Black Wing Digital Entertainment A Meryem Ersoz Digital Feature Starring Dean Cain Natalie Distler Malcolm Mcdowell Izzie Steele Contact: Meryem Ersoz 740 13th St. Boulder, CO 80302 Black Wing Digital 720-329-5007 • A Mind-Bending Media Company • MINDʼS EYE Synopsis A young high-school musician, Mattie Carver, is on a strange and unpredictable journey through the looking-glass world of the mind’s eye. Joined by her science teacher, the school psychologist, two mysterious men in black, and her closest friends, Mattie must find the truth in a constantly morphing reality before it slips away from her forever. MIND’S EYE is a sci-fi psychological mind-bender similar to INCEPTION, SOURCE CODE, and MULHOLLAND DRIVE and deals with the paradoxes of time and memory, trauma and loss. Black Wing Digital • A Mind-Bending Media Company • Q&A with the Producer - Meryem Ersoz What attracted you to the original screenplay? Mark Daniels' original screenplay was entitled "Out of the Mind's Eye." I've always been drawn towards mind-bending films and also towards films which are about films. His screenplay had both of these elements. In the original story, Mattie is drawn to the mysterious theater where she is treated to revelations about why these strange things are happening to her. I thought it would be interesting to expand this idea to include all of the primary characters, so that we could see how our minds are like little movie screens where, especially in the aftermath of traumatic moments, we replay those moments over and over again in these insistent, fragmentary ways.! I've always been interested in perception and the way our minds shape reality. We have a whole world inside our heads and it is in a constant feedback loop with the world outside. We see the past replaying itself constantly, while the world outside appears to move forward in linear time. Time is always passing in two ways simultaneously for us, and the medium we have invented to represent the marriage of linear time with memory time is film.! I'm probably a little nuts for trying to represent this abstract duality in my first film, but I always try to do the hardest things first. It makes everything else easy to do, by comparison.! I like strange things, like prime numbers, moebius strips, palindromes, paradoxes, mysteries, enigmas. I think of MIND'S EYE as a moebius strip - it begins and ends in exactly the same place, staring into the cosmos at the Milky Way. The Milky Way itself is a little mind- bending to me because we live inside it but, in the sky, it appears to us as a singular object which is "out there" and far, far away. That's the kind of stuff I like to contemplate. The world in a grain of sand. The fact that we are spinning around on this giant ball of dirt somewhere in space, having these unique experiences. That sounds pretty abstract. But I tried to explore these complex ideas while keeping the film grounded in the small world of the intimate relationship between best friends who share one very bad moment in time, which has the effect of sending time itself into turmoil. ! It was another bit of grace that Izzie Steele and Natalie Distler got along very well and became friends throughout the course of the shoot. Most of the planetarium montage was shot improvisationally. We had a steadicam operator follow them around the museum with the simple mandate to "go play." I think those moments, along with the flashback scenes, display the depth of their bond and their affection for each other, which is what makes the tragedy of the car crash powerful. That bit where they make the shadow puppet of the heart using their two hands was a completely unscripted and spontaneous gesture on their part. I was so happy when I was reviewing the footage and came across it. One of my other favorite bits in the film is the flashback of Mattie and Jess camping, where Jess is whomping Mattie with a pillow. We actually set up a tent on the floor in my studio, lit the tent, and cut a few branches from a tree outside my door. Here we are in one of the most beautiful camping states in the world, Colorado, and our camping scene is set on a nondescript concrete floor. That is the power of movie magic. ! Were there other things which were altered from the original screenplay? The original screenplay had Mattie involved in a bus crash. We are a small independent film, so we could only afford a car crash. Actually, this worked out well because it allowed us to make the central tragedy of the film play out between the two best friends as a cycle of blame and guilt.!It became less about the spectacle of a big crash and more about what happens between the people involved.! Also, Mr. Willis was much older in the original treatment, so we decided to make him younger and hotter and throw in a bit of romance between Willis and Carloftis. They stand in for Mattie’s absent parents but also have to resolve a few of their own issues, so that they can help Mattie.! Science is almost a form of mysticism for Willis. Understanding science helps him to understand better those things which defy it. His counterpart, Toni Carloftis, has to get to the bottom of why she unconsciously chose an inappropriate profession for herself, as a result of her mother's tragic death. She has to "give up" therapy for true connections to the people around her, which is the source of her character's transformation. My casting director, Mark Sikes, called me up after our LA casting sessions, where we were primarily looking for Willis and Jess Selvy. He told me that he wanted to "put somebody really good" in the role of Mr. Simms, the orchestra conductor, but he also told me that the only way it would work out would be if we re-wrote the part to flesh out Mr. Simms' role in the film. Mr. Simms, who was originally a minor character, now book-ends the beginning and the end of the film and interplays nicely with our scenes featuring Aiyana, the silent violinist.! We were very fortunate to be able to bring Malcolm Mcdowell to Colorado. He brings such an outstanding presence to the film and played the character with a great deal of compassion.! Yeah, about Aiyana…what is up with that girl, anyway? Is she even real? That's a good question and exactly the type of question that a proper mind-bending film leaves you asking, so that you watch it again almost immediately after it ends! I think of Aiyana as serving a function which is similar to the spinning top at the end of INCEPTION. She takes this nice, neat package and unwinds it, so we don't know exactly whether she is Mattie's mental projection or some sort of reincarnated spirit of Jess or a real friend/foe of Mattie's - or what??! I think a good mind-bending film begs its audience to go out for coffee and explore the places in the film where things are not what they seem. Hopefully, the audience wants to watch the film again and catch all of the small touches, the thematic echoes in the soundtrack, the hints which are dropped, etc. In the first scene inside the Revelation Church, Edgar pretty much tells Mattie "now you've spoiled everything" because she has basically guessed exactly what is happening -- that she has been in a car crash and that these two characters are essentially spirit guides -- only she doesn't realize it consciously at that point in the story.!A good mind- bending film loops the audience back into the movie. The end is usually somewhere in the beginning, only you don't realize it until the end. Lucine Fyelon, who plays Aiyana, is! a world-class violinist. She used to play a background artist on GLEE. She also played her violin in the Apple commercial which features an orchestra. She has been touring all over the world with her talent in recent years. Her improvisational interpretations of Mattie's recital piece on the set left us all in awe. I used to teach silent films, so I think she is an important character in the film. In my mind, at least, she is modeled after those beautiful silent film stars, like Theda Bara or Maria Falconetti, who only conveyed their characters through their faces and gestures. The entire sense of reality in the film turns on her speaking just a few lines at the end of the film.! The men in black are similar to Aiyana - a persistent echo of Mattie's and Jess' experiences. They have a real-world identity, as the paramedics who picked up Jess from the scene of the accident, and they have this more spectral men-in-black quality, where they are partly savior and partly menacing.! My mother was a physician, who set up a model emergency response system in Southwestern Pennsylvania back in the 1970s, so I grew up during a time when critical care medicine was still an emerging field. Paramedics feel your heart, your pulse, they are doused in your blood. This intimate contact with total strangers who are, in the moment, totally committed to your life is a precarious and precious thing. What was the most challenging part about producing the film? I had a big “oops” moment, once I had committed to the project, because suddenly I needed a youth orchestra.