watch your favorite movies over and over and over

Hey first - PRE SAVE THE CAMPAIGN! If you click “notify me on launch” it helps us out a TON! Please!

I’m almost positive everyone who becomes a filmmaker does so because they feel an overpowering urge to recreate the specific feeling they experienced when they first watched their favorite movie. I don’t need proof or evidence for that if I feel it in my heart, which is what’s most important. But I genuinely can’t guess another reason why someone would want to make movies!

I classify what makes my “Favorite Movies” list as one that, no matter how many times I’ve seen It, makes me relive that about-to-go-down-the-drop-on-the-Jurassic-Park-ride feeling in my tummy. Speaking of, Jurassic Park meets that criteria. It’s one of my all time favorite movies. Also, and because I know every micro-second by heart, Die Hard does too. Others include Into the Spider-verse (every single time I write a feature, I have to rewatch this movie because it gets the story out so well), Casablanca, My Neighbor Totoro, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Spy, almost every episode of Bluey and season 4 of The Wire.

When my mom told me the idea for this movie of seeing her dead ex-husband in the mirror, it magically sort lifted me out of my seat and made me go, “Oh, oh, oh, oh, I wanna see that” in a way that felt very familiar. It made me want to put movies on and get inspired. It made me want to make an accompanying playlist. That’s a high that has to be chased! It’s the same feeling that lifts me out of my seat every time we see there are two female ends of the seatbelts in the helicopter in Jurassic Park; or when John McClane says, “…but she never heard me say I’m sorry;” or when I realized I was watching an episode of Bluey that was DOING MEMENTO?!!?!

It feels wrong to say, but there’s also nothing more exciting than getting a note when you’re trying to figure out your story. I mean, there’s nothing worse in the world than getting bad notes…but getting good notes? I’ll absolutely fly straight up in to the sky. To know there’s something you need to fix about a story and then someone (almost always Brennan) goes, “well, if you add this extremely specific thing to the story in this other area—it fixes this entire plot hole,” I’m gone. You can’t catch me, I’m in the sky, baby!

I’ve mentioned this before, but the screenwriter, Michael Arndt, talks about that process in a very long but very inspiring video that I cannot stress enough, I have watched probably 10 times, about writing Toy Story 3. One time, when I was writing an action comedy, I put every single scene of Spy into a spreadsheet and then made sure all of my scenes in my movie were as close as possible. Is this sound advice? I don’t know…I guess, don’t plagiarize, but find out what makes your tummy feel like it’s about to shoot you up into a T-Rex’s mouth and then figure out how to make other people feel like that too!

We’re so close to showing you what this movie’s going to look like. If you haven’t yet, PLEASE go press “notify me” on the Kickstarter page. I know we’ve been asking you to do a lot of things. But if you have the ability to do that… it will make this whole thing go a lot smoother, I’m told.

Thank you for being here!

Izzy