I know this is going to sound corny. I’m saying it anyway.
Disney World is my favorite place on earth.
My family and I have been going since 2006. That’s thirteen years of annual pilgrimages to the same theme park in central Florida. Thirteen years of Space Mountain, of overpriced turkey legs, of sweating through my shirt by 9 AM and not caring even a little bit.
I’m in Orlando right now. Not for a shoot. Just for the trip. And every time I come here, I notice the same strange thing: it feels like home. Which makes no sense. Home is Houston. Home is Texas. Home is where my stuff is. But Disney has this quality where everything is so familiar, so mapped into my memory, that being here is like being on vacation and being home at the same time. I can’t explain it better than that.
I think about this a lot in the context of what I do for a living. Heritage Films exists because familiar places matter. The house you grew up in. The kitchen where your grandmother cooked. The backyard where you learned to throw a football. Those places hold something that can’t be replicated, and when they’re gone, the feeling goes with them.
Disney isn’t my grandmother’s kitchen. I know that. But the principle is the same. Familiarity is a kind of love. When you return to a place enough times, it stops being a destination and starts being part of your story. The restaurants where your kids had their first churro. The bench where you sat down because your feet were destroyed and you questioned every life choice that led you to walking nine miles in Florida heat.
Those are memories. Real ones. And they live in specific places.
I guess that’s why I do what I do. I film people telling their stories in the places that shaped them, because place and memory are the same thing. Take away the place and the memory fades. Keep the place (even on film) and the memory holds.
Anyway. I’m going to go ride Yeti Mountain for the forty-seventh time. I know that’s not what it’s called. But that’s what we’ve been calling it for 13 years.
Some things don’t need to be complicated.