It took me four days to get across those states. The first leg of the journey didn't get me very far. I had to stop in Barstow to get new tires. Then I stopped somewhere east of Albuquerque whose lights intrigued me. I stopped again somewhere in Missouri. And then drove the rest of the way to Indiana the next day. My cat enjoyed each and every stop. The driving wasn't much his scene. He was pretty restless most of the trip once he got comfortable with the world whizzing by at 80 mph. He camped out by my head most of the way and on occasion would just get fed up with everything. He'd look straight at me, my ear really, leaving no more than a few centimeters from his nose to my face, and meow as loud as he could muster. He just wasn't happy.
     Somewhere in Oklahoma, I began to use my dictaphone to take some notes on a short film idea I had. I'd never used my dictaphone for this type of thing before. It felt pretty strange to be talking into it. I don't know if it would have felt less strange if my cat wasn't there. But knowing I'd be the only one listening to it made all my intonations, my pronunciations, everything seem fake. But there was nothing I could do about it.
     The idea was based on that scene in Mulholland Drive when Naomi Watts goes in for her audition after rehearsing her lines all the day before. We know the gist of the scene and how contrived it is. Her naiveté throughout the first half of the movie plays naturally into her zeal for playing such a flat character. The following day when she goes in to the audition and we see the Lynchian definition of a Hollywood casting, we begin to dread her performance playing in front of a room full of pretentious b-movie people while the actor she is auditioning with is a slimy has-been twice her age.
     What happens next is the inspiring part. Lynch frames out the rest of the room, and the two begin to play out the scene. While Watts and her partner are saying the same lines she was rehearsing the day before, it is an entirely new scene with plot, character, motivation, dramatic arc, everything it takes to make a compelling drama. We forget about the rest of the movie. We begin rooting for THESE characters, investing our hope and interest in them, willing their wills and feeling their fears. The ah-ha comes when we remember there was a movie somewhere in the midst of all this and these characters have entirely separate motives and arcs and we promptly choose to suspend those thoughts to see how the scene plays out. I don't know about anybody else, but it tricked me quite willingly and got me thinking about the whole meta-film, meta-scene idea.
     So the idea was to somehow establish a scene in the first few moments of my film and then depart from the scene somehow by allowing the characters to create their own completely separate reality. And that parallel reality, involving the same characters creating new characters for themselves, had to be so convincing that the audience forgets about the original reality. The cat neither approved nor disapproved.