My Origin Story Has A Mullet
On filmmaking, poetry, mentors, and Spielberg’s The Fabelmans
There’s a scene early in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans that I can’t stop thinking about.
It’s 1952, somewhere in New Jersey. The clicking of heels announces Sammy’s mother before she enters the room. Mitzi Fabelman, wrapped in a navy cardigan, stops and stands quietly behind her young son, her sharp blonde bob almost glowing in the half-light. In her hands: a Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera, her bright red manicure gleaming against the industrial grey metal of the camera body.
Sammy is kneeling on the concrete floor of his father’s basement workshop, tucked beneath a tower of broken RCA television sets. In the glass of one screen, you catch his reflection—small hands holding a toy train engine, his face tight with anticipation.
“Sammy,” she says softly, “we’re going to use Daddy’s camera to film it. Only crash the train once, okay? And after we get the film developed, you can watch it over and over again. So it’s not so scary anymore.”
He looks up at her—hopeful, confused. She kneels to his height and hands him the camera. A shaft of winter sunlight from a small basement window falls directly on her head. There’s something unspoken in the gesture, almost religious: This will help you make sense of the world.
A few weeks earlier, Sammy had seen The Greatest Show on Earth, his first time inside a movie theatre. The train crash in the film was extremely graphic, involving a Barnum & Bailey circus train full of animals colliding first with a car and then with a passenger train full of families. It had left Sammy frozen in his movie seat, catatonic for hours afterward. His father, an engineer at RCA, tried to soothe him with science—explaining projectors, frame rates, how what they were watching on the big screen wasn’t real. His mother, a pianist and composer, tried something else. “Movies are dreams,” she told him, promising that he’d always leave a movie theatre smiling.
But he didn’t.
So she bought him a model train set for Hanukkah. And now, sensing a mirror of her own sensitivity in her son, she was giving him a camera—an invitation to take control of the image, to recreate the thing that scared him until he could shape his fear into something else. The artist’s first act: a kind of creative alchemy.
“One more thing, darling,” she tells him as he reaches out for the camera. “Don’t tell your father. It will be our secret movie, just yours and mine. Okay?”
In the following weeks, Sammy rebuilt the crash scene in their basement. He filmed the engine barreling down the track, cut to toy cars flipping, paper lions and tigers bursting free from their cages.
When the film came back from the lab, Sammy cleared space in his closet, pushed his clothes to the sides, and projected it onto the wall. His mother sat beside him, knees tucked to her chest, watching the flickering chaos unfold. The edits were jarring, but the point of view was unmistakably Sammy’s, and the beginning of a story was there.
When it ended, she clapped like a small child. “Oh Sammy,” she said. “More! More! More!”
It’s a beautiful scene, even if you don’t know the backstory. But it lands differently once you know the film is autobiographical. Spielberg waited until both his parents had died to make it. This wasn’t just a story—it was the story: his origin myth. A mother who sees her son’s creativity and gives him the tools to explore it. A young boy who learns to turn what he fears into art.
I can tell you from experience: this is exactly the kind of story people want to hear whenever they ask how you got into film. It’s something that came up constantly while I was doing press for my last film, Satan Wants You.
I have no shortage of stories. That time I got to call “action” on a TV commercial filming in our house when I was a kid. Or the psychic at the shopping mall who told my mother I was going to be famous. Or the day a porn star taught me how to strip on the set of Don’t Quit Your Gay Job, where I promised myself: Next time I humiliate myself on national television, I’ll be the one calling the shots.
All good stories. But none of them felt like the story.
Because the truth is, I never wanted to be a filmmaker. I wanted to write.
Which is why when people ask about how I got into film, the first person I think of is a poet.
The last time I saw Patrick Lane was in 2008.
It was a wet October evening in Vancouver. Robson Street shimmered under a film of water, the concrete slick with the glow of the city skyline, the red of a traffic light refracted across a dozen different puddles. Rush hour car exhaust drifted low, mixing with the fried onion smell from the hot-dog stand outside the art gallery.
I pulled my coat tighter and ducked beneath the overhang, heading down the stairs toward the University of British Columbia’s downtown campus. The courthouse loomed above in an impossible Brutalist geometry, its hard edges softened by overgrown vines dropping the last of their leaves before winter.
Beneath the courts, there was a plaza that felt like a secret. You could pass right over it without ever knowing it was there. Below street level, the university bookstore opened to an underground skating rink where dozens of skaters traced lazy orbits around the ice. Teenagers practiced dance routines next to the rink, a battered ghettoblaster pumping out bass-heavy hip hop tracks that echoed across the plaza in waves.
I paused to look through the bookstore windows before entering, catching my reflection in the darkened glass. Too boyish for twenty-seven. Shirt buttoned to the top, no tie. The short brown mullet was an improvement over the brassy blonde box-dye I’d tried earlier that year, but I still looked like someone trying very hard to appear like he wasn’t trying at all.
Inside, the bookshelves were being rolled to the edges to make room for a few rows of folding chairs. Instead of heading in to make small talk, I stayed outside a little longer to watch a lone figure skater commanding the centre of the rink. She kept repeating a difficult spin: starting low, leg extended parallel to the ice, before rising into a fast rotation with her arms overhead, a small circle within the larger ring of skaters hugging the edge of the rink.
