Earthquakes

I started the very first draft of About the Author during the pandemic. It actually started out with a single scene: The Big One hits during the Emmys and kills everyone in Hollywood.

(Spoilers: that scene is no longer in the movie. I got the note from a mentor that it felt like it was more about me than about the characters, and he was totally right.)

The first year or so of the pandemic was a great time for working on stuff because I, like many other then-20-somethings without kids, woke up most days to a whole lot of nothing on my plate apart from shouldering the growing existential dread. Having the entire world shut down around you provides a really good opportunity to just sit with your thoughts, as it turns out.

And the more I sat with my thoughts, and the more I wrote to avoid going crazier, the more About the Author became about “this weird feeling I always have.” I took the protagonist (Mimi) and I turned her experience into the most unyielding version of my own: I put her in a world that seems to operate by opaque and ever-changing rules that everyone else seems to be able to keep up with just fine, and where success is contingent upon understanding people who act according to mysterious and contradictory motivations.

Reader, “this weird feeling I always have” was autism. I have autism. I found that out officially about 2.5 years into the pandemic.

By then, About the Author was many drafts in, and I realized that I had unknowingly created a depiction of my autistic experience. So I decided to lean into it! True, ATA is also about being an artist, about the struggles with inspiration and the question of just how much of yourself do you have to sell, exactly, to “make it” as an artist — and about what “making it” even means, exactly.

But for me, those experiences are inseparable from the experience of being autistic. So, ATA is a film about autism…and other things! Just not about a giant earthquake destroying Hollywood.