Come and look at this.

I was about eight. I’d found a record I loved – I can’t remember which one now, probably something like “Devil Gate Drive” or “The Monster Mash” – and I needed someone else to hear it. So I traipsed down the 89 rough-hewn stone and concrete steps from the cliff-side bungalow where I lived, knocked on my friend’s door and dragged them back to listen.

That’s the earliest version of the gesture. But it’s the same one.

My mum used to drop me at the Regal in Redruth at around one o’clock on a Saturday and pick me up sometime around half past nine. Eight and a half hours. I’d watch whatever was showing until it ended, then go back to the beginning and watch it again. Sometimes twice. Sometimes two and a half times. It depended on how long it was.

I wasn’t wasting time or hiding from anything (well, perhaps I was hiding a bit). I was doing the thing that mattered most to me: understanding. Not just watching. Understanding.

I came out of Taxi Driver at an inappropriately young 13 and it was like I’d been hit with the reality stick really really hard. I just thought: the world is a darker place than I knew.

And for a fairly isolated and lonely kid – a kid who’d grown up in Cornwall, who didn’t always know how to do the social thing that seemed to come naturally to other people – there was something about that that really connected with me.

Films taught me how the world works. They showed me that stories are how we make sense of things when the world doesn’t make sense. And they showed me something else too: that if I found the right thing and shared it, a connection would follow. Maybe we’d be friends.

That’s how I learned to love people. Not through small talk. Through “come and look at this.”

I’ve been a teacher, an actor, a filmmaker, a film distributor, a photographer, and for the last couple of years I’ve been learning and building software too. From the outside, that probably looks like a lot of different things.

From the inside, it’s always been the same thing.

Teaching English literature: “Look at this text. Look at what’s happening in it. Can you see it now?” Film distribution: “This film fell through the cracks. It deserves to be seen. I’m going to make that happen.” The tool I built over the last few months – Pain Point Pulse – finds the gap between what your audience says publicly and what they actually mean at two in the morning on Reddit. Same gesture. Same music. Different guitars.

I got an ADHD diagnosis at 58. Everything that came before that – the career pivots, the obsessive deep dives, the systems I build to hold things together, the way I move in bursts of total absorption then total overwhelm – it had a frame at last. It wasn’t dysfunction. It was always this. It just didn’t have a name.

I’ve been doing a lot of identity work, and the Charlotte Rampling screening at Curzon Mayfair in 2019 is the best example I have of what I’ve realised I’m actually for.

Tiny film. One she made out of love. She’d won the Best Actress award at Venice for it. Nobody picked it up. The four hundred people in the room would never have been there without 606 Distribution. And me and David at the back, watching her receive the attention she deserved.

That was the best moment. Not the deal. Not the booking. Not the review. Watching her be seen. No matter how famous you are, that means something.

That’s what it looks like when it works. The room is looking. I don’t need to be in it.

The person who dragged a mate round to listen to Bobby Pickett and Crypt-Kickers at eight years old is still doing the same thing. The materials change – films, tools, screenings, stories, software. The gesture is always the same.

“Come and look at this.”