The Woman is Perfect
One of the stupidest things I ever did was turn down an unpaid playwriting fellowship at SoHo theatre in London. To be fair, I had nowhere to live and no money so it wasn’t simply a case of making a bad decision, I literally could not take them up on the offer as I was stranded thousands of miles away on some dirtbag’s sofa. This was around the time I wrote a flurry of plays and hovered on middle class homelessness, before TV writing and journalism and court sucked up all my time. One of those plays was a monologue about a woman trapped in an endless cycle of perfection, addicted to improving her appearance, as if that one moment of perfection will solve every other crisis in her life. This play was performed at the Hollywood Fringe in 2018 directed by the lovely Ryan Mcree, and starring the amazing and wonderful Maliabeth Johnson who has since become a close friend. Soon after I started my MFA at USC in 2023, I began to adapt this monologue into a short film.
When I teach screenwriting, I have a really hard time getting my students to understand that notes and readers are the greatest gift you can have as a writer. When we start out writing, simply the act of finishing and handing in a scene, a story, a chapter, a script, is so huge, so monumental, that the idea we may have to delve back into that hell and fiddle with it a little more, that it might need improvement, is outrageous. Many students fail at the first hurdle because they find notes offensive and struggle to let go of an idea and welcome a new one in. The best students are those who take the notes. Everything I’ve ever written has been through multiple drafts and redrafts and I am completely dependent and beholden to the editors, collaborators, readers and professionals who take the time to give me constructive feedback. There is a reason why script feedback is a business - getting good notes is literally fifty percent of the battle. USC took TWIP on a crazy, incredible journey and I don’t think it could have turned out like it did without my screenwriting professor, Trevor Munson, and my classmates. What started as a monologue, and then a script with two locations and three characters, turned into a short film with seven locations, prosthetics, SFX, VFX, sixteen background actors, four cast and approximately 80 crew.
I did not have fun in prep. I hated prep. I felt like a flagging cheerleader desperately trying to convince people to believe in my flailing, useless team. The build up to production was incredibly stressful. It’s even more stressful when you’re juggling bereavement and CPTSD and fighting to get paid and fundraising and have a malevolent ex who pops up to make life difficult just when you’ve convinced yourself things have calmed down and your inner monologue is jubilantly predicting failure and despair.
The week before we filmed, the ex, who had been sleeping in his den, roared into life again, my life exploded for three days, and we had to push the dates, bring on two new producers and get a new DP. But miraculously, these changes shaved 5k off the budget and resulted in a new group dynamic which was chill, friendly, supportive and nothing short of perfect. I rarely believe things happen for a reason, but these changes were simply miraculous. I could not not believe that this was meant to be. Our film went from imminent disaster to - I’m not sure what the opposite of disaster is. Not a disaster? Lovely. Smooth. Happy. Joyful. I’ve been on so many sets where people are stressed and angry and defensive and yelling. Where inexperienced people are made to feel like shit, where asking questions is frowned upon and the atmosphere is heavy, dense, combustible and so fucking serious. So serious. We are making stories for fucks sake, not saving lives. We are entertaining, we are making people think, we are educating. Bring the joy into it. I wanted to create an environment where everyone was comfortable, no one was being asked to work crazy hours at stupid times of the day, every possible difficulty was worked out ahead of time, everyone felt respected, and everyone could laugh and ask questions. Why do we equate great cinematic art with monstrous males leering and making everyone tense and anxious and fearful? I can’t create like that, and every single creative job I’ve ever had has devolved into some archaic form of patriarchal obeisance. I was determined to be better.
It’s highly possible that people are bullshitting me when they say this was the best set they’ve ever been on at USC, but for once I’m going to shut my inner monologue down and declare that I’m pretty fucking good at directing and producing. It was a damn good set. There is so much in my life that I cannot control, so much of my life that has been determined by others, so much of my personality that feels like a deeply engrained reptilian reflex, that consciously and mindfully giving myself the ability to create a space for others which refused to recreate the trauma that I’ve experienced, was healing and calming in a way that I can’t quite explain. There is probably something within me which thrives on the problem solving aspect of filmmaking. So satisfying - finding a location at the last minute, averting chaos, riding that cliffs edge, turning everyone back to safety. I can’t do that in my own life, but I can bloody well do it with production.
Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is not something which occurs due to one singular traumatic event, but multiple, cumulative events. It’s most consistent with victims of abuse, or people who grew up in unsafe environments. It is particularly poisonous because the stress and the trauma and how we respond to it, becomes inextricable from our DNA. Stress and trauma literally shapes how we think and move through the world. We develop coping mechanisms during our formative years which protected us during this time of stress, but simply don’t serve us in the outside world where normal people are interacting in a normal way - a way we are unfamiliar with. I don’t think it’s something we ever get over, or are cured from, but something we have to learn to manage, where we have good days and bad days. In my case, I’ve never been removed from the source of my trauma. I have had my agency removed and been forced to live in Los Angeles if I wanted to be a Mom, which has simply compounded the stress of leaving an abusive relationship and led to an almost impossible situation where I can’t simply make the best choices for myself and my son. I have lost that right. I can’t pull my hand away from the flame. I have to hold it there. And so I have had to learn to cope with constant, unending pain and loss, over and over again, a groundhog day of divorce.
Trying to navigate this has been awful. I’m constantly in fight or flight mode. Any sign of an attack and I’ve responded ten seconds before you even registered it. I’m either flooded with stress hormones, or I’m depleted and empty and recovering from a CPTSD event - and by ‘event’, I mean something that has recreated the exact same trauma I tried to leave back in 2014. Being back around family dynamics while my father was dying led to weeks of ultra painful events - I did not sleep for days, then slept for days. I could not eat, then ate everything in sight. I replayed it, over and over. Not the fact of him dying - his death was beautiful and peaceful. But the ugliness and cruelty surrounding him as he left this earth. That still gets to me.
For a couple of years before USC I could barely hold a conversation without crying or having a panic attack which clearly is not ideal in the highly competitive creative industries where you are the commodity as well as your words. When I leave LA, I experience a profound shift in my body. I relax. I breathe. I become someone new. The ability to rise above the infantilism forced on me by court mandated abuse has been so important in recovery, and I say recovery as an ongoing, imperfect process where I often feel like I have regressed rather than grown. My problem is not that I can’t ‘cope’, or that I cannot make decisions, or that the decisions I make aren’t ‘good’ enough. It is that I have had every natural coping mechanism removed, my intelligence and agency and creativity revoked. Clawing that back through this film has meant so much. Showing myself that I can have agency in some small way, in some dominion I created, that this agency looks and feels good to me and others, was something I did not know I would ever get to experience with my life like it is.
I wanted to share this note that my beautiful lead, Hope, gave to me on our final day on Sunday. It made me cry with gratitude. I got to have two Cassie’s in the same room, bringing their own special talents and interpretation to this role, and that just about blew my mind. How lucky I am to get to do this - make stories with amazing people. I am so sad this time is over. USC as a business is flawed and fucked up and an impossibly greedy capitalist machine. But USC as a school full of creatives simply trying to make their way in the world and bring a story to life is incredibly special and has given me something my LA life lacked - joy, momentum and ambition.
When I talk about directing this film, I want to acknowledge that I could not have done this without the team surrounding me, particularly my producers, Mike and Cici, who doggedly got this film to the finish line with grace, forgiveness and humor. I still don’t quite know why they did not give up on me, but I’m eternally grateful they did not.
