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A movie I wrote and produced comes out on Friday. It's called LITTLE FISH and it stars Olivia Cooke and Jack O'Connell. I am extremely proud of it. Despite having adapted it from a short story years ago, it's ironically a love story set against the backdrop of a pandemic.
I decided to go through some of my files this morning and was surprised to find that I started work on #LittleFishMovie 4 years ago this month. The very first thing I wrote was a a very broad outline.
The script was based on @AjaMaybe's short story of the same name. It was my first time adapting someone else's work and I felt there was tremendous responsibility in doing right by what we agreed was the heart of her story, while still having to branch out and make it my own.
Aja's story was extremely generous in giving me the space to make it my own. Case in point: the narrator of the story is never named, just her lover, Jude is. It was up to me to give her one, and with it, a whole new layer of identity. She became Emma.
When I started writing LF, I was in a bit of career rut. I had been on the annual black list a handful of times, but was no longer the shiny new writer in Hwood, and despite my handful of sales, I hadn't been able to manifest a movie actually getting made. I was losing momentum.
My manager and I had an extremely tough conversation in Jan 17 where it felt like I was going to get fired. I knew I needed to change things up and start writing less from the head and more from the heart. I started two scripts that month. Little Fish, and a script called POWER.
The two could not have been more different. One was an intimate love story, the other was my original blockbuster war cry. When I would get stuck on one story, I would switch to the other. They fed off of each other in a very real way that is hard to describe.
I finished the first draft of Little Fish in May of 17. While a lot of things changed between then and the first day of production, the characters and the soul of the story, which had been transferred from Aja's story to my script, were thankfully left completely intact.
This is a movie, that despite being based on someone else's very personal short story and having been directed in a very personal way by my hero @chadhartigan, feels like the most honest and unvarnished representation of my voice and creative interests thus far.
For me it was a tremendous lesson in the power of good collaboration and trust going in multiple directions. It's extremely rare to get a movie made that doesn't get brought to a point where it's hard for you to recognize your own voice in the clutter.
To wrap this up, I'm very proud of this film and I hope you'll watch it next weekend. Someday I'll talk more about the process of adapting someone else's work in greater detail (after @AjaMaybe's story is online?) Here's the trailer for #LittleFishMovie
