on, and boom, i'd press that record button, and on the tape the movie would seamlessly pick up exactly where it had left off prior to that commercial break. booyah.

ha yeah this was a real skill

[Joks Trois]

Welcome to the club young one!

As for your question, I'd say it was mostly my parents influence in my early years. My father liked Marx Brothers films, Jaws, Star Wars, The Godfather, Wizard of Oz and films like that, so when I was a kid in the 80's I watched those films constantly in addition to Bruce Lee films and other action films that were popular with kids at the time. Also watched a lot of John Carpenter in the 80's. My mum liked Escape From New York and Christine and I loved Big Trouble In Little China and They Live etc.

If you are asking when I became an obsessive cinephile type rather than just a person that enjoyed watching films (i.e paying close attention to directors, questions of style etc), I'd say that didn't happen until sometime in 93/94. It's not that I didn't pay attention before that, but I became far more interested in venturing outside of Hollywood and started watching films by directors like John Woo, Kieślowski, Zhang Yimou, Kurosawa, Fellini etc, but choice was limited in the video era. I often had to import tapes from the UK, and they were damn expensive.

When I went to university in the late 90's, that's when I was introduced to directors like Bresson, Ozu, Antonioni etc, but I didn't really pursue their films aggressively until the mid to late 00's when their work became more readily available on dvd etc. They just weren't easy to find in the 90's and early 00's, and you had to take risks and spend money to get your hands on them. I was only a student then, so I couldn't really afford to buy many Criterion discs, who had a bit of a monopoly back then on great foreign cinema.

[MayaDeren_fan]

Welcome to the clubhouse, MDF!

Watching a Marx Brothers movie when I was 12 was my epiphany

Which Marx Brothers film was that if you don't mind me asking?


And thanks to everyone for the answers! I ended up getting into film about 5 years ago with I discovered those AFI Top 100.. series lists that they made in the late 90s and early 2000s. Especially the movie quotes list they made. I was so fascinated with it that I made sure to memorize every quote on the list and from what film it was from. My brother also got into film because of these AFI lists. Since those lists were notoriously slanted toward Classical Hollywood more than anything else, that helped to generate my interest in older films. Started with staples such as The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, and Singin' in the Rain; but the one that really stuck with me was Casablanca, which still to this day remains as one of my favorite films. So yeah, after that I followed the Sight and Sound 2012 poll branching outward and then developed my own tastes. End of story

[Lencho of the Apes]

Which?

Go West, as it happens. I guess I was just 'ready'.

[Joks Trois]

^^I watched Go West a lot as a kid without knowing it was considered a 'lesser Marx'. Same with The Big Store. In fact, The Big Store was probably the first one I saw.

[...]

I'm old, like Papa Uncle Jerry old, so when I was growing up movies were a mainstay of regular television and I watched whatever was on fairly indiscriminately. At first it was mostly old horror/sci-fi movies, like Frankenstein, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Deadly Mantis, action films like Tarzan that played on Saturday afternoon TV and would go to see Disneyesque films and comedies with my family. Eventually I started watching other stuff, even looking ahead in the TV Weekly to plan "sick days" from school if there were exciting movies playing on afternoon TV. Jerry Lewis and Errol Flynn weeks were big favorites.

