Getting lost...

For me, making a movie is about asking a question and then searching for it, trying to find it through the process -- learning about it through the people you work with and through the places it takes you.

On September 11, I was a senior studying film at NYU. I remember the call from my mom. I remember finding my friends. I remember shutting off my camera because the people walking uptown were looking through me. I remember that Fall, very well. For two years I didn’t want to leave -- and it was in that time that I wrote the first draft of “How I Got Lost.” I was 23 years old and living in the East Village, sitting in the Life Café heartbroken scribbling in notebooks. When the lights went out on an August afternoon in 2003, I was walking down the street. That night there was a bonfire in Tompkins Square Park – people dancing, singing, taking off their clothes. And we started over, all of us. The next day it was a different New York City.

I didn’t think I was writing about that time until five years later, on draft nine or so. Every six months I’d pull out the pages, mark them up, and write something new. I read “The Sun Also Rises” around that time, and it seemed like it had just been written. And I started collecting postcards of Edward Hopper paintings, drawn in by their loneliness and heartache.

The journey of the production was the journey of the film. We went through it as a crew. The actors went through it, working each day in a different place. My producers were my closest allies: Massoumeh Emami, Jared Parsons, Sam Mestman and Chris DeAngelis. All of us were in New York on 9/11, all about the same age, all trying to make a movie that captured what we had experienced. My director of photography Chris Chambers was my closest friend during the shoot. We lived together, walked to set together, got sick of each other, and continued each day to make lists and find inspiration.

Early on we decided that we were going to try to shoot with this new toy, the RED One camera -- a terrifying but worthwhile risk. For filmmakers like us, it was catnip. But when FedEx lost it two weeks away from principal photography, we all aged a few years. It showed up eventually, and when it did we didn’t ask questions.

After principal photography ended, my DP and I were driving through Illinois shooting highways surrounded by fields when we were suddenly pulled over by a State Trooper for driving 20 MPH on a state road with a speed limit of 60 MPH. I explained to the trooper that I had been looking at the sky.

“Lookin’ at the sky? Lookin’ at the SKY?” He stomped his feet and shook his head, and wrote me a ticket for being an insane filmmaker.

Then we wrapped.