His desire to make movies began early and somewhat typically. Graves says, "It’s pretty basic, and it’s an old boring story a lot of people tell. When I was eleven I saw Star Wars, and about three months later I asked for my first Super-8 camera for Christmas and started filming that day, and within a few weeks we were building sets in my garage. My neighbors used to call our garage ‘The Soundstage.’"

If Graves’ origins and his decision to attend the University of Southern California film school (Star Wars creator George Lucas’ alma mater) seem common, the way he started making features wasn’t. Graves went back to El Dorado to shoot the moody Crude Oasis. While shooting at home saved him money, Graves said the return had additional benefits, "The idea of producing and directing my first feature film on my own was so terrifying. I wanted to have my family around and try to make (the process) more intimate and to take the edge off of what I was trying to do, which was make a movie for $25,000 in 14 days with my friends that I would try to sell as a real movie later."

Graves had little trouble establishing his effort as a "real movie." Crude Oasis received a rave review in Variety and national distribution from Miramax, the company that helped launch the careers of other independent filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh (sex, lies and videotape). While the film received a lot of positive buzz, it didn’t reach a wide audience. Graves doesn’t sound all that disappointed when he says, "I wasn’t surprised by the commercial reaction because it came out between Apollo 13 and Waterworld. It opened against five major studio films and about five independent films. It just got lost."

Fortunately for Graves, enough of the right people in the industry saw Crude Oasis and after a long series of meetings and near misses he was able to make his new film which is currently titled Casualties. "I really wanted to make a movie that was different from Crude Oasis stylistically and yet had enough similarities so that people would let me direct it," he says. "It’s about a housewife (Caroline Goodall from Schindler’s List) who has a terrible marriage and who meets a killer in her cooking class and without realizing it sets into motion his doing in her husband."

While the $1.1 million dollar budget is microscopic by Hollywood standards (Mars Attacks!, for example, had an $80 million budget.), making Casualties in Los Angeles was a step up. Nonetheless, shooting in El Dorado and LA proved remarkably similar. He says, "It was a real adventure and an education for me because I had always thought about what would happen when I made a movie for a company with a bigger budget with real actors. It was really the same thing. It was easier. I had a bigger crew and more time."

One of the more seasoned actors Graves directed this time was St. Elsewhere veteran Mark Harmon, who plays the killer. At the suggestion of the same casting agent who handles Francis Ford Coppola, Graves sent Harmon the script and a tape of Crude Oasis. "I had never thought of Mark at all for the part, and he came in and just floored me in that he had this surprise understanding of what I wanted for the character and what a great idea it would be for this very nice man to play a very dangerous person. Mark plays this very nice All-American assassin."

While Harmon does add some marquee value, Casualties is scheduled to play in Europe and Australia, but isn’t scheduled to play here any time soon. He explains, "That’s pretty common for financing films here in that all the independent companies have deals wherever they have connections, and this company had a lot of connections in Germany. Germany has a huge market and is always looking for American films. So they actually take part in financing certain American films that they know will sell in Germany."

Thanks to pre-sales and similar arrangements, Graves states that Casualties is already making a profit despite the fact that it can’t be seen here. "It’s much easier to sell a movie in Europe because here you’re up against Independence Day and Space Jam, all the huge films the studios in Los Angeles mean to make hits," he says. Eventually, Casualties may see the light of the screen in limited release or on cable or straight-to-video.