“Let’s Watch a Space Movie”

The recent release of ALIEN: ROMULUS reminded me of a defining moment in my childhood and development as a film director:

One afternoon in the Comoros Islands (a place where I spent six years of my childhood and most of you will need to google that one to know where it is), I asked my dad if we could watch a “space movie”. I was six years old. He listed off some of the inter-galactic films we had in our inventory. You see, my dad was a forward thinker. Before bringing his family across the globe to spend our first three years on the East coast of Africa, he recorded at least 300 films off of American TV onto VHS tapes. He packed them in a big crate and shipped them to our new home, where we didn’t have movie theaters, Blockbuster, or even regular TV channels. I grew up without Saturday morning cartoons but instead had a wonderful collection of movies. They were even organized alphabetically in our “movie book”, a notebook that listed all of the films and on which VHS tape you could find each one. This was my film education. And that afternoon’s “space movie” was one of the most important lessons in the birth of a filmmaker.

My father listed STAR WARS and STAR TREK, along with various other sci-fi films I’d already seen. “I want to watch a space movie I haven’t seen before.” He pondered this and soon responded, “Well, there is one.” He paused. “I’m not sure your mom would want you to see it yet…” She was down the hill at the Mutsamudu market shopping for our groceries. “But I guess we can watch it anyway.” My dad pulled out the VHS tape and slid the cassette into the VCR. That’s when I watched ALIEN for the first time. It felt like the first grown up movie I’d seen. Something about it, the characters, the tone, the look, I recognized as different from the other films I was accustomed to. It ignited a deeper love for movies (something I was born with). Soon we watched ALIENS which excited me even more. Thankfully, my mom was not pissed at my dad for showing me these two space movies. Both of my parents have always been amazing at supporting my love of cinema. But I always look back at that afternoon in the hillside village of Hombo on the island of Anjouan as one of the pivotal moments when I focused my eyes on a little screen and saw what I was meant to be.