[7] He would continue to do so upon entering his sophomore year at East Meadow High School, filming their sporting events and theater club productions of Guys and Dolls, Once Upon a Mattress and Beauty and the Beast, before graduating in 2015.

[8][9][10] At that same time, he also attended the Television Production and Digital Film Making program at Nassau BOCES' Joseph M. Barry Career & Technical Education Center in order to get his first hands-on experience in the field, with an anti-bullying campaign being one of his projects.

The supercut he edited of the musical number "America" went viral with over one million views and was featured in an article for Collider on "10 Great Movies That Had a Decades-Long Gap Between Them and Their Remake.

"[31][32] In 2023, Hechtman served as colorist on his friend Nathan Siegelaub and Ania Gruszczyńska's debut documentary film Sparni, which the latter two produced for the completion of their studies at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The film, which followed young jazz vibraphonist Pierce "Sparni" Sparnroft preparing for a junior recital at Montclair State University in New Jersey under the guidance of professor Steve Nelson, all while dealing with the repercussions of mental illness, premiered at the school's DocFest on December 9, 2023.

[33][34][35][36] As of January 2024, Hechtman is in the early screenwriting stages of his first original narrative feature film, The Lens Within Me, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama very loosely inspired by his adolescence and college experience as a young filmmaker.

Hechtman has cited the films of Steven Spielberg, Rob Marshall, Tom Hooper, Jean-Luc Godard, Yorgos Lanthimos, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, Terrence Malick, Greta Gerwig, Christopher Nolan and Damien Chazelle as influences on his work.

His visual style frequently involves hand-held camera movement, the framing of actors and/or objects on the far left or right sides of the screen and using wide-angle lenses and dutch angles in creative ways, based largely on Tom Hooper's work in Les Misérables (2012) and The King's Speech (2010).

His late father, Alan Hechtman, served under the Wantagh-Levittown Volunteer Ambulance Corps (WLVAC) and was one of the first responders who survived the September 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center and died from 9/11-related acute leukemia on May 11, 2010.

[7] In 2010, Hechtman, at age 13, donated a collection of 50 children's books and DVDs focusing on the theme of character education to the East Meadow Public Library in honor of his bar mitzvah, which took place months before.

Reflecting on the experience, Hechtman remarked "I realized that books and movies were great ways to increase student awareness about values such as kindness, compassion, friendship, teamwork and taking care of the environment ...