BUILT BY DESIGN: DR. JON MARASHI

I didn't want to make another film about a successful dentist. And I definitely didn't want to make one about celebrity dentistry.

Jon Marashi has treated some of the most recognisable people in the world. That's part of his story, but it's probably the least interesting thing about him. What held my attention was a simpler question: how did Jon become Jon?

Look at his life now and it all seems incredibly intentional. The practice. The people around him. Los Angeles. The way he works, the way he dresses. Skateboarding, design, business, his family. Even the way he thinks about a smile. There's a point of view running through all of it.

I've always been fascinated by people who have developed their own taste. Not people with the best or most expensive things, but people where you can look at something they've made and somehow know it belongs to them. Jon has that.

And yet when you pull his story apart, there was no master plan. There were people he met, things that went wrong, opportunities, risks, mentors, obsessions. Things that probably didn't feel connected while they were happening. Only looking backwards can you see the thread.

Skateboarding explains him better than any list of achievements could. You try something. You fall. You do it again. Eventually you can do it, but being able to technically do it stops being enough. You start wanting to do it your way.

That's taste.

It's also what makes his dentistry interesting. He works in a strange world where we can make things almost endlessly perfect. Straighter, whiter, more symmetrical. We can keep going. So at what point do you remove the person?

That question became much bigger than dentistry while we were making the film. We're all doing versions of it to ourselves. Deciding what to change, what to keep, what we want people to see, and ultimately who we want to become.

Los Angeles felt like the place to ask it. It's a city obsessed with reinvention, where everyone is building something: a career, a company, a body, an identity. Jon has built an extraordinary world inside that. But I didn't want the film to say, look at everything this person has achieved. I wanted to get underneath it. To the kid who skateboarded before any of this existed. To the dentist, the entrepreneur, the friend, the husband, the father. The person who still has doubts, and ideas, and things he hasn't figured out yet.

Success does something strange when we look back at it. It makes everything look inevitable. We connect the dots and suddenly a life looks like it was always heading towards this exact place.

Nobody actually lives like that. We're just making decisions. A few enormous, most incredibly small.

You meet someone. You take an opportunity. You say no to something else. You get something badly wrong. You learn. You change your mind. You find something you're obsessed with. You keep going.

And eventually you look back and realise you've built something.

Built by Design isn't a film about how Jon Marashi became successful. It's a film about how Jon Marashi became Jon Marashi.

I think we're all doing the same thing, whether we realise it or not. Slowly, we're building ourselves.