My parents made the mistake of giving me a TV of my own when I was in junior high and since I was a night owl by inclination I soon discovered they played movies on late night TV too, so I'd stay up and watch them, which introduced me to all sorts of stuff like racy Eddie Cantor comedies, unusual war movies and old thrillers, (as well as Dr. Who and The Thrill Seekers reruns that played before the movies started.) By accident I ended up watching some dramas that sounded exotic, things like Little Foxes, Jezebel, and Imitation of Life, which I loved and got me hooked on watching ever more stuff just to see what I was missing. At the same time, the prime time hours frequently carried some recentish releases as well, which you tried to watch to keep one up on the other kids at school when those movies weren't "for kids", but were exciting. Rollerball, the Planet of the Apes series, Towering Inferno. That led me to discover the Catholic Bulletin had weekly ratings of what was to be aired on TV, rated for their appropriateness for kids. Needless to say I looked for the movies rated least appropriate and sought them out. PBS back then made a point of trying to bring "arthouse-like" movies and shows to the screen as part of their cultural education programming and left them unedited, so the lure of nudity and violence led to watching Lina Wertmuller movies and shows like I Claudius. (TV was really weird back in the day, "family shows" were mostly simplistic nonsense, but as the night wore on the shows were more daring, in their way, with shows like Kojak, Police Woman, and sort of ironically, Family, often broaching pretty daring subject matter, in a comparative sense. There was little consistency to the censorship or values until the eighties when the conservative backlash really kicked in.)

In ninth grade I became friends with another kid whose parents were even more easy-going in their standards towards media than mine had become, rather his mom was an art lover type herself, so she didn't object to him watching whatever he wanted and I had already gone that way myself without my parents really noting the extent of it since it wasn't their interest at all. The class in which we became friends was led by a teacher who had the listings of the local rep/arthouse theater posted on the wall so he could see what was going to be playing that week. That theater rotated different double features throughout the week of old Hollywood and "foreign" films. My friend and I started going to see those movies regularly in addition to the current Hollywood movies at other theaters. The rep-house didn't care at all about age restrictions so we'd see anything and everything we could, Aquirre, Kagemusha, King of Hearts, Jabberwocky, Wizards, 1900, Amarcord, Allegro Non Troppo, Tess, and even a straight up hardcore x-rated film pairing once, when those still had some aura of "artiness" attached to them. And in the regular theaters we'd just movie hop, pay for tickets to something like Winds of Change and them go see All That Jazz after.

When videostores became a big thing that just meant the addition of renting movies too, in bundles of five, several times a week, that we or I would stay up late and watch then switch over to the new cable channels we got and watch whatever was on the Movie Channel, Cinemax, AMC (back when they played movies all the time), or Bravo (back when that was an arthouse channel). I had talked my dad into Cinemax and The Movie Channel instead of HBO or Showtime because they played more movies and more weird ones overnight, and no one else in the house watched TV all that much outside of prime time hours. I later worked at movie theaters just out of high school, a videostore when I was a slacker, and generally just found movies interesting. I mean even more than the search for "greatness" or whatever, I'm drawn to the cultural aspect of movies for what they show of the world and how they reflect it. Stumbling on a great movie is, well, great, but that's not the main thing that keeps me involved with movies. Somewhat oddly perhaps for being so removed from the centers of the film industry, my friend went on to work as an editor and actually starred in a low budget film that was big enough to get reviewed by Ebert and I was good friends with other people who ended up working in the industry or on the outskirts as well, but I never had much of an interest in actually making movies myself. Probably because as soon as I was interested in movies I was reading about them. When I was little, I'd check out books from the library like Life Goes to the Movies and be drawn in to the images and stories about the films, and by the time I reached high school I was reading film criticism and the like as a steady diet. I'm just more into thinking about the movies and art then even consuming them in some ways I guess.

[Curtis, baby]

And in the regular theaters we'd just movie hop, pay for tickets to something like Winds of Change and them go see All That Jazz after.

oh hell yeah, i used to do that shit and see 4 or 5 in a day. now that i'm older i don't really have the mental, physical or optical stamina for that sadly

[Umbugbene]

Nice to read everyone's histories here. For me the foundation was laid between ages 10-12 when my parents took me to see classic films at a local cinema with a "Spanish castle" interior, the kind that has moving clouds projected on a starry ceiling. I saw both Nosferatus in a double feature, 2001, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a few Hitchcocks, Silent Running, etc.

Those memories created a latent interest that was activated in college when I realized the library had a huge video collection, and I started seeing two movies a day there. The first one I watched was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari because it was mentioned in my architectural history textbook. From there I was hooked.

