I watched a lot of silent directors who were absolutely great like John Ford and Fritz Lang Tod Browning and also some very modern directors like The Coen Brothers. The directors take the freedom within their own movies to be melodramatic or funny when they chose to be. They do whatever they want and they don't care about the genre.
I love my family and I had a very wonderful magical childhood. But New Jersey was actually a very cold place. There was such an intense concentration of wealth and such a low concentration of any actual human happiness.