Better in My Head

Sitting in a theater is one of the few places where you get to completely disappear into someone else’s world. For a couple hours you’re not yourself. You’re not thinking about rent or work or whatever’s broken at home. You’re just there, eyes forward, letting the screen do the work.

The problem is that what they actually show you is almost never what you want to see.

I’ve been thinking about the films that don’t exist. The ones you imagine. There’s this whole category of ideas that are too weird or too cheap or too unmarketable for anyone to actually make. Vegetarian aliens trying to explain their philosophy while obviously failing to convince anyone. Pirates with an allergy to saltwater. Megan Fox naked in a sci-fi film that’s actually worth watching. These are desires, some absurd and some just horny, but they’re all real.

The gap between what exists and what we imagine is huge. Someone will always make another superhero movie, another romance, another heist. But nobody’s making the thing you actually want, the one that only makes sense in your head. Maybe that’s why people talk about making their own films—not because they love cinema particularly, but because they want to see the one specific impossible thing that’s stuck in their brain.

I’ve never made a film. I’ve thought about it, obviously. But there’s something almost better about it living only in my head, where it can be perfect without any of the compromises that reality would bring. In my head, every cut works. Every shot means something. Every frame is exactly what I imagined. The second you try to actually make it, you’re already losing.