I’ve watched all 78 episodes of the Sci-Fi Channel’s hit Battlestar Galactica reboot three times; first on DVD in 2006, while clinically depressed; then in 2013, when I met my wife, Sarah, and made her watch it with me; and, finally, during Covid, when both of us fanboys were in search of healing.
Battlestar also plays a small (and highly erotic!) role in my debut feature, Fantasy Life, starring Amanda Peet, Alessandro Nivola and myself, which is out in theaters in New York City now.
If you haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica, here’s the gist: there are highly civilized human beings in another star system and they love cigarillos; tickled with A.I., they create enfleshed chat-bots who end up nuking the entire human race, except for 50,000 souls housed in a fleet of terror-stricken spaceships.
My personal Galactica-level space-opera begins in 2017. I am languishing as an actor. Sarah tells me to get off my fracking ass (Battlestar was on basic cable and ingeniously subbed the word “frack” in for “fuck”) and write something (she’s a therapist). I am very offended, because I am a writer. I had just never finished anything. Three weeks later, I get started.
When I finish the screenplay, during the pandemic, I start to share it around “town.” The toasters (“toaster” is BSG military slang for the sex-addicted chat-bot warmongers called “Cylons”) swiftly nuke me with a billion passes.
In 2022, I get my first genuinely encouraging pass. A young bespectacled development executive tells me, on Zoom, that he really loves my script. His company would never do it, he says, but he wants to help me. I hadn’t heard that before. “Have you considered directing it?”
I had never directed anything. The thought had entered my dreams, but I assumed that no one would ever let me direct a feature film. Just attaching myself to the lead I’d written for myself and finding a director was proving impossible. But I was encouraged, so I immersed myself in the techniques of movie-making by becoming a Patreon member of a low-key Christian filmmaking YouTube channel, and started to read directing books by my favorites.
A year later, my bespectacled development executive became the first producer on Fantasy Life, leaving his job a year after our Zoom meeting. By that point, I had created a director’s pitch deck (a compendium of visual references with bold, unsupported claims), and I’d practiced yelling “Cut!” in the shower. Several other broken industry professionals soon joined our fleet too.
The first task was to write passionate letters to famous actors. After about 11 months of this, we somehow landed on: Amanda Peet, Alessandro Nivola, Bob Balaban, Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Jessica Harper, Holland Taylor, Zosia Mamet and comedian Sheng Wang. Maybe these names don’t all ring bells for you, but, for me, it’s still religious joy.
We had just got Fantasy Life financed as the actors/writers strike went down. In a nail-biter, we secured a “SAG waiver” to shoot during the strike, all creating a mood of an on-the-run spaceship in a decimated war zone.
The night before my first day of pre-production, I cried into Sarah’s lap and was unable to sleep.
I arrived the next morning and was shuttled to Judd Hirsch’s costume fitting. He asked me why I would want to act and direct, and if there was something wrong with me. Back at the office, I spilled seltzer all over over my storyboards. I taped them up around the office to dry.
Since none of the studio movies could shoot during the strikes, everyone on Fantasy Life – the crew, the cast, the caterer – was truly happy to just be working. My non-genre, character-driven picture was one of the hottest tickets in town. We had outrun the toasters for a spell and I learned how to be a filmmaker with an unnaturally buoyant cast and crew.
Despite the enormous pressures of completing a film, the scariest moment for me was when I cried the night before pre-production. I was terrified I’d have to pay the financier back when I collapsed on set after the first setup. But from those tears on, I was blessed with a generous cast and crew, and had a uniquely analogue version of the filmmaking experience – no actors suddenly needed to travel to Bucharest for a Marvel reshoot; no reps from streamers or studios were on set. (They were too busy fighting tooth and nail for the Cylons’ right to sing, dance, act, write, direct, and generate new locales for Love is Blind.)
In the end, I think my luckiest break was that 75 percent of the Fantasy Life cast would require a grandchild to do things like throw a script into ChatGPT. Those legends still just read and go to the movies, thank the gods. So say we all.
