In the beginning...

I don't know how many of you are interested in this, but its part of the movie so I thought I would include it.  When I got into grad school I was hell bent on proving that I could make a micro-budget comicbook movie based on a comic that I was working on with a friend. A great many people said that it was crazy, so I decided to move on to another idea.  I took about two weeks just thinking and trying to come up with something else. Nothing seemed as interesting to me as investigating the idea of what heros are, and why we treat them the way we do, which a comicbook movie is the perfect vehicle to use to explore that question. My mom pushed me pretty hard to come to the dinner that they were having for the ship that my dad was on when he was in the Navy, the USS Randolph.  So I asked my friend and cinematographer Brian Macaione to go with me for the day to St. Augustine and see what there was to see.  That day we recorded about 6 hours of footage.  I was deeply moved by the stories that were shared with us, and I was completely engrossed by what I heard. Sometime on the long ride back, I realized that this movie about the men of the USS Randolph could be what I had always intended the comicbook movie to be. These were actual heros.  People that had won the war in the pacific and been a breathing part of history. To me that is who they are, but to themselves and to each other, they are a much more humble thing. And that lack of hubris, is what I believe makes their story so interesting.