The world of cinema never really influenced my childhood. Sure, I loved the same classic family films and cartoons of the 80's and 90's, but I never looked deeper into their styles and narratives; never saw them as anything more than entertainment for my developing brain to shut-off to outside of school.
Getting older, my social skills were clearly not on par with that of the other kids in the playground; my dad was an asshole, and my mother forever blamed me for his abusive ways; my older half-sister copied her mentality. The outcome was a socially awkward, anxiety-riddled kid that did not know how to talk to people, but did know how to escape it all through an SNES, and a ton of magazines. Videogames were the primary method of escapism until I hit my teenage years.
That world started to get stale. All-too-familiar, repetitive and simply far too expensive to maintain at a young age. I started diving deep into films--primarily those terrible comedies only young teens and workaholic forty-year-old's would find amusing--in hopes of finding various new things to keep me distracted; jumping into a new genre each time I felt I had seen everything that had appealed to me in the former. It was as if I were exploring a new reality each time. Endless possibilities filled with endless characters and types of exploration.
Eventually I was able to fund my own computer, which was a massively liberating feeling. I had the ability to remain alone for as long as possible; reading reviews and articles online and discovering a plethora of new things to check out; as if the curtains had finally been pulled open to reveal the true scale of the world I felt I was already close to finishing. I discovered classics old and new, films created entirely to impress through their unique styles of writing and camera trickery, and films many would spend hours attempting to analyse and fully understand. Film became more than just a world of escapism: it became a forever-expanding universe.
Being so out-of-touch with reality, it never dawned upon me that I could pursue a career in either videogame development or filmmaking. A future never really crossed my mind. Anything related to my future was pushed down by whatever was bothering me in life and replaced with escapism; that's where the two have remained since.