I grew up in South Africa, where you learn early how much can divide people. What struck me — and never left — is that a film can cut straight through all of it. A great story doesn't care about your religion, your politics, your creed or the color of your skin. It reaches everyone in the room at the same time.
That's my mission, and it's the whole reason I do this: to tell universal stories — the ones we all recognize ourselves in — without a thumb on the scale. Film is the one language everybody already speaks.
I learned the craft the slow way. At Florida State's film school I spliced film on a Movieola, worked sound sync-blocks, and shot on 16mm ARRI cameras before any of it went digital. Knowing that camera is what got me hired as Spike Jonze's camera assistant on a music video — one of my heroes growing up. My thesis was one of five the university chose to fund that year.
Then I drove across the country to Los Angeles with no job and started as an assistant editor.
Two years later I was cutting trailers — Ghost Rider, then Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, sitting one-on-one with Raimi in the edit and the sound mix at 28. I still think about that room.
In 2005 I built my own agency from two Macs into thirty people cutting for Disney, Universal, Sony and Netflix. We couldn't afford veterans, so I hired kids with nothing on their reels and taught them everything. A lot of them run things now — that's the part I'm proudest of.
I sold my stake in 2016 and made MONITOR, a short with Ben Feldman and Lauren Miller Rogen that played the Cannes Short Film Program and won Best Picture at the Hollywood Boulevard Film Festival. I wanted to make something instead of selling something.
Today I build at the frontier of AI filmmaking through my studio, HAUS FILM. What excites me isn't the novelty — it's who it lets in. For the first time, a kid with a story and no connections doesn't need a Hollywood zip code or a studio's permission to make something great. AI hands a whole generation of creators who were never let into the room the scope and speed that used to cost millions. It won't write the moment that lands — that's still the job. But it tears down the gate, and that's the same thing film has always done for me: reach everyone, and now, be made by anyone.
I'm currently open to executive creative & AI-production leadership roles.
David Lynch. Stanley Kubrick. The filmmakers who taught me that the rules are optional and the story is the only thing that isn't. They questioned everything, answered to no one, and made work the gatekeepers couldn't ignore — even when the Academy pretended not to notice until the very end.
Every story has already been told; that was never the point. The job is to tell it better — to find the image, the angle, the moment no one has felt in quite that way before.
And the medium is not the message. 70mm film or a frame born on a laptop — a true story lands exactly the same. The tools change. The truth doesn't.
Through hands-on production, I've found AI's first real advances in filmmaking land in four places:
Compress production and post-production workflows from weeks into hours.
Create original digital assets instead of modeling from scratch or relying on stock.
Bring still and 2D material to life — the territory studios like Disney are investing in heavily.
Give storytellers the grandeur and scale that budgets used to forbid.