The Vision

dreamed up

The idea for Out of This World was hatched quite quickly. Before the rounds of drafts, before, the budget considerations that drive decisions, before casting, and before even the discovery of Ariana’s song to map the film to, the core idea was hatched in about 20 mins. 

You know the drill. Dusky LA afternoon, end of the week—one more hurdle to overcome before getting out of the office that had been put off. That hurdle being a music video treatment, one of many sent out in the past few weeks, with me having no way into any sort of creative design. 

Cue Marlene Lacasse, my artistic director at the time, now turned creative director, and known as the film’s creative producer. She got us kicking the ball around. Marlene has always loved aliens—anything space inspired, anything like her, you know, from another planet. 

I make films for my friends. They’re my first stop. Included therein are my cast, my crew, my  employees. If they are into it, I keep pushing forward. They are the gatekeepers. So when we  started to flesh the idea out, there was a little edge to that challenge in making a sci-fi movie  that Marlene would very much enjoy. Add to that our agency know-how of art and copy.  

When it comes to art and copy, the chemistry is actually quite simple. I was reminded of it by Marls a few days after we wrapped the film. It comes down to this: this is a film where Marlene built a world and then I told a story within it.  

“I dunno. Alien on Earth—“ 

“One night on the town!“ 

“Sure, but what are they after?” 

“The Human Experience! A human truth!” 

It was that quick. I started throwing plot at her, she threw me moments she wanted to see happen, and I structured them. 

The treatment was rejected. But we were burdened with an idea we both adored. Meow what?

the approach 

Originally this film had one central character in Nebby the Alien. Then we found “Lonely Star” by Ariana and the Rose and I felt it had to be a two-hander. Here’s a big bang moment, where there was nothing and then something in the blink of an eye. It’s hard to put your finger on this sort of creative burst, but I’ll do my best. 

The song was brought to me by Rylan Soref, the legendary music supervisor we had tasked with finding a substitute track that could use the treatment we had written. He sent us a playlist made of 40+ songs. We listened to them all. “Lonely Star” was track 1. Marlene and I came into the office after the weekend and simultaneously breathed out, “Lonely Star.” And that was that, it was truly immediate—love at first sound—hence, Rylan’s legendary status.

Ariana’s online presence revealed her own love of alien iconography and alter egos, and yet, maybe because of how good the song was, and maybe because of the “casting” director in me, I saw only her humanity, and honestly my younger self quickly wished her as a best friend. 

There it was. It was in Ariana that the theme of friendship carried by the film was born. In her song, in her vibe, I was drawn to tell that story, and specifically to write the sort of relationship that exists between Nebby and Ariana.  

always making

My love of music is indistinguishable from my love of film. They are both extensions of the core twitch within. I often intertwine them. Despite how hard I try, I can’t outrun my servitude to this heavenly couple.  

The gravity pull that draws me to them also compels me to think of new ways to please them, and new creative attempts to enjoy them simultaneously. The lyrics of “Lonely Star” were a big deal. Had they been rubbish, this would have all gone down very differently. But those lyrics inspired me to write a story around them. I received them as dialogue within scenes, as opposed to song lyrics.  

Adapting a song into a screenplay seemed like a challenge. Granting Ruy, our composer, access to the stems of the song in order to flesh it out into a longer score seemed like our next adventure. Having that final piece of music exist as a fundamental part of the shooting script, serving as much as it could on the page itself before we shot, was a thrill and a leap of faith. It truly was where I wanted to head next as a “musical director”, to concoct an alternate version of the term.  

So the form was being messed with, surely, but what of its counterpart? What of content? Well, every scene in Out of This World holds a special quality of something I was dying to try. Others have gone before me, but I’ll tell you again, every time I step off set I never take it for granted that I may ever be back. I make every film like it’s my last. And so, yes, I have a bucket list of cinematic moments I want to bring to life that I want to leave behind.  

Hurling pieces of cutlery across a diner because an alien is commanding them through gravity is on that bucket list. Nebby’s established power to control light in order to inform lighting design and push Kelsey, our DP, to really commit to signing this piece in light, is on that bucket list. Exploring the realm of “body acting”, of building a sympathetic character caked in makeup, and a space helmet, without the crutch of dialogue to lean on is on that bucket list. Working with actors to connect over the beauties and complexities of a gender fluid relationship is on that bucket list. Herein, for me anyway, lies the weird realm of the “writer/director”. Where one of me is focused on craft, story vs plot, character, scene work, and motivation, the other keeps yelling from the cheap seats, “That’s gonna look effing cool!!!!!”

a worthy story 

An important characteristic that draws me in is that film is a popular art form. It has the power to reach a very wide audience. The more entertaining it is, the further it may travel across the various party lines that divide people. This presents the artist with an interesting opportunity to cloak their expression in the guise of narrative, genre, and style. I feel the combination of art and entertainment is working at its peak when even those lines blur and one becomes interwoven with the other, leaving you with a feeling that this film was meant to be.  

