Memories are powerful, they have the ability to connect us to our pasts whilst evoking a plethora of emotions which we have no control over, so what if there was a way you could access them without limits? Mirage from filmmaker Elizabeth Acevedo explores this very concept through a fantastical drug – Nostalgia. Her debut short film is an exhilarating, visceral study of the role of memory within relationships and the terrifying implications of having unlimited access to our inner worlds. Mirage deploys a heady blend of colours, tones, dissolves and fades which not only reflect the protagonist’s loss to the drug but also play with time in a way reflective of the filmmaker’s deep understanding of memory, addiction and loss. Acevado worked intimately with actors Devon Bostick and Dylan Gelula to build a deep and connected understanding of the characters, thus intensifying the audience’s journey through the film. With the director’s cut of Mirage premiering on Directors Notes today, Acevedo speaks to us about writing a secret scene for her leads in order for them to fully access their characters’ backstories. She also outlines her slightly unorthodox but impressive journey of raising the needed funds and the challenges of designing the chronology of the film.
What sparked the conception of this powerful, exploratory film?
I was an addict of nostalgia myself. Stuck in a seven-year relationship, saturated with cheating and abuse, I clung to the innocent ghost of my teenage love instead of facing reality. And my father was an addict of nostalgia, debilitated by my mother leaving him, he suffered severe amnesia. His present life melted away while he focused only on what he lost. I started to wonder, “How can I visually realize the role of memory in relationships?” That’s when the tale of Mirage sparked to life. In exploring the idea of dependence, even in a magical realism context, I pulled from first-hand experience. I’ve revived loved ones from overdoses on meth, pills and alcohol, and I studied neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University before transferring to film school. These experiences, I think, helped me capture the seemingly endless cycle of addiction in the fantastical drug of Nostalgia.
I was looking for locations that felt weathered by time, like a rotting capsule detached from any particular period or place.
I wrote the first draft in September of 2020 then of course I was rewriting it until “Action”. Because the script called for both an urbanity and ocean, and because a lot of the talent we had our eyes on was based on the West Coast, we knew we’d shoot in L.A. This was the Zoom era, so not only was the team producing in our independent spheres, we were also realizing a film from afar. For some locations, I used Google Maps to hunt down locations in 1980s-90s L.A. crime films and then in the present timeline, I was looking for locations that felt weathered by time, like a rotting capsule detached from any particular period or place. For the past timeline, I searched for little dystopias, places that felt as physically warped as the mental warping taking place in Loli’s mind. When I arrived in L.A. solo, a month before the shoot, I scouted the locations I had found online, reworked the storyboards I’d drawn back home and then did walk-throughs with my incredible D.P. Corey Waters.
As we all know, funding films is one of the biggest hurdles faced, can you tell us about your journey to getting Mirage made?
Flashing back to six months before the shoot, we launched a crowdfunding venture and raised $20,000. Still, the ambitious vision called for a larger budget. I met with entertainment lawyers and venture capitalists to learn about raising private funds. After rounding up some Associate Producer investors, I roped my best friend into a little scheme. She was working at a high-end restaurant in New York and would tip me off anytime someone in the film industry showed up. I’d drop everything I was doing, throw on a suit, run over and slide in at the bar and order a whisky. I’d eavesdrop until I overheard something I could work into an opener and cold pitch people. It went on for a month, rejection after rejection, until one day I met an MIT psychologist studying memory and addiction. We hit it off and he closed the funds, joined me in Cannes, and we’ve remained friends ever since.
Both Devon Bostick and Dylan Gelula impressively embody their roles as Adam and Loli. How did you come to be working with this talented duo?
A lot of people ask about how I found Adam and Loli. I cast a wide net with platforms like Backstage and Actor’s Access, sifting through hundreds of people for four months. I had something very specific in mind but wasn’t finding it anywhere. Because Mirage was my first film at the time, I didn’t initially have the confidence to go for established talent (note to anyone, don’t waste time doubting!) But we were nearing the eleventh hour, or more like eleven fifty-nine PM. We were set to shoot in ten days and I didn’t have my leads. I wrote a two page single single-spaced letter to Devon Bostick explaining what about his nature made me feel that he was meant for the role, and I meant it all. His agent replied saying Devon asked for the script, Devon and I met and he said let’s do it. He recommended Dylan, and by the grace of some higher being, we found our Adam and Loli.
