Dear Writer Director Letter #113

I’m writing my debut feature screenplay from scratch for the fourth time.

Photos by Iris Azalea.

Dear Writer Director,

I’m writing my debut feature screenplay from scratch for the fourth time. Only this time, I feel like I get to write it on my terms as opposed to inside of this package I designed to fit into “Hollywood”.

The longer I’m in New Orleans, the more the parts of me that were built to satisfy an imagined outside world fall away. The whole side of my personality that was crafted to be “commercial” is alchemizing into something much more me and much more interesting. My Avant-garde roots and my lock picking resilience have returned to me full force. We just nailed down every core member of the team, and it’s me and a producer and cinematographer who are not United States based. I am part of a global Indie filmmaking team. It is official, and it’s so exactly what needed to happen. The American centric way of seeing the world is looking faker than ever before. I can see my American upbringing as something separate from myself now, something I’m capable of discarding.

I’m writing my debut feature screenplay from scratch for the fourth time. I’ve changed so much since that third page one rewrite a year ago. I feel like a totally different person now. The issues I’ve observed in communication between people have only sharpened and honed and become more abrasive when I encounter them in real life. My script is, at its core, about the humongous struggle it is for Millennials to have a genuine, healthy romantic relationship. Our absolute failure to accept ourselves, our sexuality, and to communicate set us all up hurtling towards disaster every time. My leading character, Rachel Adela and Sam, are two people: one from Chicago and one from Los Angeles who have done very bad things in their respective recent pasts. They have both been “cancelled” in their worlds and find themselves adrift at spiritual sea in The French Quarter at Christmas Time. My DP asked me to name the overarching theme of our story, and without skipping a beat, I said, “The Failure of Communication.” I’ve made a lot of progress on this subject in real life, but the United States and the relations between human beings still feels like a hellscape, so I still have a long way’s to go.

The whole side of my personality that was crafted to be “commercial” is alchemizing into something much more me and much more interesting. There’s a lot of costumes I have had to wear that didn’t feel right: Non-Profit Leader, Producer, Professor. There’s a lot of costumes that, at one time, felt impossible for me to embody: Pop star, Model, Auteur, or Hollywood Screenwriter. Now, I embrace the fact that because I’m coming up through social media and through grass roots ecosystems, there is no one costume I must wear. I am not required to dawn a suit to this job every day. Now I’m Olivia Lilley of the Internet. I am part pop star, performance artist, podcaster, auteur, businesswoman, radical, organizer, probably a future politician. I’m like Marc Maron: I’m whoever the fuck I care to be that day. New Orleans has already taught me so much about how not to assimilate into a carbon copy of anything. The more I am bold and brash and myself here, the more I connect authentically, make sales, and get people hyped for stepping into their own power and owning their Andy Warhol superstar status. I love watching New Orleanians be even more excited to be themselves because I’m around.

I’m writing my debut feature screenplay from scratch for the fourth time, and I’m hyped to do it because I love writing. I haven’t written any screenplay pages since December of 2024, so this afternoon, when I got to work, it was jarring. I felt rusty. I felt out of sorts. I felt like I wish it were a Writer Director essay instead, but then I got into the flow state, and it came. I stripped the first 15 pages down to their core bones events and now it’s only 9. I wrote from my memory of how the story unfolded and also whittled away freely what didn’t feel essential. As I was writing, I realized that I have learned to trust my audiences to get nuances on a whole other level. I let the imagery breathe and the complexities of thought linger in a well-timed glance. I no longer felt a need to overly explain myself or be demonstrative for fear that people wouldn’t get it. People are capable of registering energy, vibes, body language. We’re all fluent in watching the screen, after all. When we don’t have some outside force guiding our meaning making, that’s when we falter.

Dear Writer Director, sometimes it is necessary for you to begin again again. Relish the opportunity. You only get to write and direct your debut feature film once. Sometimes as you’re working, you will feel lost, out of sorts, not good at this, disconnected, in between processing conscious realities, and you have to keep on writing anyway. There are more questions that will arise from the writing which will lead to new answers and new questions and eventually aha’s and clear-cut conclusions that will probably continue to change. That is the process. You must go through it. You must allow yourself to be and feel messy. You must allow yourself to fear that none of it makes any sense. You have to wade through the shit to polish the turd and have it transform into gold like in The Holy Mountain. You have to experience it all because you never know what incredibly bad ass currently unfathomably awesome version of you is waiting for you on the other side of it all. And she’s ready and excited to meet you, so you better get to work.

Love,

O