A Hero of Our Time
Almereyda studied art history at Harvard but dropped out after three years to pursue filmmaking. He acquired a Hollywood agent on the strength of a spec script about Nikola Tesla. His first film as writer/director was a self-financed, black-and-white short featuring Dennis Hopper, "A Hero of Our Time", based on Mikhail Lermontov's novel of the same title. Shot in 1985, it was finished in 1987 and screened in the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.