Movies have always had a special place in my heart, and it wasn’t until I graduated high school that I fully understood why.

Little did I know that my last semester of high school was the beginning of a lifelong journey that still provides meaning today.

Up to that point, I was a good kid. I didn’t do anything. There were a couple of times that I drank, but I never was drunk. But something in me changed, and I decided it was time to drink/party, smoke weed and pursue a girl. The result was mostly a failure, but it was one hell of a story.

This inspired a five-minute emotional montage that would later turn into a screenplay called Reckless Abandon. Currently, I’m working on the second draft.

The ideas poured in. Movies had to become a part of my career plan in some shape or fashion. It didn’t matter if it began 30 years later, I just knew I had to explore my creativity in this important medium.

My attempt into writing a screenplay led to new road maps in my mind of what a movie can accomplish.

High school Devon would have listed Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring into my top five movie list. Both of those movies are still amazing and are in my top list, but now it’s filled with films that were foreign to me. It’s almost too much, but I still have a lot to watch.

Movies allow me and others to enter a world different than ours. They provide complex characters that remind us of how humans operate, sometimes they are an example of what we could become if we just tried a little bit harder.

Cinema is a visual storytelling that begins with a pad of paper and a pen. The writing is simple and made for the director to turn into a visual story. Every camera angle is important. Every edit helps tell the story. The lines read by the actors help communicate more so we can understand motivations, and it helps with story structure. Most projects are never made, and for the ones that do get made chances are they aren’t good.

We tend to forget this every time we sit in a theater or at home. No matter how much you disliked the film, there was a lot of hard work that went into that terrible movie.

For some reason, that risk excites me.

Movies are an endless rabbit hole of human consumption. You can spend 10,000 hours watching them, but you will still be hungry for more. You will find that a certain director catches your eye more than another, or a story type will be the one made for you.

Currently, there are several directors I swear too as being great filmmakers, and some of these men can be considered gods.

Included:

Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola. Quentin Tarantino. Denis Villeneuve. The Safdie Brothers. Robert Eggers. David Fincher. And there’s probably more.

Some of these men write and direct their films. Some just direct. One thing is for sure, they create films that emotionally affect me unlike anything else in this world.

My love for movies exists because I’m an emotional human being, and I feel something whenever the screen mixes in with my reality. And I need to feel something just like everyone else does.

This is my second love besides journalism, and I will always treasure it.