Sixteen performances. Only one voice at a time.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I spent a lot of time in traffic as everyone who lives here does. I started with a job but no apartment, so I drove all across the city a million different ways to get back and forth to work for those first few weeks. I had a job; but without a home, I felt like a fraud, like I was trying to live someone else's life, and that at any moment I could lose everything.

In the evenings, I would look around at all the cars that sat still on the 405 headed north and would think of the thousands of people that were just out of reach and what their lives might be like. We were separated by only a few feet of pavement and a couple panes of glass, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of being totally alone.

This anthology is dedicated to that feeling of loneliness and how many different ways we experience it. This piece is often somber, but it is not hopeless.

THE FILM

MY STORY BEHIND THE STORY

Bringing Soliloquy to the world took almost seven years in all. I started conceptualizing the format of a monologue anthology when I first moved to Los Angeles in 2016, worked on the outline and script into 2017, then started filming between 2017 and 2019 in both Los Angeles and back in Michigan, and finally editing, VFX and scoring the collected anthology took up into 2023 before it was completed in full.

The journey was much longer than I ever anticipated, but what the piece represents is much more to me. As a director, I had hoped to leverage the work itself as a way to gain experience working with actors specifically - to focus on performance and character over the other elements as a means of practice. In that vein, the film serves as a time capsule for my growth over the course of those years and I’m proud of the scope of what I was able to accomplish.

Despite the the time it took to bring the project to fruition, its thematic through-line and central focus on loneliness only grew in relevance during its production. When I came up with the concept, I felt this was a cathartic way of speaking to the time in one’s life between college and true “adulthood”, but as we were editing the film and the world felt the effects of the global pandemic, I felt the message was much bigger than what I had originally conceived, and I felt hopeful that so many other people would be able to understand the emotions I was trying to convey.

I worry sometimes that we were able to move on to quickly from the collective emotions and stress people felt during the early parts of that time, and that people would no longer remember what those feelings were like by the time this film finally reached them. But speaking for myself - this material has been on my mind for such a long time now, and I hope that people are able to connect regardless of when this message reaches them.