III. The Script

On magic

Zac Brettler was a 19 year old middle class kid from London who pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch. He spoke with an accent on occasion and took on the surname Ismailov. Improbably, he was able to chat up the right people and got introduced to Akbar Shamji, a shadowy entrepreneur who took him under his wing. The two of them even pitched businesses to investors. Zac also lived at Dave Sharma’s luxury apartment for a while, a friend of Shamji’s and a known gangster.

On November 28, 2019, Zac jumped from the fifth floor balcony of Sharma’s apartment on the shore of the River Thames. He hit the balustrade, was probably knocked unconscious, fell into the river and drowned. No one knows what happened that night, or why Zac jumped. The police ruled it a suicide but the far more plausible explanation is that Shamji and Sharma were running a scheme to extract some of Zac’s supposed fortune, realized there was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, then threatened the teenager in such a fashion that he tried to escape the apartment by jumping from the balcony. He wasn’t trying to kill himself, he was trying to jump into the river for safety.

What struck me when I first heard of Zac’s story, was the almost antiquated nature of his scheme. He ran a real life long con (“a real dinosaur con” as Joe Montegna’s Mike says in House of Games) as opposed to the online version of faking a certain lifestyle for a social media audience. It takes real conviction and courage to do what Zac did. There were real consequences for his actions. At the root of it was a genuinely experienced FOMO— he was a middle class kid who went to a fancy high school and envied his rich classmates’ lifestyle. There is a sort of nobility in his attempt to overcome it: he tried to transcend reality.

“My greatest preference by far would have been to be a magician”, Herman Hesse writes in Childhood of the Magician. “This was the deepest, most profoundly felt direction of my impulses, springing from a certain dissatisfaction with what people call "reality" and what seemed to me at times simply a silly conspiracy of the grownups. Very early I felt a definite rejection of this reality, at times timorous, at times scornful, and the burning wish to change it by magic, to transform it, to heighten it.“ What Zac did was just this. He transformed reality, this “silly conspiracy of the grownups”, he heightened it.

Of course, there is a real tragedy underpinning all this: Zac’s insecurity, his inability to find self worth in his own circumstances, a misguided obsession with status, with power, with wealth. Faking his identity would have never allowed him to attain status, power and wealth, at least not permanently. A tree cannot grow on rotten roots. Reading about Zac, one wonders what his ultimate goal was, if he even had one. Was hanging out with Shamji, glimpsing a world of riches and influence he wouldn’t otherwise have access to enough to make Zac feel better about himself? My fear is that it didn’t. As the Swiss novelist Herman Burger writes of his fictional magician Diabelli, he became an “artist with an artifical soul”.

The second thing that struck me about Zac’s story was how American it is. Zac is an almost Gatsbyesque figure full of longing, watching gangster movies and dreaming of a rags-to-riches story, faking it in the hopes of making it one day, obssessed with material riches instead of spiritual fulfillment. The confidence man is a classic figure in the American imaginary. The country was built on industries that were not much more than legal cons. Nowadays, influencers of all stripes preach the get-rich-quick scheme of the crypto rug pull to an ever-growing audience of impressionable young men, the American Dream redefined as a short con financial crime.

I started thinking about what the version of Zac’s story would be that would take place in America. What kind of kid would pretend to be the heir to a fortune? What background would he have? What circumstances would he live in? I had a notion of a second or third-generation immigrant, a solidly middle-class kid who lives in Los Angeles and sees the markers of unimaginable wealth all around him without ever experiencing it himself. Someone of a generation that is being bombarded online with a heady mix of alpha male influencers, the illusion of easy money, materialism as happiness, individualism as the only path to success. A smart kid to be sure, and charmin to boot, a goal-getter, but someone misguided by envy at his peers and a rotten online culture.

The more I thought about it, the more the idea of writing a story about a teenage con man got me excited. Additionally, the feeling of comparing oneself to others and feeling inadequate is so universally shared that it seemed to me like a perfect story of our time. “Somewhere, the good life is being lived”, James Salter writes in Burning The Days, and social media has intensified this sensation for essentially everyone. We’re all online salivating at someone else’s lifestyle. Here is a bold hero who goes out into the world and does something about it!

The character of Amin was born, a high school kid who decides to pretend he is the heir to a foreign fortune in order to infiltrate the rarified world of moneyed financiers and entrepreneurs so he can pretend to live the life of luxury he’s always dreamt of. The new American Dream. As Theodore Dreiser writes about Clyde in An American Tragedy, “what was he to do? Which way to turn? What one thing to take up and master— something that would get him somewhere.” These were the questions the script would now have to answer.

