Making movies was more a reaction to not being chosen for sports. Other kids were out there playing at whatever I was off making something blow up and filming it, or making a mould of my sister’s head using alginating plaster.

Abrams frames his early filmmaking not as a precocious career plan but as a compensatory outlet: excluded from the social prestige of youth sports, he redirected competitive energy into making things—staging explosions, experimenting with materials, and documenting it all on camera. The quote highlights a common creative origin story in which marginality or rejection becomes a catalyst for invention. It also underscores the hands-on, effects-driven play that would later characterize Abrams’s interest in spectacle and practical craft. More broadly, it suggests that artistic identity can form through improvisation and curiosity rather than formal training, with “not being chosen” functioning as the negative space that makes a personal vocation visible.