How Egg Found Me
It started with a question someone asked me: what would you make for Easter that isn't an Easter story?
The image of an egg wouldn't leave me. Egg. Just not an Easter egg. Something that shows up without explanation and forces everyone to reveal who they are.
Harold came first. He finds it and brings it into his world. Then Luce, practical, loud, certain it's one thing and not another. And Harley, whose first instinct is fear, then confusion, followed by acceptance of most things.
The story wrote itself once those three existed. Three personalities, pinging off a tangible mystery, projecting their worldview onto something that can't be categorized.
I knew the ending before I wrote a single scene. (Weller Rule #1: know where you're going before you start walking.) The egg would be gone by morning. No explanation. Leaving the audience with the same uneasy mystery of having passed through an experience you can't explain that the characters sat with.
The hardest scene was Harold and Luce talking quietly in the dark admitting neither is sure about what they're experiencing. That scene is where the film lives or dies, because if you don't believe their confusion, nothing after it matters. I rewrote their dialogue four times. The simplest version of the four worked best. Of course.
There was a surprise though. Harley, who tied a napkin around his neck for a meal that never happened, cried when dinner was cancelled, and fainted when reality broke, still managed to surprise me. In the final act, he crawls to the empty shell, touches the inside, tastes it, and smiles partaking in something Harold and Luce did not: communion. The one who seemed to understand the least leaned further into the mystery than the others dared.
That moment changed what the film was about. It stopped being Harold's story and became everyone's. Harold's faith was immediate. Luce's faith was earned through crisis. But Harley received something more direct. Communion.
I made Egg in a week. Three felt meerkats, one impossible object, and a question I still can't answer: what was inside that shell?
I don't know. And that's okay.
Egg premieres April 4th on the AI Music Video Show