Connecting Through Art

At eight years old I wasn’t aware the boat accident affected my life.

The trauma was hidden away from me. I forgot about it. When the boat accident happened I instinctively buried it into my unconscious to survive the overwhelming moment. Today, I know that this created bad feelings inside me. But during my life, I never connected the boat accident as the cause of my bad feelings, all I knew was I felt them. If I can explain that feeling, it was like having a shadow inside me that would show up at my weakest moments. When I was challenged emotionally, those feelings came up, and I would get stuck. As I got older, these feelings held me back professionally, and in relationships. I struggled with my self-worth and felt I couldn’t get out of my own way. After the boat accident, these uncomfortable feelings set me on a long journey of recovery because I hungered for emotional connection, and instinctively wanted to heal.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ― C.G. Jung

Self Portrait, 19 years old, talk about feeling disconnected :)

I always liked to draw. After the boat accident, I found myself drawing more and more.

One day I drew a picture, I must have been around nine or ten. I saw a friend in the neighborhood and showed it to her. She lit up and said Wow that’s good! I immediately felt an emotional connection to her. Because of the sad silence that resonated from my parent’s past, I had a deep hunger to connect emotionally with others. It felt so refreshing. This was a turning point in my life. My art became a bridge to my feelings. I felt something, and I wanted to feel more. This began my journey to find the art form that best expressed my feelings and connected me the deepest with others.

"The Fox and the Prince" 23 years old.

I drew, painted, sculpted, and took photography classes in high school. I went on to study art in college, refining these art forms and trying new ones like jewelry making and printing.

It’s through the expression of art that we make our unconscious conscious.

Sculpture, 23 years old.

When I graduated college, I got a job at a company that made plastic food, the kind you would see in windows at Japanese restaurants. I thought I found my career. Fortunately, my boss felt differently. He was a strict Japanese man from Japan, he fired me for being a couple of minutes late. I then got a job at a special effects company. They did old-school in-camera special effects like stop-motion, rear screen projection, forced perspective, miniatures, and explosions. They were known for the special effects in the first Terminator movie. I worked on movies like Killer Klowns From Outer Space and The Abyss.

This job opened my eyes to filmmaking. I took a night class in Film at Pasadena Art Center College of Design. We used Super 8 cameras to shoot, edit, and tell simple stories through images. One of the assignments was to make a documentary. Mine was on the process of life. I showed the ten-minute film in class. It started with a baby crying, the music came in as we saw children playing, then older kids, to high school kids, to people working and having families, getting older, and ending on a shot of a funeral at a cemetery. When the lights came on, one of the students was crying. I thought, if I could connect emotionally on a level that would make her cry, I’d found the art form I had been searching for. This was the deep emotional connection I hungered for. When the semester ended, my teacher encouraged me to study Film there.

I got into Pasadena Art Center and began to study Film. It was the first time I excelled in school, I loved it. In my first semester walking through the school cafeteria this guy was sitting at a table. He asked me if I wanted to play a samurai in a school film he was about to direct. His name was Zack Snyder, he would become one of the most incredibly visual, creative, and visceral directors in Hollywood. He was a fellow student, and we began a long friendship of creativity.

Zack Snyder, he believed in me before I believed in myself.

After graduating from film school, I hit the ground running. I wrote a screenplay called Walk a Mile, and I was going to direct it. I was working with a producer, raising money, casting actors, and finding locations. I was shooting karaoke videos, making money, and living the dream. I had long hair down my back, I wore a beaded necklace with a frog made of stone. I looked like a wild man, but I didn’t feel that way. On the inside, I still had those disconnected feelings of low self-worth. I was now consciously searching to understand why. I would take the occasional self-help seminar and the occasional psychedelic journey. I was looking inward reading books by Krishnamurti. I had been disconnected from myself for so long, I had no idea who I was. Like I said, I looked like a wild man, but I sure didn’t feel that way.

One day I was shooting a karaoke video. The model was this beautiful, wild, Hawaiian-looking girl. I fell in love… but there was a little problem. She wanted the wild man, but inside I was still that frightened boy stuck at the boat accident. I desperately wanted to be with her, but she was slipping away. In a last-ditch effort, I took her to a cabin in the mountains. That weekend felt like I was squeezing my fists trying to hold on, but she was slipping through my fingers like grains of sand. It sounds dramatic because it was, it was high drama!

