But "George Washington," writer/director Green's first feature-length, has received more acclaim than movies that will earn many times that.
Roger Ebert selected the film as his No. 5 choice for 2000;The New York Times placed it at No. 3, and Time magazine at No. 2. It has won awards at festivals around the world.
"George Washington's" crew was made up of Green's fellow School of the Arts graduates, and the cast was recruited from Winston-Salem's streets, barbecues, churches and teen centers. "This film needed to feel organic from the start. We were not looking for actors, sets or controlled environments," Green said.
The film focuses on George, a young would-be superhero who wears a helmet because the soft spot in his skull never closed. Green based it on a short piece he made while at the School of the Arts. "It was always something I wanted to expand," he said.
After his 1998 graduation, Green pursue a film industry career in New York and Los Angeles. But he returned to Winston-Salem after only eight months -- "Just long enough to realize that I miss the community, the landscape, the environment," he said -- to film "George Washington."
He went to learn the industry's ropes, but "I was becoming cynical," he said. "I felt I needed to get away before I became completely soulless like some of the other people out there."
Winston-Salem provided a more languid lifestyle (" I want to just sit on the porch and/or take a nap on the side of the highway," Green said), as well as the setting for "George Washington's" anonymous Southern town.
"The movie doesn't take place anywhere, just the generic South -- timeless, placeless. Our only goal was to make ugly things beautiful," Green said. The city's industrial areas contributed the decaying, yet lush backdrop to the film.
He wanted to make a movie that portrayed adolescence in the real South, the one he experienced growing up in Texas. "If there is a movie set in the South, it's always like 'Fried Green Tomatoes,' which isn't the South I know," he said.
