JJ Abrams is one of the most powerful people in Hollywood right now. Over his career in the movies, he’s written, directed, produced, acted and played a wicked keyboard solo on Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions, and through his production company Bad Robot, his name is counted among the credits of massive franchises like Cloverfield, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and of course Star Wars. He’s more of a household name than most filmmakers of his generation and we sometimes wish we wanted anything as much as he wants that Steven Spielberg status.

You can’t blame him when you hear about his first paid job in the film industry. Returning a bunch of Spielberg’s personal super-8 home movies that he discovered after his family moved into a house where the director used to live, he and his friend and later collaborator Matt Reeves were hired to edit and catalogue them. If this doesn’t already sound too good to be true, the two budding filmmakers were 15 years old at the time.

In between this and his feature directing debut with 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, Abrams sold and produced a number of screenplays for films that are less well known than his later franchise work. Film is a collaborative medium, and one in which screenwriters typically get screwed over in one way or another.

“I was part of the machine of screenwriters that goes from project to project, but over the years I found myself doing things that weren’t so meaningful,” Abrams told The Guardian in 2013. After a sabbatical from movies, working on mega-hit TV shows like Felicity and Lost marked “the beginning of working on things that made me feel something again.”