Growing up in New Orleans, when you're in seventh and eighth grade, and you're into music, and you're a dorky dude, you know, you listen to the entire Rush catalog and the entire Zeppelin catalog, and you go through these, like, phases of classic rock.

I always did plays, and when I went to NYU - and I didn't go to Tisch, the theater school, because I was like, 'Well, acting's not realistic. You can't make a career out of it.' So I just studied general studies and humanities at NYU, but I was doing plays while I was there. So I was sort of cheating.

I directed the play 'Amadeus' with puppets way back in the day for theater. I also studied puppetry at the Eugene and Neil Center with a lot of the 'Sesame Street' people, so I do have a little bit of a history with puppetry.

I'm Greek-American, and I come from an immigrant-type background, and Greek-American parents want you to be a doctor or a lawyer. Because that's how you make money, and it's very respectable.

The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.

In a way, I was spoon-fed, if you will, a career. It was fully manufactured by a studio that believed that they could put me on their posters and turn me into their bottle of Coca-Cola, their product.

Sundance took me on my first film and from there sort of launched my career.

I would say my career is in a very good place. I'm in a place of a lot of hope for what's next. I see something great, but I'm not quite there.