At six he played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for Fred Rogers, and the idea he took from that man is sitting underneath a film he made decades later about a girl whose best friend is a plant.
Nicholas opens up about being a physics obsessed kid with a threadbare copy of A Brief History of Time who would happily argue with anyone about black holes. He talks about the beauty of finding one corner of the world where a child gets to feel like an expert, and the loneliness that arrives with it when nobody else knows every single thing about the same subject. He gets candid about the lesson he traces directly to Fred Rogers, that there is wisdom in a child’s perspective and not only youth, and how easy it is to make films about children from an adult’s eye instead. Nicholas walks through the thing he had to learn about loving people for how they differ from you rather than how they match, and why a friendship built on similarity cannot survive one person changing. He also reflects on the eight plants the production needed to get through the shoot, which he calls by far the most finicky cast members he had.
An essential watch for anyone who has ever loved one subject more than anybody around them.
