-What has been the greatest difficulty you faced in producing your project?

Michelangelo and Me hasn’t been produced yet.  I only actively started submitting to festivals a little over a year ago though I came up with my novel concept of the same idea over twenty years ago.  The published book version is called Heaven’s Rogue and was published by Dorchester Books’ Millennium imprint in 1999 to launch their imprint celebrating the turn of the millennium.  I’ve altered the storyline quite a bit to make it fit screenplay format better but the basic romance and many of the character arcs are very similar.  lt was requested by my editor but she liked it so much she asked for a trilogy.  I’ve begun the second story and the beginning is attached to the end of the Michelangelo script.  

-Do you think the film industry today has been damaged by political correctness?

Yes.  And also by the proliferation of online free video sources.  It’s hard to get traction in this noisy world and we’re all jaded from too many boilerplate stories that get altered a bit and then told over and over.  I consciously try to create stories that are fresh and have a large reading/viewing audience because I want to create characters and worlds that span religion, ethnicity, gender and age.  A curse/blessing kind of goal I guess because we all know franchises, in both book and film form, are most popular with readers/viewers.  However, every billion dollar franchise began as an idea somewhere that savvy people in the industry risked a lot of money on.  Something I hope to achieve someday. The curse part is my ideas tend to be way too expensive for me to produce alone.  

-What was the greatest source of inspiration for creating your project?

Trying to come up with an idea that tied humanity’s fates in the past, present and future, largely what we create ourselves along the way by the daily choices we make, into a meaningful throughline with a moral, philosophic core, much more than mere romance.  After all, very few people ever live to see the turn of a millennium and the subjects celebrating it should be thought provoking.  When I came up with the idea of Michelangelo’s David as the symbol of all three of those times yet in an immortal way only Michelangelo could have created, everything else fell into place.  

-If you could ask a question to a great director from the past, who would you like to talk to and what would you ask them?

Probably Alfred Hitchcock.  I already know a lot about him having researched and written an original script about him (Full Circle) which has also done well on the festival circuit.  I don’t know if asking a few questions would help me much.  I’d rather just follow him around for a week during filming of, say North by Northwest, to better understand the challenges of creating film stories that will, like the David, also live forever. I particularly admire the genre bending ideas he found interesting enough to bring to life.  Very few directors today can combine true suspense, great, interesting and flawed characters who get thrust into situations they don’t know how to handle but have to rise to conquer, in absorbing plots with brilliant cinematography, directions and dialogue.  I went over the top a bit with my Full Circle villains deliberately (the Cohen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino are also great at combining humor and suspense in their antagonists) .  I also tried to add a lot of the dry humor Hitch loved to use.  I’d challenge anyone who loves film as much as I do to tear apart and study the dinner scene between Eve and Roger and tell me it’s not one of the most interesting, sensual sex scenes ever written though it’s all done with dialogue.  Hitch knew it:  in one of his interviews he said he was the first to bring an X rated sex scene to film past the censors.  He was referring to the last scene where the train goes into a tunnel right after Eve and Roger join on the top bunk of their sleeper car as newly married.  Hitch was also smart enough to say when questioned, that the script, the script, the script was the most important part of a film. As a writer, I obviously agree…

-What do you think of the Wild Filmmaker platform?

I love the black and white look but am not very familiar with the format and distribution as of yet.  But I know this is a fairly new venture.