What they wound up discovering ‘in the past’ helped develop the specifics of the intimacy you see in the film.
Because Mirage takes place deep into a couple’s relationship our rehearsals started outside the bounds of the script. Devon and Dylan wanted to know what Adam and Loli were like together before it all went south in order to understand the love that was at stake, so I wrote a secret scene from a time years before Mirage takes place. We went to set, just the three of us. I set up a soundscape and let Devon and Dylan improvise their way through the secret scene. What they wound up discovering ‘in the past’ helped develop the specifics of the intimacy you see in the film. One of our rehearsals was even held in a pool. In our initial one-on-one conversations, we also talked a lot about our own previous relationships. I brought love letters for Dylan to read. Devon changed beats of the script to resonate more with his experience and Mirage evolved into an amalgamation of all this very real pain – and even became new love.
We settled on dissolves to exit memories because they mimic the feeling of waking from a dream or slowly coming to terms with reality after being steeped in a delusion.
The focus on and shifting form of memory is echoed throughout with visceral scenes fading in and out. At what stage did they become part of the film’s structure?
Originally, the cross dissolves you see each time we depart a memory and reenter the present were not in the script. The transitions were written only with match cuts, from doorway to doorway or from the mouth of a cave to an open window in a dark room. It was with my editor, Carter Linsley, that we developed the visual grammar for transitioning to verses from the highs. We settled on dissolves to exit memories because they mimic the feeling of waking from a dream or slowly coming to terms with reality after being steeped in a delusion. These revelations are never instant, so neither could our cuts from past to present be.
For Loli, it’s always a slow reemergence into reality. When she wakes in bed from the first high of the beach, her face is loose with a smile; still thinking of making out with Adam years ago, she’s drenched in a waning euphoria that only fades when she’s confronted with the harsh truth of the man she’s with now. One of my favorite dissolves is from Loli’s memory in the bathroom to Adam looming in the doorway. In the present, Adam surmises Loli is tripping on a memory of infidelity. His supposition materializes through the dissolve in that Loli’s memory bleeds into the shot of Adam. Add to that, they’re both framed in doorways, suggesting they’re both between realms and divided from one another. The climactic overdose sequence with continuous split dissolves, wherein the shots were doubled, shifted and differentiated by 5% speed so they would sporadically sync, represent Loli’s entrapment in a half-state of memory and reality.
I was so drawn into those moments of our couple chasing that high reminiscent of scenes from Requiem for a Dream and the drug taking in that. Can you tell us more about the planning and subsequent shooting of these?
Oh yes, Requiem for a Dream was up there in my references, for the pace of the editing, palette and textures. As with the dissolves that bring us out of Nostalgia, the rapid cuts that introduce Nostalgia became our editing language retroactively. Carter and I chose this manic device because, for Loli, using the drug is an impulsive act, one she does out of desperation to escape. By flashing macros of the prologue on the beach, our thinking was that we could re-infuse the idea of ‘original bliss’ into each high. No matter the memory, Loli is always trying to return to a more idyllic time with Adam.
As the writer you can be autonomous, but once you become the director you can’t. You still have to steer the boat, but in relation to the current.
Virtually everything you see mirrors the storyboards except for the scene where Adam and Loli intimately do Nostalgia together. In the script, the moment was balletic and romantic. Adam was to drizzle the serum along Loli’s arm, slowly servicing her into a quiet high. Now it’s an urgent, passionate affair. In rehearsal I brought Devon and Dylan to set, just the three of us. At first, their physical chemistry was stifled. Dylan asked if I could leave the room for the two of them to work through this scene in private. I remember sitting on the street outside a tiny tin house in Central L.A., baking in the sun. After forty minutes, Devon and Dylan emerged, a sweaty mess. “We have something to show you,” they said. I sat in the corner of the bedroom and watched them make out and do Nostalgia for hours in the frenzy you see on screen now. Dylan explained that Loli was having her version of makeup sex. The scene needed to be fast, heated and messy because Loli didn’t want to think about what she was doing. Given the preceding tension, I think she was right. It worked. It was natural this way.