In the morning, I drove her back home. I knew it was over. I dropped her off at her apartment in Hollywood and headed straight back to the cabin. I felt like such a failure, such a loser. I had these broken feelings inside which limited me from connecting with people. But I didn’t understand how to get out of the feelings. I didn’t know where they were coming from or why. I just kept asking myself, “Who am I?”

When I got back to the cabin, it was early afternoon. I grabbed a small paperback book a good friend had given me called “The Force” and headed out into the mountains. I walked deep into the forest and found the tallest tree I could find. I climbed to the top of the fifty-foot tree, sat up there, and began to read the book. It was about all the energies in the universe, and how everything is connected. I sat up there and finished reading it in a few hours. The book woke something up inside of me. It felt like I had found the end of a string, and was going to work my way back into my life and figure out who I was. I sat on top of that tree, staring at the forest and mountains all around me. I wanted to see a sign to tell me I was on the right path. I looked into the sky for a hawk flying by or a deer in the meadow. But I didn’t see anything. I started climbing down the tree. As I got close to the bottom and was just about to jump off, I heard a big BOOM CRACK! I looked to my right and saw this big old tree slowly start to fall, then CRASH into the forest. I couldn’t believe it. Was it a coincidence? Maybe. But I took it as an affirmation. This was the beginning of my journey to figure out who I was.

I was always trying to prove myself by pushing my limits, running marathons, doing martial arts,  stepping into the ring, stepping into the unknown. Pushing the envelope to overcome feelings of weakness inside me, thinking that it would change things. I was always strong that way. I still am.

The movie, Walk a Mile, ran into problems and the project fell apart. This movie was going to show the world who I was. The achievement was going to make me feel better about myself, I was sure it would. But now it was over. I remember walking around feeling like ashes were falling from the sky around me. I had to regroup. I called Zack who was shooting commercials, he put me on his crew. For years I shot commercials with him, it was like running away with the circus. I met my incredible wife on one of his commercials. It was during this time that Zack and I started writing the movie SuckerPunch.

For me, the story of SuckerPunch was fueled by the boat accident. When trauma gets in the body, the body wants to heal. The pain that was stuck and buried deep down in my unconscious, was pushing me to become conscious of it. I was always drawn to redemption stories because trauma gives you a lasting taste of being at fault. At this time I still had no idea the boat accident was affecting my life, and in many ways guiding my life.

I'm so proud of this movie.

SuckerPunch was released in March of 2011. An eighty-two million dollar psychological action movie. A redemption story wrapped in a shiny package of pop culture. We had the premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I took my parents and they walked the red carpet with me. Rubbing elbows with celebrities as photographers flashed pictures. Then in this massive theater, I saw the words I’d written come to life on the big screen.

I thought for sure this was my ticket. I thought that this success, this achievement, would make me feel better about myself. I truly believed this was going to change my feelings of self-worth. And for a moment it did. Until it didn’t.

Even with a huge filmmaking credit like SuckerPunch, I couldn’t go out into the world and get people to believe in me. I couldn’t do it because I didn’t believe in myself. They say fake it ‘til you make it. It felt like I’d made it, but I couldn’t fake it. All my limited feelings of self-worth were standing in my way.

By this time in my life, I was married, had a daughter, and I was struggling. I didn’t feel like a good husband, a father, or a man. I felt like a failure. This is NOT a good feeling to have when you live in a beautiful home, with a beautiful wife and a beautiful daughter, a couple cats and a dog, and you just made an eighty-two million dollar movie. From the outside to everyone else, it looked like I had it all. But on the inside, I knew the truth. I was scared and I wanted to hide. I still felt like that frightened eight-year-old boy stuck in the water at the boat accident. But I didn’t know the boat accident had anything to do with how I felt, that it held the key to my healing.

But I’m not unique. Anyone living with trauma knows those feelings don’t go away. Your legs will give out before trauma does. It will bring the strongest most powerful man or woman to their knees. This is the lasting power of trauma and needs to be acknowledged and respected. Then healed and put to rest.

If these thoughts resonate with anyone and they’d like to talk further, contact me. Send me an email on my website and we’ll figure out a time to connect on the phone, take good care of yourself.

In my next blog, through the power of screenwriting, I’ll tell you how I put those feelings to rest by finally addressing the trauma of the boat accident.