What are the films or people that had impacts on you and deeply inspired you to become a filmmaker? 

The films that impacts and inspired me depends on when they came out in my lifetime or if they are classic movies when 

I sat down and watch them.  Even though I have been thinking about movies since I was eight, I guess I had a greater sense of motivation 

to make movies after seeing  “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” in theaters at the age of twelve going on thirteen. During high school, 

“Batman Begins” came out and I became of fan of Christopher Nolan since. As I gotten older I became obsessed 

with the works of Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock as I like to study the works of directors that influence the directors that 

influence my generation.  I grew up on Steven Spielberg movies and television shows and like Kubrick before him I enjoy his work 

because every movie is never the same genre or same story. As a storyteller I want to be able to explore different genres 

and different subject matters to keep my creativity fresh, be unpredictable, and reinvent my storytelling ability. 

Tim Burton is another director like Steven Spielberg that had an influence on my childhood and I would be interested in doing a project 

that feels like a homage to a Burton movie. There are many other filmmakers from the past and present that inspires me 

that it will be hard to go through all of them at once.

You have made your feature film "Monster in the Hood" which got official selection in the 

"American Golden Picture International Film Festival".

As a filmmaker, why you decided to make it?

To be quite honest there was a season in my life from 2016 to 2018 that I lost interest in doing movies for personal and moral reasons. 

In 2018 I did apprenticeship work at Twenty-First Century Studios from March to November of that year as part of the Recording 

Radio Film Connection & CASA Schools. After my apprenticeship ended, I was presented an opportunity to intern with Carlos that lasted 

for the first half of 2019 as part of a separate program that gave me an opportunity to make a movie of my own. Originally 

I was going to do a movie titled “The Writer” which I turned into a novelette and self-published it on Amazon last year in 2022. 

At the time I decided against doing that movie and went ahead with doing “Monster in the Hood” which was the better choice 

because “The Writer” is, in my opinion, a tearjerker while “Monster in the Hood” is a comedy which was much needed at the time. 

Perhaps “The Writer” will be made into a movie one day where either someone buys the rights or I can finance it myself.

What were some of the challenges you faced in making it?

Raising the money for the budget was a challenge. The movie itself cost $5,000. I found myself interacting with actors who would only do 

the movie if money was involved. I think my goal originally was to raise between $7,000 to $10,000. If this movie was made by 

a major studio on a budget of $10,000,000 we could have crafted a super bonkers movie that felt like a live action Looney Tunes movie. 

Also one week before filming began my original actress for the lead role dropped out due to injury and at the last minute 

I replaced her with Bri-Timmons Kepler who was originally going to play a different character in the film.

Let us more about your experience in this film?

The one thing I don’t like doing is rewriting scripts and boy did I have to rewrite a lot of scenes due to the budget itself or actors dropping out 

which happened during preproduction and principal photography itself. Also there were some serious time restraints when filming scenes 

because you would have performers who is only available for such a limit of time that you need to film the scene as quickly as possible. 

Guerrilla filmmaking can be tricky when filming outdoors because there have been some distractions when filming outdoors. 

The fact the movie was filmed in June in Florida, I’m surprise that it did not rain once while filming. That would have been a disaster. 

I am going to be deep for a little bit. Art is a yearbook. Whenever I think back to a film that I made, while I do think about 

the process of making the film  itself and what went right and what could have been an improvement, 

I also think about what was going on in my personal life at the time. 

That is definitely true considering what I was experiencing in my personal life while filming “Monster in the Hood” and the other films afterwards.