Man Interviewed By His 18-Year-Old Self for 'Later That Same Life'

"I'm old, I'm fat and, in your mind, I'm a failure. I know that. Why do you think I've been avoiding talking to you for 38 years?"

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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What if you could interview your future self? One writer thought ahead—by thirty-eight years—and recorded himself at 18-years-old to ask himself the tough questions.

Back in 1977, the same year StarWars came out, Peter "Stoney" Emshwiller recorded himself asking questions like “Are you married?”and “What’s happened to the family?” Nearly four decades later, he answered them and cut all of the footage into one seamless interview that is now a short film called Later That Same Life.

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Per the NPR, highlights from that interview are listed below.

On seeing the 1977 footage for the first time in years: 

The biggest thing that surprised me is, back then, I had very, very bad self-image. I thought of myself as hideous. I grew a horrible, scruffy beard trying to cover up my acne. And I looked at the footage of myself, and I thought, "You're adorable!" It was eye-opening.

On feeling like he let his 18-year-old self down:

I was sure I was going to be distinguished and gray and have these little beautiful wrinkles, but the idea that, you know, I'd sit down across from my future self and he would be, you know, Jabba the Hutt and look like a mutant beached whale...Oh, the editing process was horrible because I would be sitting there having to look at myself—I'm at that age and weight where I avoid reflective surfaces as much as possible. So having to sit for hours and look at this footage of myself was torture...And it wasn't just, of course, my appearance. It was that I was facing the disappointment.

Why he decided to answer his younger self's questions now:

There [are] two reasons I think I did it. One is I needed him to be OK with how I led his life. But honestly, I might never have decided to go back to this project if I hadn't had a little bit of a health scare...I was in the hospital with tubes coming out of me and I thought, "I gotta finish this movie."

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