[kanafani]

Copy/paste from this thread in the old place

My parents used to take me to the movies pretty much every week when I was very young, back in the eighties. My father took me to see action movies, martial-arts movies, and blockbusters. Jean-Claude Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Jackie Chan, the tail end of Chuck Norris... To this day, I still remember watching Terminator 2, Total Recall and a feature-length compilation of Bruce Lee fight sequences in seedy, rowdy movie theaters, where the seats had a faint smell of pee. My mother took care of family comedies and Disney flicks. I also watched tons on VCR at home.

I started to go to the movies on my own as a young teenager. Hollywood was pretty much the only game in town, with the occasional French mainstream movie.

In college I became friends with students running a local movie club, which was my gateway to Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, Hitchcock, Lang and other heavyweights. I watched tons during my undergrad days, mostly in movie clubs around the city, four or five times a week, sometimes with friends, but mostly on my own.

Around 2000 or so, I discovered Rosenbaum's capsules and reviews in the Chicago Reader, and I started seeking whatever he rated as 4 stars. I did not have access to much of it, but I had seen so little at the time that I had my hands full with what I could find. That was my first exposure to Kiarostami, Tati, Renoir, and others.

Then I came to the US, and got access to previously unseen stuff. My school's library had a large VHS collection. I used to check out stacks at a time, and go hide at the back of the library and watch movies on a small TV in the multimedia room. That's when I first delved deep into Fassbinder, Bunuel, Ozu, Tarkovsky, Hawks...

I then bought my first small TV and DVD player, and subscribed to Netflix, which back then was still an amazing resource for DVDs. The very first thing I rented was the Apu trilogy, followed by everything they had from Tsai Ling Miang, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Cassavetes, Feuillade, Rivette, Godard, Fuller, Ray...

After college, I lived in Boston for a few years, and I augmented my daily Netflix consumption with regular trips to the Harvard Film Archive and the film program at the MFA. My fondest Boston memories are the HFA retrospectives of Costa, Lisandro Alonso, Claire Denis, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Rivette.

I then moved to the suburbs, and after 1,500 DVD rentals, Netflix had become a miserable, shitty, money-craving place, and I had to fend for myself on Youtube and other free streaming sites. A few years ago, I was seriously starting to contemplate a world where I no longer had access to the things I had not seen yet and was dying to explore. I thought that my movie viewing would gradually dwindle and be replaced by reading. Then, on a whim, I subscribed to Letterboxd and started logging films there and wasting time making lists. Then one day Lencho leaves a comment on a movie review or a list, and tells me I might want to check out a little community of online film-lover desperadoes he's a member of. So here I am, a couple of years later, closing on 500 movies logged in 2017, by far the largest number of movies I've seen in a year. Thanks guys, you saved my cinephilia from certain death!

[nrh]

my parents like movies a lot when they were young (they both grew up in jersey so had access to the amazing nyc pbs stations of the time) and so they had a few mildewed old "the 100 best movies" books (i remember looking longingly at photos of, like, au hazard balthazar, which at the time was unavailable in the us) and copies of shit like cocteau's beauty and beast and seven samurai taped off of television.

and we legit had an incredible little video store way out in the country - like they had vhs tapes of at least 10 fassbinders, pasolini, bunuel, just all sorts of wild shit. i was an insomniac as a kid! would tape anything of interest off of tcm and watch it.

i don't know...in some way none of that explains the "why" of getting into films. or why it's been a sustaining interest for my adult life so far (i'm 32 fwiw). i went to school for film production and work in tv but i wouldn't say that film as ever been a social interest for me (although having a romantic partner who shares that interest has been great). and i think interest waning over time has been always saved by some new rabbit hole to go down (raul ruiz, hong kong film, indian cinema).

