Soul Memory

1 Writer

Additional Project Info

After deciding I wanted to write a short science fiction screenplay with a romantic edge, I wrote every weekday morning for an hour before starting my full-time job. These mornings were special but challenging. I wanted to make this sci-fi script different from my “practice scripts” that came before it, full of intention if nothing else. Karma and unconditional love — topics that carry the screenplay — often left me in a freeze, staring out my apartment window like the character Mark staring out the car windshield at the beginning of the script. I often became him — thinking about a beautiful wife, the fear of losing her, and learning how to let her go. Little writing got done, but it was for the writing to come. When I was not him or the other characters in the script — feeling the PTSD of Mary, the savior complex of the doctor, the brute strength of the guard, or the self-realization of the space shifter — I was no one. I was the essence of the story. I returned to this essence, again and again. Impatience to essence. Excitement to essence. Frustration to essence. And on and on. What is the essence of this sci-fi script? I wanted it to be about us all having a soul memory, inspired by the movie scenes in this tweet: https://twitter.com/gibbiv/status/1528399374304395264 That idea makes an appearance on the final page of the screenplay, but the screenplay is not about that. It’s about letting go. Mary lets go of suffering. Mark lets go of Mary. The space shifter lets go of an agenda — and his life — to deliver a simple message to Mark: to love means to let go. The screenplay was inspired by some of my favorite popular movies: - The Matrix — The hindu space shifters and the green color of their dress, the digital representation of Mary’s brain that burns green on the doctor’s laptop, and the doctor punching code into the laptop’s command line are inspired by the green-filtered, hacker-like quality of The Matrix. - The Shawshank Redemption — The interview playing on the car radio as Mark watches the exterior of the old country store where Mary is undergoing the “Neural Wipe” procedure is inspired by the car scene with Andy Dufresne at the beginning of The Shawshank Redemption. The radio was also a means to add exposition to the beginning of a short script in an efficient manner. Looper — The action in the script — like the guard breaking down the country store’s doors — was inspired by Looper. One version of the science fiction screenplay had the doctor cutting a hindu space shifter in half with a shotgun similar to the blunderbuss in Looper, but I decided to make the scene less messy. The blood would have distracted from the essence.