The Directors Who Made Me Want to Make Things

As a comedian, actor, and occasional director, I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about what makes people laugh, feel, and think about life. Over the years, I’ve kept circling back to a handful of filmmakers who showed me different ways to tell a story.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly might be the reason I became a comedian.

When Dumb and Dumber came out in 1994, I was the perfect age to think gross-out humor was revolutionary. Here were two guys making a movie about the dumbest people imaginable, and somehow you still rooted for them. It felt new and wonderfully rebellious.

Then There’s Something About Mary came out when I was in high school. I remember thinking, Wait… you can do this? This was the stuff my brother and I laughed at. I had never seen that exact mix of absurdity, heart, and shamelessness on screen before. It made me realize the things we thought were funny could make other people laugh, too.

What I came to appreciate about the Farrellys was the heart underneath the jokes. Their characters could be idiots, perverts, or deeply flawed people, but the movies still found something human in them. Years later, I got to meet Peter Farrelly and watch him work. That was a quiet kind of validation. The thing I loved about those movies wasn’t only the comedy. It was the permission to be ridiculous and sincere at the same time.

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Richard Linklater taught me something different. Drama doesn’t always need a plot twist. Sometimes it just needs real people talking.

I’ve watched Dazed and Confused more times than I can comfortably admit. Different apartments, different cities, different versions of my life, same movie. I never seem to get tired of it.

One of my favorite things I own is my Dazed and Confused DVD, signed by Linklater himself. My neighbor, Dan “Diego” Fulton, got it for me when he worked on a movie with Linklater. Dan knew how much I loved the film, so he casually broke into my apartment, he lived downstairs, took the DVD, got it signed, and returned it like this was a normal neighborly thing to do. No note. No apology. Just a surprise. Dan Fulton was a saint, and I miss him dearly.

Linklater trusts the audience. He lets conversations wander and emotions sit there without explaining everything. He made ordinary moments feel worth watching.

Mike Judge is always somewhere in the back of my mind when I’m writing characters or building a project. He’s like a quiet warning label that says, Don’t overwrite this. Life already did the work.

His work understands that people are often funny without realizing it. Office Space, Idiocracy, and King of the Hill all look closely at how people behave, work, complain, and try to get through the day. Nobody is completely right, and nobody is completely wrong. You don’t feel judged. You feel seen.

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I’ll never forget the first time I saw Boogie Nights. It was in a dollar theater in Youngstown, Ohio, on a double date. As the movie went on, I started to lose track of where I was. The music, the movement, and all those lives unfolding on screen pulled me somewhere else.

I didn’t snap out of it until we walked out to the parking lot and I saw my Jeep.

That was when I thought, Oh right. I’m not in this world. The movie’s over.

I remember driving home thinking, Oh my God: I want to do this for a living. Not the fame part. The transportation part. I wanted to make entertainment that could pull people into another life for a couple of hours.

That’s what these directors gave me: the desire to make things. From the Farrellys, I learned that comedy can have a heart. From Linklater, I learned that conversations can carry a story. From Mike Judge, I learned to pay attention. From Paul Thomas Anderson, I learned how powerful it is when a movie truly transports you.

You can find more about Mark’s film and directing work on the TV/Film page and the Director Bio. The original version of this piece is available here.