[liquidnature]

Sounds like I'm one of the younger ones here at 26. I grew up in the nineties which in my opinion was the height of children's film and television (and it has an obvious influence on my personal favorites), so most of my days were spent playing outside and watching tv. The movies I watched were mostly age-appropriate such as the Disney, Pixar and Disney channel releases of the time as well the the typical action films that every kid seems to watch with their dad - Stallone, Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee, etc.

In 2009 while on fall break during my sophomore year of high school I randomly decided to watch Titanic on television, which despite knowing the hate it received, I loved. I searched online to read as much about the film as I could and that led to the discovery of IMDb and its top 250 list. From there I discovered the IMDb forums and started posting there often, mostly about current hollywood releases, but gradually ventured onto the classic film board and started watching a few classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather, and The 39 Steps (which was extremely popular on IMDb back then for some reason) and was blown away. I thought that I had really discovered the beginning and end of all things cinema.

Around 2011 at age 18 a recruitment post from Gloede on the film general board led me to an off-site forum called FG3, which introduced me to films, directors, and a way of viewing films that I would have never known existed - thanks in large part to people like serriform and Sy. This progression led to the discovery of websites like iCM and the great lists of Rosenbaum and TSPDT, as well as the online resources of KG, CG, and SMz. I watched probably close to 1,000 films in a span of two years, as well as listening to a lot of new music, and also playing a lot of video games. In many ways it was an depressing and reclusive period of my life, but also one which I do not regret for the things it taught me about myself and for setting the foundation of film and music knowledge that I currently have. Now I am afforded the great luxury of learning how to harness this passion and instead of consuming art so obsessively, it can be a significant part of my life in order to enhance it rather than ruin it. There are definitely at least two distinct films that I want to make in my lifetime, hopefully sooner rather than later, and that I want to fully finance the production of myself - this is one of the main reasons I watch films; to discover what works and what doesn't work for me creatively and personally.

[arkheia]

I don't remember this experience but my parents told me they once took me to a revival screening of Singing in the Rain when I was a little kid and I danced in the aisles to the music - I'd like to think this may have been the beginning of my budding love for film. Much later in high school I discovered online film forums which gave me lots of recommendations to search out. I was fortunate to live within a train ride of some repertory theaters which introduced me to more films outside of my purview. One of the first times I went to the Berkeley Pacific Film Archive was during a Kenji Mizoguchi retrospective (at the time I didn't know much more about Japanese cinema than Kurosawa) and I was bowled over by A Geisha and Miss Oyu. From that point forward, I kept an eye on their calendar and attended screenings of Lubitsch, Bresson, Tarkovsky, etc. I definitely owe a part of my cinephilia to their programming. The theater has now relocated a few blocks off campus but my fondest memories were in this former building on the edge of their campus.

You would walk up these stairs below from the city sidewalk and hook a left to enter the theater's main entrance, which had a small lobby that led into the main theater.

[wigwam]

great thread! love reading everyone's histories

I grew up in the 80s so Star Wars/Spielberg/Schwarzenegge/VanDamme/Ghostbusters/Weekend at Bernies, etc

Pulp Fiction came out right around puberty/sex/drugs/etc

during film school Rushmore and Lebowski amazed me and at the other end Armageddon and Gladiator sutured something shut

I got really into Woody Allen (sorry?) and thru him some world stuff like Bergman/Fellini (eventually Godard/Fassbinder) and vaudevillian classics like Marx Bros/Bob Hope (eventually WC Fields/screwball)

in LA there was this rep theater called the New Beverly which was really formative and played The Conformist and a bunch of great stuff all the time (before Tarantino bought it and kinda dumbed it down post-Grindhouse era, like 2007 or so?)

there was also this great video store called Cinefile which organized movies by director instead of genre or language so I got into like Minelli and Preston Sturges and I forget who else that way

