J. Lazarus Hawk was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on December 18, 1967. He started enjoying television, movies, and comics at a very early age, and as far back as he can remember Stan Lee and Marvel comics and Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone were among his most prolific influences. In the summer of 1976 his older brother took him to a local movie theater to see a special rerelease of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The boys sat through it twice. It was that very day, at the tender young age of 8, when Lazarus realized what film can be.
Four years later, his brother again took him to the movies, this time to see David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man.” That film did for Lazarus visually and emotionally what “2001: A Space Odyssey” had done for him intellectually. That also led him to look into the works of Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock, and sparked in him the earliest desire that he can remember to make a film.
