Celebrating Christmas without subscribing to Christianity is like watching the Super Bowl without watching a regular season game. Some people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials; others watch it for the halftime show.
I was a fan of football. I was more of a Raiders fan, but I knew who O.J. was. I knew The Juice, and I remember the Hertz commercials with him running to the airport and whatnot. So he was a highbrow celebrity in my eyes.
It used to just be a SAG card, and then you got an AFTRA card. I got my AFTRA card doing a commercial in Atlanta. I got my SAG card doing a beer commercial from 100 years ago; it was one of the first national commercials with a family in it that was black and normal, and I played the daughter.
I’ve always said it’s easier for bands to make a hard stance – like, we don’t do commercials or whatever, blah blah blah – when you’ve sold billions of records. It’s super-easy to be righteous when you’re rich.
You see so many movies… the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there’s no sense of film grammar. There’s no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It’s just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy.
It’s scary for a 20-year-old to move to a city where she knows no one, but I did it and thankfully for me, I met the right people and got a whole lot of work in terms of commercials and music videos.
I love commercials.
The beauty of my job is I do all different kinds of film directing, not just surf films anymore. And I do stuff from commercials to short films to working on feature films, and none of it is based from where I live. It’s all based elsewhere, so I can live anywhere and commute to where I need to go.