I also got the internet around then (2004-5?) and would dig up old Siskel & Ebert (sorry??) year-end lists and watch anything I hadn't heard of (A New Leaf, Modern Romance) and then also Ebert's (sorry???) Great Movies book (Last Year at Marienbad and Aguirre are what I recall finding through that) and Rosenbaum's (sorry!) Alternate AFI list (Ace in the Hole and Force of Evil maybe? I think J Hoberman had some lists I pilfered from too)

then 2007-2008 I got into movie msg boards and really went apeshit with Zulawski and Tsai and stuff like Jeanne Dielman and learning through others' favorites and tastes how my favorite things about movies weren't what I was conscious of like story and performance and camera movements but instead all these elusive factors like energy and atmosphere and how much color and tone had abstract/ephemeral effects on me while I watched, and it's been downhill ever since so please everyone just stop and get into videogames k thnx byeeeee

[MatiasAlbertotti]

Great Question and awesome thread to read!!

My intro to cinema was very traumatic, my earliest memories of movies are movies scaring me and giving me nightmares. I was 5 or 6 and watched "Critters" at a friends: Nightmares. Around that age at a birthday party we watched "The Dark Crystal": Nightmares. "Labyrinth": Nightmares. "Gremlins": Nightmares.
Luckily my cousins started taping (we were poor so we didn't have VCR at home) Van Damme, Stallone, Chuck Norris, Schwarzenneger movies and I stopped having nightmares with movies (I was a young facists it seems). In Argentina we had "Sabados de Super Accion" were you could also see some great 80s movies, so that helped, and I got hooked. I think one of my favorites at the time was "Blind Fury".
Then my parents bough a VCR and I started renting VHS films and I was in heaven. I wasn't and still are not very sociable, so I used to spend a lot of times watching movies at home instead of going out with friends.

Then cable arrived, my family was doing better money-wise, and we had HBO. My first approach to what is called "foreign film" was because they showed more naked women than your average american movie (access to porn was not so easy when you were underaged before the internet era), so I started renting what was available in the equivalent of a small town store. One day I rented "Los Amantes del circulo polar" by Julio Medem (spanish director) and I loved that movie like crazy (my profile pic is from it) and I decided I wanted to study film.
So I did, started college in 2001 (one of the worst possible years to start something in Argentina), and I had access to a good video library for a pre-internet era. Also I moved to Capital Federal and had access to cine clubs and retrospectives and film festivals. So I started watching a lot of films, and before graduating I started working in films.

Unfortunately some bad experiences (drug related mostly) took me away from film, working and mostly watching, for some years. I gradually started watching movies again after some years passed, at first as an occasional movie watcher (just watching what was easily available) and then five years ago or so I started downloading and actively engaging with the medium I always loved, and discovering new directors and new industries, and learning a lot from reading books and film theory again. Also finding this forum has been awesome, since I learn a lot from everyone here, the depth of knowledge of the people in this forum is mind-blowing and also they are very nice and love to share what they know.

[pabs]

.
My family were big film-watchers long before I was born, so I already had quite a vast library of films on vhs tape, a lot of them recorded off tv, ready for me to see by the time I appeared. My elder sister, 20 years older than me (I was a very late "surprise", completely unplanned), also curated much of my childhood viewing. Thanks to her, I ended up watching (on VHS, mainly) plenty of 1970s BBC children's programs that she'd enjoyed seeing on tv in her own youth, which made me feel odd given all my schoolfriends ever wanted to talk about was the latest escapades of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (which I still managed to watch, too).


I'm told that I'd already mastered the video player controls and buttons at age three.

It wasn't until I was 15 or so that I started watching "serious" movies, and not until I reached 17 did my film education actually begin, when I started scanning critics' lists of film classics and selectively choosing critically acclaimed films which had stood the test of time. When I first dove into such lists as TSPDT, I was surprised and secretly proud to realise I'd gotten a headstart and already enjoyed and appreciated many of its listed films, thanks to my family's film collection.

Movies played a big part in my early explorations of the opposite sex. In my mid to late teens, I'd sometimes use movie-watching to entice girls over. We lived in a big house, and the tv-room was out of the way on a separate level. If someone came down there for any reason, I could easily hear their approach. I'd then have at least 20 seconds to sit up, pull away from her, cross my arms and look completely casual, a picture of innocence.