Inherent in the pursuit of popular art, and dare I say in one’s societal role as someone committed to be the custodian of those skills on behalf of others, is to include and represent everyone when it matters, and even when it doesn’t. There is no other way out of it alive. Or else, it just ain’t popular art. It’s that simple to me. Somewhere, someone’s story needs to be told.

There is no world in which the art has become so popularized that it has told all the good stories out there driven by all the different kinds of people that live on this planet. This is the covenant you make, I feel. It’s what you owe back for the opportunity to dream up tales and play pretend, rightfully so.

Your talents are meant to be shared in this way. The alchemy you’re after is how to bring everyone into it, get everyone in on it, as opposed to narrowly focus the story for a specific group. That’s where the entertainment factor really matters. The more fringe the idea, the broader your story has to be, the louder the entertainment has to become, even if scales are small.  

Nebby, the non-binary teenager looking for someone as they struggle to define themselves, to find their place in the universe, meets the one person on Earth that can show them it’s okay to  be just the way they are. They are both brought together by the universal love of music, embracing it as a common language.

By any other name, this could have been an arthouse film. By any other name, this could have been a “think” piece. So we dressed it up. We took the metaphor literally.

“I don’t feel I belong here. I don’t feel comfortable in the skin given me. I feel like an Alien from another planet. I wish I could go live in space.” When you take those struggles so seriously that you make them literal, you end up with an alien space opera action adventure musical comedy. Now throw in some scenes of suspense, revelation, backstories, moments of  intimacy, and moments of tension. Throw in the fact that I am so short sighted I have to make films for the big screen because that’s how I best enjoy them myself. Stir in the genre tropes of cow abduction, of magnetic pulls, of humanities wonderment at alien life forms, of aliens  endearment to the simplicity of the human experience. Remember that adolescence and puberty has been a struggle for all of us throughout the ages. Make it relatable, make it fun. Et voila.

Make it so that a teenager goes to see this with their grandma and their grandma throws her arms around the youngster after the movie, both of them feeling empowered, safe, and invited to freely exclaim, “Well what did you think about that?! Talk to me!” Film has the power to get people talking to each other and excited to be together.

the cosmic sigh 

The pandemic hit a week before we were slated to shoot this film in the first place. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, right John?

And boy did it ever hit. It skinned us of our original crew. It put us all in a state of flux, and it presented me with the unique challenge of staying interested in the script over that long period, of finding a way back in that kept me excited. Films capture a moment in time to some and all  extents, and I was changing. But here’s the terrible twist: the script today is so much more meaningful to me, so much more weighty due to COVID-19.  

Think of this cauldron we were thrown into as the 2020 election, the George Floyd murder, and the pandemic raged around us simultaneously. And that’s just the United States. The entire world was going through a time of self awareness and self examination. 

All of a sudden we saw our own planet, our species, from a distance under the shadow of a common global enemy. Fleeting as it may be, we embraced ourselves as a collective all going through the same experience.

This helped me understand the power of Nebby’s vantage point on our world—how they idolized our perfect imperfections and our species as a work in progress, like a hot mess of a child trying to stand up straight without the help of their parents. The beautiful chaos of emotion in the mix with the range of how humans can feel, and the unique trait feeling itself offers to being…only human.

Back on Earth, we were struggling, contained, and not able to express ourselves to our loved ones, something we had clearly taken for granted. For a flash we all felt we had taken the very human experience for granted, with the notion of contagion at the center of our culture.

It all came together that way. Emotions are contagious. Teenagers want the forbidden. Now  Nebby had motivation. Intimacy and tenderness often go hand in hand with trust. Trust was a  conflict both characters needed to overcome in order to live their best lives together for a night,  and so you’ll see the notion of intimacy and connection amplified throughout.

But through it all, Nebby learns from Ariana how to express their feelings, their emotions, and  themselves because feelings can be contagious. It was fun to think of emotions that way, because it’s true. They are powerful energies, and being able to steer them so that they may or may not affect those around you is a sign of maturity, most days. Heaven be damned, teenagers have a knack of and a duty to try and form their own individualism, even if it means going to a galaxy far, far, away to do so.  

