John Robb Saunders — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

West New York native, Voluisa County bred. From a kid with his mom's camera filming his friends at the skatepark off Nova, to a few thousand pages of script to his name. An auteur maybe not the most talented, but easily the one with the most heart.

While filmmaking was a fundamental part of his teenage years, Saunders also traveled rigorously while playing in Florida's youth soccer circuit for a handful of different clubs in Central Florida. He was invited to play at college showcases in North Carolina, and attended numerous other high-profile tournaments. Nearing the end of high school, he elected to forgo pursuing playing at the collegiate level, closing that chapter of his life.

Immediately after graduating high school in 2016, Saunders began taking his artistic pursuits more seriously, initially attending the University of North Florida that fall. He transferred to Florida State at the end of his freshman year, but after only one semester there, Saunders decided college life was not for him, and that he wanted to fully begin a career in film. He remained enrolled, but switched to a completely online course load, and moved back home to Daytona Beach.

After moving home at 19 years old, Saunders worked various full-time jobs, notably at the Daytona International Speedway, as well as a brief internship in Concord, North Carolina. He spent all of his remaining downtime mastering different creative software, making music, and writing his first scripts. He eventually saved up enough money to fund his first independent films, releasing his first narrative projects at 21 years old.

Saunders is highly influenced by the early works of The Weeknd, and the later works of Mac Miller, noting their highly honest, unfiltered, and gritty personal experiences as extremely similar to Saunders' own during his youth. The typically socio-economic focused style of his writing & films tend to have a blunt, didactic nature that juxtapose urban, hip-hop & grime culture aesthetics with satirically zany, heartfelt stories. His narratives, at their core principle, often feature the portrayal of immense personal growth stemming from healthy relationship dynamics, whether it be familial, romantic or platonic.

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