.

[Zulawski]

Commando, what else?

[Roscoe]

I can't remember not being into movies. They were always on TV in one form or another. My parents were the big influence that way -- my Dad was into the High Art stuff that used to run on that magical dear-departed thing called PBS, where Janus collection films could usually be found, and I saw stuff like Bergman and Eisenstein right there on my TV, and my Mom was more into popular stuff, like Abbott and Costello and horror movies. I grew up being able to appreciate both M and THEM! I'd go from repertory cinema to repertory cinema, back when they used to have them -- we landed in the DC area when I could see double features at the long-lost Circle Theater and then run over to the Biograph to catch something else. I remember seeing GODFATHER I and II at the Circle and ALL ABOUT EVE at the Biograph in one day. I was young then.

Then home video came along, and college, and film classes where I was that guy who'd always seen whatever the teacher was talking about.

[Javier]

As a kid in the 80's in Bogotá, I attended the Sunday morning screenings in movie theaters with my parents. I was impressed by the Hercules movie with Lou Ferrigno, the special effects and the different episodes. Clash of the Titans and Never Ending Story were some interesting fantasies that impressed me too. There was also that Japanese flick with a witch and robots that I still cannot find anywhere. I don't even know how it was called.
In the 90's I decided to follow the only field of studies that, in my opinion, could contain all professions and stories and lives together: film. Fortunately, later I realized, film is more than that. So I became a filmmaker and had to struggle with some financial crisis and I had to take non-film related jobs. In 2009 I joined the auteurs.com and went deeper into films I already knew and some others I never imagined I had missed. There I found some of the knowledgeable people you can still meet in this site. Some years later I got married and I was apart from filmmaking and film jobs once again. Last year I got divorced and finally had some time to start film life from scratch. I'm currently teaching film and slowly coming back to film world one more time and getting to meet new people in film related professions. But meeting new people is not enough... meeting some good people is what really matters here or elsewhere. During hard times I listen to Raúl Ruiz's all kinds of interviews and I find them inspiring. There is still a lot more to live.

[josiahmorgan11]

I'm only a few years older than you, but my pathway was certainly similar. And like many here, parental interest started it all. My father had a somewhat nuanced and interesting take on Hollywood and curated films like Alien/Edward Scissorhands/Terminator/Titanic/Jurassic Park/ET etc. to enjoy, but my interests remained heavily Hollywood-y until 2013. Stumbling upon Letterboxd, actually, broadened my horizons tenfold. I've always had an interest in modernist poetry and beat writing, so the avant-garde became a natural extension of my interests. By following works that influenced avant-garde filmmakers (not always predictable: often oscillating between overlooked mainstream movies and completely underseen Filipino stuff and the likes), my taste just continued to expand.

[jal90]

Not a very cool story I guess. I started getting into film relatively late, when I was like 18-19, and the main reason was simply curiosity. I've been in forums for a long while -mostly related to The Simpsons at that point in my life- and film-related threads always piqued my interest. I had some little experience with classics (a couple Chaplin and Marx brothers movies) that I had enjoyed a lot, so it kind of served me to begin my journey completely unprejudiced about age, B/W or even silent film.

My first explorations were Kubrick, 12 angry men and some more modern titles that were generally well-considered (Trainspotting, Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind); at that time I was following the more immediate recommendations of "alternative" cinema. And they were all great to me and essential to shape my taste early on. My tastes have only broadened from then on, still in a kind of chaotic and non-linear way because I've never been good at establishing entry or advanced levels in my cinephilia. I've been picking from several sources and watched classic Hollywood, auteurism, arthouse and experimental, blockbusters and mainstream, not in order but rather according to the mood of the moment. Very rarely I have completed a filmography but I have tried many and I like to keep my viewings varied instead of focusing on a theme at a time.