Ty Rawls:         I guess you could say my entire life, I have been in love with film and entertainment, which includes comic books, short stories, whatever.  I’ve just been in love with the whole idea of telling stories.  In particular for me, heroes kind of drove me.  The idea of Superman, Spiderman, Batman, you know… These ideas at a young age really sparked me sort of to explore what super-heroism was.  So at a young age, I started to think about it and that sort of thought process led me to writing about the ideas I had, which eventually led to actually creating my own comic books and getting into comics.

Ty Rawls:         Smoke.  Smoke was the title of my book.

Ty Rawls:         It’s a comic book.  It’s about a superhero which I created, totally fictional.  He’s a black superhero from Detroit.  I kind of … At the time (it was the late 90s), there was a sort of explosion of black superheroes.  I think Blade had just come out the year before.  Matrix episode one was the big movie and people hadn’t really committed to the idea of these black heroes as being profitable, especially on the comic market.  I think I kind of sensed that that was changing, especially with Blade, so… And just as a kid, I really wanted to create a black superhero that kind of has this superman dignity about him, coming from America.  I wanted a hero that had this sort of honor, dignity and respect that I thought were sort of lacking in the other black heroes that had been written in the past.

Ty Rawls:         Yeah, I illustrated the book, I wrote it, I coloured it.  I did everything.

Ty Rawls:         It’s off the market now, but you can… It’s only a 7-book series, and then I pressed it into a graphic novel.  I think the last books were sold in 2003-2004 so I haven’t reprinted anything since then.

Ty Rawls:         Well, basically, I was involved with a film in Boston which was a martial arts thriller, an action adventure we shot very low budget.  I was a minimal part of the film in terms of credit, but I was doing a lot of things to actually support the film, from just running around on set to all the press materials and even negotiating the deals for the film in the end.  That led me to writing scripts.  As I was working with the director and showing up on set and we became really good friends and he had read my book, so he kind of explained to me that you could do live action.  What I was into at that point was thinking about having my book animated.  He sort of pushed me along into the future (I think I would have eventually gotten there) was live action.  I sort of saw that as 10 years down the line after I’d accomplished what I wanted to accomplish in animation.

Ty Rawls:         She showed me the script.  I took the script home.  When I read it, she gave me a kind of when she’d like to have it done, and how she thought she’d like it to look and to feel.  I think when we really knew that we had something was when the idea of Charlie’s Angels came up.  It was kind of funny because I guess the previous editor that she was looking at, when she had a meeting with him, she’d brought up Charlie’s Angels to kind of see what his reaction to that would be.  I guess his reaction was that was great, way to go and Charlie’s Angels was a good movie and like if we could do that with 30 Days, it’d be a great film and I think she just walked out right there.  When she asked me about Charlie’s Angels, I was like no, this isn’t Charlie’s Angels.  You don’t have Charlie’s Angels here.  You have a serious movie here.  This is real acting.  There’s no wires.  The fight scenes were incredibly fun to do on my end because they were all kind of old school techniques of how to shoot fight scenes.  And they were women.  So, for the first time I think there would have been some Nollywood film worth seeing, you know, women doing things that we typically see men do and I think that’s great.  I’m glad to be involved.