The world of our film is purposefully analog and not rooted to any particular time period. Its universe is adjacent to ours, found in the realm of make-believe. So it was important to me that the quarantine totems like Ariana’s mask didn’t tie us down, but are more broadly wrapped  around the scene work. Pandemic or otherwise, always good to have a mask handy when stepping out to greet an Alien for the first time. 

If I were to impress a note on craft handed to me by the pandemic, it would be this. If you are a filmmaker who considers themself a “writer-director”, take time away from your script before you direct it. Like, take 6 months. Take it so that you may truly lean into both job roles separately and enjoy what one brings to the other. The space and time away from the script afforded me by the pandemic granted the director in me the vantage point to interpret the writing objectively. It was easier to kill my darlings and much easier to carve out a better story from the screenplay than it would have been if I had stepped on set soon after the writing was done.

childlike things 

I was supposed to make this film before I turned 40. It was on my mind, saying to myself, “I’m gonna make this whacky sci-fi musical thing, and then I’m going to make things that are more ‘mature’. This film is my swan song to my 30s.”

But there were two things I realized about the final script as we got closer to shooting, with the set coming together, scenes being rehearsed, and costume and make-up being applied.

It was actually funnier than it read on the page. There was a lot of space there for the comedy that can come with the forging of bonds between two people, and from the quirks and surroundings of our characters. It also dawned on me that this story was going to play a lot younger than I had thought. It was more innocent and full of wonder than I had originally pictured it being.

Although Out of This World boasts sci-fi iconography a-plenty, as I danced with the film while making it, it became clear to me that this was actually a work of magical realism. Magical realism, like music, is another creative expression I seem to be intrinsically drawn to and cannot escape. I kept describing my work as “strangely familiar”, but one afternoon in the middle of shooting, exhausted and in the shower, the term magical realism crashed into my mind to remind my brain what it had known all along.

This film will forever be important to me because of this self-epiphany and what it meant. It will forever be important to me because it served as a sign of life after the pandemic for my cast and crew, as a moment of togetherness and collaboration we could all sorely use. And it will forever be important to me because, thanks to its cast and crew and thanks to the quintessence that all of those talents coming together tends to produce, it ended up being a work childlike in nature, in its simplicity, and in the viewing experience.

I am so grateful and now realize that this kind of parable is so hard to crack, and it’s something done most often with the vantage point of age. Had I not made it a year later than I had planned to, it would not have been that complex. The Lebanese side of me very much aspires to the depths of simple truths as expressed by Khalil Gibran, and this film is the closest I’ve ever come to capturing that.

As Nebby grows a little older in Out of This World, it’s my hope that the people watching it grow a little younger. To have your audience lose themselves in a film is already a triumph, but to have them reconnect with that childlike nature they once had, to have them abandon all earthly logic and their worldly woes for a few minutes because they were able to feel like a kid again by watching an alien in their bedroom getting ready to party and a cow being abducted, is special. Really special. Whether it works or not, I’m glad I tried, and I thank those along the way who got me there.

encore. this one’s for…

Out of This World is for my old friends who will always be a part of me because they deeply influenced my art, my personality, and my perception of the world. They taught me how to think, to feel, and how to dream by showing me music, films, art, fashion, and then some at times when that gesture really mattered, when it counted the most.  

This film is a homage to every moment someone who cared deeply said, “Wait, you haven’t heard—!!!” or “Are you telling me you’ve never seen—!!!”, or “Stop. No stop. Stop what you’re doing right now, we have to go check out—”. For every record listening party member that howled along with me to an album we had been anticipating for months, for every late night movie buddy that was as excited as I was to get to their seat, for every shoulder I cried on at a show, for every friend who put their arm around me when I crumbled tearful into a film.

It’s for all the currency in the world earned with the exchange of phrases like “check this out, you gotta see this”, “that track is super important”, or “this film is getting some buzz”. This film is my offering to the Goddess of that kind of love. To the Goddess of Agape.  

And here is some cosmic tea, buried in the footnotes: Love is love is love. There are moments in life where you forget all the ways you can love someone and all the different offerings of love you can make to someone. This film is a reminder of that. Remember that you can choose a way to love them, to honor them, and that friendship is as powerful as romance. So is this a love story? Sure.

Talk to each other. Children of all ages, feel togetherness. My deepest wish is that you’ll leave this film, phone in hand, urged to call an old friend, a parent, a mentor, or a teacher that you know connected with you the way Ariana and Nebby did that night. Call a friend, if only to remind them and yourself once and for all that “you are not alone”.