In his childhood he used to climb to the lighthouse of the nowadays ghost-town of Koprena, where he was raised, and daydream he was in a ship, sailing for distant places. His family, though, forbade a sailor's career. As things turned out, he became one of the two or three greatest film makers of the so-called golden era of the Greek cinema, the '60s. Three generations of Greeks laughed and cried with his movies. Those films are still very successful when broadcast on Greek TV. The sea is more than evident in his best known films. He had the reputation of a hard man to work with but he used to say, "making movies is a game, if we all respect its rules, we can enjoy the game, when someone breaks the rules the game is no longer amusing for the rest of the set". He spent many of the last years of his life by the sea, next to a pine forest, writing novels mostly for children.