Psychosis

Two years ago, after wrapping one of our films in Virginia, my friend Willis McCord showed me Matt Dymerski’s short story Psychosis and said we should make it into a movie. I’m always intrigued by psychological thrillers, but this one was different because as crazy as its main character becomes, I could relate to him. Though there are no dates, I interpreted the story to be set in the early 2000’s, where the protagonist’s fears about technology replacing human interaction strangely foreshadow present day, rather than being told from a futuristic sci-fi world that is becoming cliché. The challenge, however, was that the story relies on extremely complex and subjective exposition that would at least partially have to translate to voiceover, which I usually try to avoid in scriptwriting. I knew it would only work on screen if we had the right tools to complement the voiceover and enhance that subjective portrayal cinematically.

A year and a half later, Will had been working full-time in Los Angeles and I was interning there for the summer. We were finally in position to assemble the tools we needed. I brought on my brother Daniel as a co-writer for his understanding of psychoanalysis and philosophy, which would help us structure the development of a character who ultimately accepts his own irrational beliefs over everyone else’s rational reasoning. My childhood friend Jack Alberts was perfect for the lead role of John. After studying the script, he pointed out John's sudden shifts between fully doubting and fully believing the idea that technology is his antagonist. When John is in the midst of one of these states of mind, we had the camera follow him closely to make the viewer feel like they’re moving through the stage with him. But when he's about to shift, the camera stalks him from an angle that makes it seem like he's being watched—not objectively, but by the antagonist, which is the assumption that triggers John's paranoia.

To further echo these shifts, we wanted to use harsh, abrupt transitions between physical and temporal settings by drastically changing the camera style, sound, and/or color on the cuts. Each room in his dingy basement apartment and his memory of the vibrant outside world should evoke a distinct, immersive feeling that you only realize was there after it’s gone, for example a clock ticking in the background that suddenly stops. The locations were designed to be characters even more so than the other people in the film, who never actually appear in human form, but are only seen on webcam feeds or heard through cellphone speakers. Subjectivity again was the key to this film, therefore everything had to be shown from John’s point of view, even when that view is distorted or surreal. In the end, I hope audiences will empathize with him just as they would with any sane hero, because as the original story goes, “a sane man would’ve fallen for the deception long ago.”