[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: With your movie SITE, you began writing in 2015. What was the very first idea you had about this story? Do you remember?
Jason Eric Perlman, Writer/Filmmaker: I do. I was fascinated by the ideas of reincarnation at the time and I was reading a lot about reincarnation.
I had heard some anecdotes even within my own family of some people, especially acquaintances of my mother, that had very strange experiences of knowing about people and little towns and places that they felt such an acute affinity towards and felt like they had experienced being there before.
Then I actually went to these places and found that there was evidence that the things they were remembering and thinking of were real.
I had a bit of grounding, if you want to call it that, in personal anecdote about this kind of thing.
I had never experienced anything that made me personally feel that I had been in another previous life or anything like that.
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But I was reading a fair amount about it.
I thought there’s something very interesting here in terms of creating characters or looking into how this would bloom into characters because you’re dealing with the idea of karma and of handing off sort of unresolved particulars in one life onto onto a current life or another precursor life, whatever the case may be.
I just thought there was something very interesting and unique about exploring that.
Film Courage: In thinking about reincarnation and some of these other if you want to call them esoteric thoughts, did you have a feeling right away that this would morph into a movie if you sat down and wrote the screenplay?
Jason: When I start to cultivate an idea, I always think about it in the terms of:
Can this be a screenplay?
Can there be a story here?
Because that’s the way I can do something with the idea.
I always feel a need to make something out of an idea.
I have to get it down in some way to kind of rein it in and give it shape.
I always think about it through the lens of:
Can I outline something here?
Are there three acts of story?
Whatever your act structure preferences.
Some people do eight now, but can I tell a story within this idea?
I started to kind of note and outline concepts, do some story, some character bio work to try to kind of sketch up who might be the characters in the story, what’s the framework.
It starts with early rumblings, that is my process.
Film Courage: What’s your actual process for building out a story?
Eric: That takes a number of forms. In my recent career, I’ve…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
MORE ON JASON ERIC PERLMAN’S MOVIE ‘SITE’
About:
An accomplished WGA screenwriter, feature director, producer and Emmy-recognized editor, Jason Eric Perlman has collaborated on over 20 feature films since completing USC Graduate Cinema. He has worked with major television outlets and studios like Warner Bros, Sony, and Lionsgate. His material has screened at prestigious festivals such as Sundance and SXSW. Jason was named #4 in LA Weekly’s “Top 10 Entertainment Professionals to Watch in 2023.”
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