The Idea

The idea for my short film “In the Beginning” was an accumulation of a few moments coming together in my mind and nagging at me. Having just finished reading David Markson’s novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the short might easily have become an adaptation of the book. Thankfully, although inspired by the novel, the short is a much different story. I couldn’t afford or navigate the legal issues around adapting a novel.

Around a year prior to reading the novel, I heard Fredrick Arlen Lee’s song, “Groundhog Day” and we discussed me shooting a music video. That sparked another nagging idea—what if the movie Groundhog Day hadn’t been a comedy. The thought horrified me in a good way. I imagined David Lynch meets Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.”

Note: I am neither Lynch nor Anderson, so please temper expectations for the short accordingly.

Finally, I became obsessed with another idea—in the near future, when AI delivers us food instead of people, how long could someone working from home go without seeing another person?

These ideas spun around my subconscious and met up with some articles about how easy filmmaking had become thanks to smart phones and some lens companies (I’ll talk more about the equipment I used later, #Moondoglabs). And so the journey began.