Rocky Costanzo

Rocky Joseph Costanzo (born May 26, 1973 in Newport Beach, California) is an American cinema director. Costanzo's childhood consisted mostly of filming home movies with friends. At the age of 14, he was hired through a talent agent by New World Entertainment as an on-call actor for the popular ABC television series, "The Wonder Years." It was during these three years that he learned the craft of filmmaking and grew an interest in directing. In 1998, Costanzo attended the Los Angeles Film School in Hollywood (basic courses) to learn the technical and business side of filmmaking.

Costanzo's 2000 feature-length film, "Return to Innocence" film has to be daring, controversial or disturbing. Return to Innocence was all of those and more. The story involved a man on trial for the accusation of sexually abusing a young boy. The film was shot in black & white so that the audience would focus on the theme and graphic dialog. Costanzo's follow-up to Return to Innocence, a coming-of-age film called "11:11" began shooting in the summer of 2004. This was Costanzo's segue into unionized film productions. His company became an affiliate to the Screen Actors Guild and Costanzo's cast consisted of young SAG actors Noah Fleiss, Myles Jeffrey, Rachel Thorp and Darian Weiss. Production suffered a blow when the producers ran away. The film was shelved. It's been mentioned that the film will now come out in 2009.

Next on Costanzo's slate was what he called his return to horror. Most of the home movies Costanzo made as a child were slasher films. He took the idea from one of those movies and created "Hallowed" in 2005. This low budget film involved the mentally-disturbed character Gabriel and his killing spree of young vulnerable teens. As a fan of slasher films like Halloween and Friday The 13th, Costanzo used Hallowed as a tribute film to the classic slashers he grew up watching. He honors director John Carpenter in Hallowed by studying and researching the original Halloween. He took a visit to the exact shooting locations Carpenter used 25 years prior and created the introduction of Gabriel in a music montage.

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