I loved pouring through these books and looking at the photographs about the movies and reading about the movies. I think I saw King Kong when I was pretty young which I really, really loved, and I loved that King Kong was made with a miniature model and they moved it one frame at a time so that when you ran it back, it looked like it was moving. You could sort of still see the fingerprints moving through the fur of the gorilla in King Kong if you look at the original one.
It gave it this really nice, hand-made quality which I really loved. That was really exciting. The Wizard of Oz was a very important movie to me when I was a kid. I still think to this day that the moment when Dorothy opens her door from her house into Oz, when the movie goes from black and white to color, is probably the greatest moment in all of cinema history. I think that is just thrilling. I eventually saw a movie by a film maker named George Méliès who was a French film maker and he made a movie called Trip to the Moon in 1902 right after the movies were invented.
He had been a magician and he, along with several other magicians, immediately saw the potential for the magic of the cinema. he made this movie called the Trip to the Moon where he imagined what it would be like for people to go to the moon even though it was still 67 years in the future before people actually landed there. He made this great, little movie and I saw it. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when I saw that movie but it stuck in the back of my head.
So the cinema has definitely been a very important part of my life for a long time.