The image of the Cactus Man is one that has stuck with me for a long time; nearly twenty years in fact. In my teenage years I scrawled his image in the back of my school exercise books; his spiky visage peering out from amongst the other doodles with his big sad eyes, just begging me to do something with his character. For a long time I wondered exactly what that was, but a couple of years ago I began exploring the idea of putting him into a short film. The story went through a few iterations initially, but at the heart of each one was a simple concept that I kept coming back to. A universal theme experienced by everyone at some point; the moment when the time comes to put away childish things.

To make the film work I knew I’d have to make the audience care about an anthropomorphic cactus. With this in mind I looked to the work of some of my filmmaking inspirations; Jim Henson, George Lucas and Spike Jonze. Directors who have built worlds in the realms of the fantastic and asked us to suspend disbelief long enough to feel compassion for monsters and puppets. Though merely a figment of Winston Prickle’s imagination, the Cactus Man had to be every bit as real and believable in his performance as his human counterparts, and it was very much the challenge of executing this got me excited about bringing his story to the screen.

The filming of ‘Cactus Boy’ also marked something of a homecoming for me, having shot it on location in Arizona, a state I once called home. I moved there from London on my own in my early twenties, and lived through my own coming-of-age story in much the same manner as Winston; breaking the chains of childhood and shaping myself as an adult.

Returning to the US in this capacity was almost like retracing my steps, except this time I was lending my boots to Winston and observing with the benefit of hindsight. But from the moment the cameras rolled I realised; we never really put away our childish things. They haunt us, inform us, and fashion us in their nostalgic mould. More than merely memories, our formative experiences are as much embedded in who we are as who we will become. In this respect the Cactus Man isn’t only Winston’s friend, he’s all of ours. A walking reminder of why we are who we are.