Justin Hunt

The issue of fathers somehow wounding their children and the ensuing struggles have been around for quite some time, such stories are peppered throughout historical literature and lore, but they definitely did begin to come to the forefront after the Second World War and the Industrial Revolution. It was then that gender roles were much more defined and the separation began between father and child. Men were going off to work and coming home with nothing left to offer their children, whereas, in the past, they tended to work together at home as a family and the relationship was much more incubated.

Ironically, if you really think about it, the entire concept of ‘adolescence’ is a fairly new idea. We didn’t really see these phases of teenage angst and curiosity and being lost, so to speak,

until we started seeing generations of children without engaging fathers. Sadly, what was once a period of, say, age 17-19 in the first generation of adolescent children, is now going up into the 40s and 50s with so called adults still wandering around like lost boys and girls; the ‘peter pan’ syndrome, if you will.

I often use the analogy of video tape to describe the current situation of father wounds and expanding adolescence. If you remember back in the VHS days, every time you made a copy of a tape, that new copy had a little less quality than the one before it. It was more faint and harder to see clearly. In the news business, we called that ‘losing a generation’. It’s much the same here. With each passing generation, the noble role of fatherhood seems to be a little less and less recognizable. 

I don’t mean it so much in a career or educational sense, but in a cultural manner. Men behaving like boys, constantly searching for affirmation in women, materialism, money. There is a shortage of mentors and leaders who use such words as nobility, legacy and morality in their vocabulary. Women who seek eternal youth through cosmetic means. Mothers who try to dress and act like their teenage daughters.

The root of the issue is that we don’t have adults like we once did to teach, provide safe forums to grow and mature for their children, to mentor them. Because of the fleeting role of fatherhood, it’s becoming more and more a culture of kids, even in their 30s and 40s, trying to  raise kids, if you will.

I‘m not going to lie, I loathe social media. That, unfortunately, doesn’t always bode well for someone in the public arena such as I am. I don’t tweet, no Instagram here, and rarely do I get on Facebook. I think the last post I had on my fan page was november 24th. It, to me, is a necessary evil to let folks know about my films, but I rarely get any more personal than that. I think, despite the limited amount of good it’s brought us, it’s dumbed us down socially and created a false sense of reality for so many people.

Part of it was practical, part by necessity. When I was younger and working for NBC News here in the States, we had to be a one-man band. Thus, I learned to shoot, write, edit, interview etc., because I had to. I couldn’t be more grateful for that. Fast forward to the films I work on, it makes sense that I would save the cost of such aspects, since I was capable of handling them myself. Conversely, it would be nice to outsource some of these things, but being that I finance these projects myself, for the most part, I just don’t have the funds to do that, or I feel that what funds I do have can be put to better use. I take great pride in the fact that I’ve done these films on my own, but I think the time has come

to try and gather others around me to collaborate. In fact, I’m currently working with a production team out of the Netherlands, visual effects people from England and India, and so on. 

The American West is much like any other place in the world. It has its ups and its downs, its pros and cons. Just like any other location, people strive to survive via the daily grind, they buy homes and groceries and fuel, there are good people and bad.

One aesthetic that I would say is a bit different than, say, New York, is that it is a wide open landscape. You see huge skies, massive valleys, towering mountains, simple space. For example, just outside my window here in Colorado Springs is Pike’s Peak, a 14,000+ foot [4200m, ed.] mountain that looms beautifully over the city. Other than that, I’d say we’re just about as cosmopolitan as any other place I’ve ever been. I suppose you could say the mindset is a bit different, as well. The thought processes and actions do, at times, tend to have a bit of the Old West left in them, which I appreciate.