The first time she fell was hard to watch. Her skates clipped mid-spin, and she pitched forward, instinctively curling her arms around her head to avoid a face-plant. She slid to a stop, sprawled on her stomach. A guy in hockey skates glided over—trimmed beard, sweaty t-shirt, full of confidence. He extended a hand to help her and my mind immediately filled in the blanks: she’d made nationals once before a bad coach ended the dream. He played minor league hockey up north, lost his shot at a scholarship after blowing out a knee. They skate here together on Wednesday nights. At home, they argue about laundry, the dishes, the volume of the never-ending hockey games on TV. He’s hopelessly in love with her, but she knows that he loves her more than she loves him.
It’s a habit I’ve had since childhood—making up stories about some stranger’s life in vivid detail as a way of escaping my own.
Back on the rink, the figure skater waved the hockey player off. While she took a breath and pushed herself up to try again, he skated backwards away from her, shrugging and then mouthing something to his friends.
Inside, Trina, the bookstore manager, greeted me at the door, clipboard in hand. It was an omnibus reading: five authors, all with new books. The only one I knew was Jennica Harper—who would eventually become the showrunner for Jann, a comedy series where singer-songwriter (and Canadian treasure) Jann Arden plays a fictionalized version of herself. But back then, we were just two early-career writers pretending not to size each other up.
As the room filled—and I use that word generously—I chatted with Jennica and the other writers. It’s never really about the books at those pre-reading mingles. It's more like dogs sniffing each other: side-eyes about who got what grant, fishing around to find out what you're working on next. When my turn came, like everyone else, I said that I too was working on a new collection.
“Poetry or fiction?”
“A Fall/Winter collection.”
“Like clothing?”
I nodded with what I hope. “It’s a poetry collection themed around fashion. There’s an entire section of haikus about tubesocks.”
What had started as a joke with my friend David James Brock—a playwright and poet I met in university—had quietly become a real project. We started emailing each other poems to stay in touch after he moved to Toronto. I sent him a poem about a balaclava. He replied with one about cut-off jeans. This continued back and forth until it wasn’t a joke anymore. Magazines started publishing our poems, and we were seriously considering co-authoring a book.
Trina began her welcome. Two of the three rows were empty. My publisher had pitched this as a warm-up before the Vancouver International Writers Festival in two weeks. But nothing makes your confidence evaporate faster than reading to a mostly empty room. A packed venue feeds your soul. An empty one steals it.
I prayed not to be called first.
Then, midway through Trina’s intro, I looked up—and there he was.
Patrick Lane.
He must have slipped in while I was distracted. He wasn’t on the program. He wasn’t launching a book. He was just there, sitting alone in the back row, legs crossed at the knee. Grey hair, brown moustache, wool sweater, boots damp from the rain. He looked like he’d come from teaching, or from mucking around in his garden.
He was just as I remembered him from the final year of my undergrad—both mentor and a kind of father figure, in that quiet, mysterious way great teachers sometimes are. One of the first living poets I’d ever met, he was a larger-than-life presence in Canadian literature. Alongside writers like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro in the 1960s and ‘70s, he helped make it possible for writers to publish here in Canada, to write our own lives and landscapes into being.
Having him here was the poetry equivalent of Spielberg showing up to the screening of your first film. While I read from my book, he stared with that inscrutable expression of his, nodding his head occasionally at a line or two, not giving much away. He hadn’t changed. He even had the same clear-framed glasses.
Three of the writers swarmed Patrick at the end of the reading. I browsed the L section of the bookstore’s poetry shelves while they talked. I picked up a copy of his memoir, There Is A Season, and brought it to the counter to buy. I wanted him to sign it.
When I finally got to say hello, he seemed surprised to see me. We hugged.
“I thought you’d be in L.A. by now,” he said in that low, gravelly baritone. “On some TV or movie set. Acting.”
“Well, it’s funny that you said that. I’ve been trying to develop a documentary project with a friend…”
He grinned. “You must really hate money.”
We both laughed. But part of me froze. Acting?
I’d spent hours in his office, reading poems aloud, breaking them apart line by line. We talked about rhythm, structure, metaphor—how language can open and close like a fist. He told me that writing a great poem feels like opening a trapdoor to the universe, and that once you feel that, you’ll never want to stop writing. So why did he think I’d be an actor? What did he see that I didn’t?
Then Jennica and the bookstore manager approached, their voices bright with recognition, already drawing him into the next conversation. He squeezed my arm goodbye.
I stood there for a moment longer, book in hand, unsure if the moment between us had just ended or if I’d missed my cue to say something back. Something meaningful. Something final. But whatever it was, it passed. And so did he, vanishing back into the chatter and coat-swapping of a room already beginning to forget the poems we’d read.
Outside, the figure skater was still on the ice. Her face flushed from exertion, her ponytail damp, but she hadn’t stopped. She spun again—arms overhead, off-balance, still turning. Every time she missed the finish, failing to hit whatever invisible mark she had in her head, she started over again.
Maybe Patrick had seen something in me back then. But maybe it wasn’t what I thought he saw. I considered pulling his memoir from my bag, flipping to the title page to see what he’d written. Instead, I kept watching the skater.
She traced that imperfect circle again and again—faster now, chasing something only she could see. Maybe landing it wasn’t the point. Maybe the trick was just to keep spinning.
So what did that inscription say? I’ll tell you everything in my next post.
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The most loveable curmudgeon, that Pat. Did memories of having my work ripped to shreds and made better. (p.s. we all knew you’d be a star)
Well holy shit, colour me hooked