Light of My Life

I wrote the screenplay formerly titled Light of His Life 2 years ago whilst directing a short documentary about my grandparents. Elements of the piece concerned how aging affects their daily lives and how they had been together for over 60 years. This prompted the pair to reflect on how when one half of any long romantic partnership passes away, the other person is left alone to live the rest of their life very differently to how it had been for so long, which I found poignant.
I took the idea of a partner being like another half and exaggerated it in the script. Ray was an older gentleman who had someone who was his partner in marriage, in work and in life. They met and married young, the complementary attraction was evident - he and she centred each other throughout their years together. He was shy whereas she was outgoing, him serious and her playful - the embodiments of Yin and Yang, together the pair achieved balanced. She was the light of his life, whose playful and more adventurous nature often brought Ray to new things in life that he otherwise may not have experienced. Another influence for the Ray and his wife is Disney/Pixar’s animated adventure movie Up, specifically the heartfelt establishing montage of Carl and Ellie’s long relationship together.
The lighting shop idea came naturally as a clear illustration for the “light of one’s life” idiom. Warm, colourful lights at night-time set a romantic, playful ambience that I felt would drive the story in representing Ray’s wife’s personality and presence. Ray and his wife opened a lighting shop together, continuing to work there into old age. Ray undertook the technical/electrical side and his wife primarily dealt with the social and aesthetic elements of the shop. But in old-age, his wife passed before Ray. With the end of his wife’s life came the disruption of the couple’s equilibrium – her light burnt out, and thus in Ray’s eyes leaving darkness to be all that remained for him. He has shut himself away from the world since her passing, accepting his destined loneliness as he refuses to believe that such a balance may ever be restored again.
In the months following her passing, Ray shuts himself in his home until he must venture out to the shop to complete some long overdue paperwork. He does so, and it is this outing that compels the spirit of his wife to let Ray know he is not alone and if he is willing to push himself further, his life doesn’t have to be so dark. He can still have fun and friends even with his love not around. She communicates with him in a way she believes he’ll understand – through lights, what they lived their day-to-day lives among for many years together. This mysterious, magical element is influenced by Netflix’s horror-drama Stranger Things, especially the scenes in which young boy Will who resides in another dimension communicates to his mother Joy through multi-coloured fairylights. Such a setting creates opportunity for interesting and aesthetic visuals that is a quality exclusively available to the audio-visual medium of film.