Freedom Island

The Script Writing Process

Saturdays are usually for sociopolitical and cultural psychology articles, but today, I’m sharing part of my screenwriting journey.

On Tuesday I released “The One Rule: A Day on Isla Gitana, Costa Rica.” The story is part of a Forever Foreign, a collection of short stories I designed for Substack. Each story stands alone but holds more weight for those who read from the beginning.

“The One Rule: A Day on Isla Gitana, Costa Rica” is also the story I loosely (very loosely) based my second screenplay on.

I loved movies before books. As a child, I saw my parents’ travel stories play out as movie scenes, but when I went to Vancouver Film School (an overpriced institution luring in creative souls with false promises, clever marketing tactics and strategic Vancouver real estate), I didn’t have enough material to write their story.

It wasn’t until my father got cancer that we committed to penning his tales. By that point, I had already been stripped bare (both literally and figuratively) by producers and agents. The film industry left me hollow, a soul laid barren by its superficial grasp. As a third culture kid raised in South America, Europe, and North America, soul searching in Italy, Bali, India or whatever else Eat Pray Love people do, travel wasn’t highest on my list to fill the void.

Instead, I turned to academia.

Literature and psychology textbooks brought meaning into my life, filling my head with ideas and knowledge rather than goals and wants.

My writing was no longer focused on a formula, thinking producers would only give me seven pages to get to the inciting incident. I began to see the magic of stories where rules can be broken.

But we all know that this type of present-focused careerism can awaken the great capitalist vampire-squid² in all of us, and this squid’s blood-funnel ways can easily take over a writer’s life and their work.  I’m not superhuman; I have a capitalist vampire-squid inside me like everybody else, and it bursts into tentacular life at the slightest hint of money/advantage, and what these 28 plus writing years have taught me is that I do better work, am a better human, when the vampire squid sleeps.  And it sleeps best in me when I’m focused not on gaming the precarious present but reaching out to the still-possible unforeclosed future. 

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Junot Díaz

The capitalist vampire-squid coupled with the mind of an eighteen-year-old boy seems like a recipe for disaster… or success in ‘Merica. This was a time I dreamt of writing and staring in movies like Superbad, American Pie, and Harold & Kumar.

Although I now dream of writing work that isn’t tied to time and touches on human truths across cultures, I still love raunchy late-night comedies.

Freedom Island is one of these comedies and loosely—very loosely—based on “The One Rule: A Day on Isla Gitana, Costa Rica.”

Since 2011, it’s gone through ten revisions, entered three screenwriting competitions (some honourable mentions), and ignored by over one hundred producers.

Here are the protagonists crossing the first threshold and leaving the ordinary world.

Paid subscribers can access the full script below.