I knew from the beginning this would be the micro-budget movie I would direct myself. I knew the budget would be $15,000. I knew my options to tell this story would be severely limited, a true challenge given that some of the main characters in the script are wealthy, live in big houses, go to fancy dinners, drive luxury cars, etc. Locations and renting cars is expensive. I knew I would have to spend a large chunk of the budget on this to make the movie look convincing but I also knew that I could only afford one, at most two set pieces in such an environment. I would have to work around that.

At the same time, I didn’t want to limit myself too much when I first started breaking the story. I wrote a detailed outline first without worrying about budget constraints. I wanted to make sure the emotional spine of the story was there, the character arc made sense, the story was engaging. Once the outline was completed, I pared down and simplified. I started reaching out to friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends who know people— restaurant owners, house owners, etc. I needed to gauge if getting certain locations for free (especially bars, restaurants and the like) would even be in the realm of possibility. I wasn’t in a position to lock anything down but I wanted to write a script that could plausibly be produced.

Based on the responses I started to add and substract locations. I started to think about which exterior shots we could steal and how to integrate them into the script. There is currently a scene set at a drive-in theatre. I don’t know if the scene will survive as such but my idea is to both steal some shots at a real drive-in, then fake the bulk of it in someone’s drive way with strategic framing, some lights and killer sound design.

Writing in this way is a completely new experience for me. The script feels alive, growing and morphing like an unwieldy house plant one has to water and prune so it grows more uniform and blossoms into something beautiful in the end. Usually, I try to bring a finished script to the market I would expect to be shot pretty much as written. Now, I am working on an elaborate blueprint where the building blocks are liable to change up to the day we shoot. What doesn’t change is the spine of the story. I know what story I want to tell, and I’m not going to compromise on it. But how the story is told can change at any moment based on the practicality of the budget.

I currently have two scenes that seem impossible to shoot based on our budget. One seems 75% impossible, the other 100% impossible. They would require locations that that are so expensive and logistics so complex you only see them in much bigger Hollywood productions. These locations cannot be faked. They are in addition to at least one sequence I already know we will have to spend a pretty penny on. And the scenes are crucial to the story.

It’s an impossible bind. As I’ve revised the script in the last few weeks, as I’ve bugged friends and acquaintances to shoot at their homes or places of business, I have done a lot of work to make the script cheaper to shoot by using every interior and prop I know I can get, and set the bulk of the rest either outside or in cars. But these two impossible scenes remain, Mount Kilimanjaros that, at this time, seem like we won’t be able to climb. And I don’t have a plan B for either of them.

For now, they are staying in the script. We are not in pre-production quite yet, and maybe one of the crew members will have a creative solution. I am trusting the process and forging ahead.

The other big hurdle I have set for myself with the script is casting the main character Amin. On paper, he’s a 17-year old with tons of charisma and a dark edge. This is absolutely crucial to the story, a non-negotiable. I am not questioning whether there are actors out there who could portray such a character convincingly, but I am questioning if we can find someone who convincingly looks 17. I am not going to cast a person who is 35 pretending to be a teenager. I need someone who looks the part, maybe in their early 20s with a baby face and the acting chops to pull it off. It’s a meaty part for a young actor, and if you’re reading this and know someone who fits the profile, please get in touch.

As pre-production will kick into gear in the upcoming weeks, and we put together honest-to-god budgets and schedules, the script will have to change yet again, compromises will have to be found. To me, this is exciting work. To take a bit of a detour, I have always found the selling point of AI companies for their various “tools” profoundly misguided. Having access to a machine that can generate anything you can imagine at the press of a button is not unlocking or expanding creativity. In fact, it does the exact opposite. Creativity is about overcoming limitations— your own, and the ones imposed on you by your environment.

Working within the confines of a $15,000 budget is the most satisfying creative work because it forces me to sharpen my senses as a storyteller, as a visual artist, as a problem solver. It forces me to abandon all artifice, cut away the unnecessary fat, focus solely on the essence of what I’m trying to achieve in the story, in a sequence, in a shot.

The script is ambitious. It is not a mumblecore character piece set in someone’s bedroom. It takes place in mansions, Porsches and there even is a foot chase. As it stands, my naive belief is that we can pull it off. Maybe in a few weeks I will eat my words. But as it stands I am a doing my best to be a magician myself, heighten reality and bend it to my will.