The Day I Murdered the World

The Day I Murdered the World is a new project I'm looking at for next year. I'm finally done, for the moment, with cheesy, old school 70s, 80s stuff - although I might return there eventually, but I am done with zombie movies for the time being, I've done what I needed to do there, the Bimbo Zombie Killers! series has come full circle and I don't have much more to say on the subject.

The stress of scheduling and just the overall exhausting experience in making this last BZK! movie has been a little too much for me (and it's not over yet) and I decided some time ago it would be my last overly elaborate movie. I still wanted to keep making them, but I needed to find a way to ease some of the production stress - I don't feel like having extra help behind the camera would solve it, it would just become another thing to worry about. Another person whose reliability would constantly be a source of distraction, so I'm not going that route.

I'm going back to simple and I figure I can achieve that in a couple of different ways. One thing that slows down shooting is dialog, well, with a totally silent movie, that's out the window - easy enough. A large re-occurring cast, I'm scaling it down to a much smaller size, although it will be a more out in public movie, the main characters will be lesser in number and most likely wearing a lot of makeup that will allow for a double if needed.

So there we have it, a silent movie, with a smaller cast. I'll be using full head prosthetics to ease the stress of having to schedule just the right person constantly, so I can use a stand-in. I'll work on the need for a constant flow of continuity by not having a cast that's slowly knocked off and needing to make sure costumes stay clean if I shout out of order.

This was my starting point for a project that came to me with the title, The Day I Murdered the World. My goal here is to make a serious movie, to actually try a genre that could prove very difficult if not written just right or acted just right. My first goal was to find the right actor, it took about 5 seconds to settle on a guy I've worked with off and on over the years, Tim Gormley. To put it as simply as possible, he's incredible to work with. He understands acting and he's willing to do pretty much anything. So with him onboard, I felt the project at least was off to a good start.

The overall feel of the movie, will be awesome if I can pull it off. We're going with a Hitchcock type movie, one of the general themes of Hitchcock movies is paranoia - which fits in well with the fact we have a fellow who is unable to hear and trying to find out what happened, all the while wondering, who's a friend and who's an enemy. Combine that with a story with a slight Lovecraftian vibe (whose stories also heavily featured the notion of paranoia) and I think we've got a potentially bizarre little film.

Will it be feature length? Probably not. Maybe half an hour. I really don't know. I do know I won't limit myself and try for a specific length of script, I'll just start and see what happens and we'll go from there.

I've got a lot of vague random imagery floating around in my head to try to mix both the Lovecraft and Hitchcock feel - and if it's successful or not, I think it'll be a bit of a curiosity of a movie that some folks will really get into and other will just hate it within the first 5 minutes.

I'm planning on a winter pre-production and if the script is completed by spring, we'll try to shoot it if the budget isn't cripplingly huge.