Narrative

Director's Statement

This is the second short in which I’ve performed all three roles of writing, directing, and producing. It is the first short of mine that I have DP’d.

Late last summer (2025), I was going through a period of collective career and financial anxiety. I’d been in LA for 2.5 years and was facing an internal reckoning of whether my journey into filmmaking was worth so much sacrifice of my finances and time. I wasn’t really able to save any money, didn’t have much free time for dating or friends, and was still working at my day job to pay the bills. This sinking feeling was accompanied by the intrusive thought that I was “using people” by only befriending those who could help me get ahead in my career.

The realization I always fell back on was the fact that I had so much passion for writing and directing that I couldn’t imagine another lifestyle, even if it was more lucrative. Thus, I embraced my reality and funneled all the anxiety, narcissism, and frugalness into a crime/thriller script where the main character confronted a similar crossroads to mine.

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Visually, I was heavily inspired by the work of the Safdie Brothers’ breakout film, Good Time (2017).

Narratively, I used the city of Vegas as a central element of the film whereby the plot revolves around.

On the character side, I wanted to delve into the lives of criminals to show that there’s a little bit of narcissism in all of us to some degree and that their motivations for continuing to commit crimes can be born out of habit and not necessarily from their overall morals.

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Every film I make is designed to be widely appealing and theatrically-motivated. While this short film stands on its own, I wanted to include enough open-endedness to serve as a proof for development into a feature where the backstory of the criminal trio (Parker, Freddie, and Jayden) would be shown along with the revenge arc that Parker starts at the end of the movie.

Director's Statement

This is my first real attempt at directing, producing, and writing my own short after I moved to LA about a year and a half ago to pursue filmmaking as a career.

I went into writing the script knowing I wanted to illustrate the complexities of romantic experiences and deviate from the typically-glamorous depictions that are so prevalent in Hollywood. The real spark for the film came unexpectedly was when I was messaging a girl on Hinge who had agreed to meet up when she was back in the U.S. from traveling abroad. On the exact day that she mentioned that she would be back in the country, she ended up unmatching with me. I was no stranger to having plans fizzle out with someone I was into, but this time hurt me a lot harder than before. I felt an extreme amount of mental whiplash after all of my feelings suddenly turned out to be unreciprocated. That was because, psychologically, I was totally wrapped up in the imagined version of how our planned date would go–I would fantasize about the place I would take her to, the questions I would ask her, and the feelings I would potentially develop. The climax of the film seeks to illustrate this sudden reversal of fortunes by having the audience go through the same feeling of shock and surprise that I felt. Moreover, the conversation that the film’s lead character, Adam, has with Tina afterwards is based on my own journal entries that I wrote during my personal fallout.

I hope viewers are left with a feeling of resonance and catharsis for their own times where they felt let down romantically–not by the other person, but, rather, by their own mind’s illusion about the idea of what might have been.