First born son of legendary Filipino filmmaker Celso Ad. Castillo, he started out as an actor,
winning the Best Supporting Actor award at the 1986 Metro Manila Film Festival and a
nominee for Best New Actor of the Year at the 1986 Philippine Star Awards. He quickly
shifted to writing and became the scriptwriter for some of his father's film as well as
serving as assistant director.
He is the founder of Cinemafest; an annual Los Angeles based film festival solely
dedicated to the Filipino American filmmaker. He is also the founder of the 63collective, a
tight knit group of Filipino American filmmakers based in the U.S. who work on each other's
projects and whose main focus is to uplift the filmmaker by doing innovative work and
competing in the international stage.
A graduate of Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management, he
grew up on a steady diet of European and Japanese films. Influences range from the classic
masters such as Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Jacques Tourneur, Roman Polanski, Francis
Ford Coppola and to the new masters such as David Fincher, Wong Kar Wai, Kiyoshi Kurosawa,
and M. Night Shayamalan. He believes that art and intelligent
filmmaking can be mixed with commercialism.