As the writer you can be autonomous, but once you become the director you can’t. You still have to steer the boat but in relation to the current. Once you bring real people together, you surrender your characters to the actors. Devon and Dylan became the keepers of Adam and Loli. The relationship became theirs. They chose their coping mechanisms. Once Devon and Dylan discovered their tone and pace here, I choreographed their movements. All that survived of my storyboard for this scene was their final position. It was important for me that they land configured as Antonio Canova’s statue of Cupid and Psyche, for beauty’s sake, but also for the secret symbolism. The myth of Cupid and Psyche (which involves a drop of oil) teaches the lesson that without trust there can be no love, and more specifically, according to philosopher Erich Neumann, that a woman must journey from her unconscious dependence on a man and accept the monster he hides within.
The film is beautiful as well as haunting, can you talk to us about developing the look and tone of the piece?
I wrote Mirage with the camera already in mind. Before even speaking with DPs, I had mapped out a cinematic language that corresponded certain lenses, movements, palettes, angles to the different temporal fields. Corey Waters clicked with my thinking right away, built on it and improvised beautifully within our framework on set. We shot on an Alexa Mini and chose Cooke S4 lenses because we wanted a crunchy, crispy definition in skin without losing the creamy-dreaminess of the feeling we were trying to capture. We hung out mostly with the 18mm on handheld for the present timelines to create a raw, immersive presence; a sense of here-ness. For past timelines we see-sawed into the extremes of 14mm or 75mm on Steadicam to take us out of reality, push us deep in or pull us far out. We thought a lot about what memories look like when are they preserved in a compression and when are they ballooned with exaggeration. When are they clear and when are they smeared?
In terms of colouring Mirage brings us through sharp overexposure to yellow dreamlike hues and then an overarching darkness.
In our limited realm of control, yellow became a cue for Loli’s solo bliss. You’ll see it in the light of the memory where Loli sweet-talks Adam’s friend Jesse in the bathroom. You’ll see it in the present timeline’s blocking, where Loli is framed in the yellow-painted kitchen during her brief obliviousness to her crime. Meanwhile, Adam, who knows the truth, is framed as a silhouette in an unlit blue adjacent room. Overexposure carved out whitespace in pleasant memories, helping us create a dystopian sense of isolation. We didn’t want anything to feel too distinct in time or place. Loli’s experience should float in this dreamlike unknown. In the final scene, the overexposure hopefully changes our understanding of the bedroom we’ve come to know. Waking up, Loli suddenly doesn’t remember anything. Soaked in bright white light, her surroundings take on an almost clinical simplicity. Darkness, of course, is the foil to this. Backlights and blackness signaled bad decisions and the unknown embodied by the character’s perspective.
Alongside your beautifully paired score Mirage’s sound design focuses on minute creaks of floorboards and gentle breathing cadences, could you explain the narrative role of increasing the sonic prominence of these sounds?
When sound designer Tristan Baylis and I discussed the sonic vision, we focused on rooting the design in Loli’s perception. Our philosophy predicated on a delineation of her ‘now’ and ‘then’. The present timeline adheres to a visceral sense of reality, whereas the past is more expressionistic. While the score mostly lives in memory, I didn’t want to glorify the present relationship. It was important for me that this timeline felt hyperreal. What does it feel like — and so what does it sound like — to be at home alone with your lover once the saccharine haze fades out? What’s left but just two humans in an empty physicality? We had to construct a sense of reality because this couple wasn’t facing it themselves. Sound design was one of the ways we could do this. Heightened textures make the present feel immersive. Breath enhances Adam and Loli’s corporeality. Creaking floorboards and motorbikes outside elicit a sense of dilapidation (plus, those floorboards also infuse genre cliches of thriller/horror to emphasize the predatory nature of Adam).
Through the construction of this duality, I wanted to comment on the nature of now, how its significance is entirely altered simply by its link to or severance from the past.
For me, sound design is like another score. Tristan and I spent the greater part of an hour just timing and shaping those shower drips. The car keys you hear beep in the garage after Loli recites the Waiting for Godot line about “going deaf” contributes to the surreal logic of her memories. Together, I wanted the sound design and score to function as a continuous concerto, melding the story into one ‘smoothly chaotic’ trip.
The film’s 15 minute runtime takes us through what seems to be a long drawn-out period for the couple. How did you work on the pace to bring us to that final scene?
Designing the chronology was quite a little hair-pulling feat! I printed out the script, cut it out and created a number of designs on my bedroom floor during development. Lots of diagrams too. Mirage functions on two temporal fields, each with different paces and directions. The present timeline is in chronological continuity over the course of a single day as perceived by Loli (at one point, Loli blacks out and forgets the evening but soon re-experiences it when she gets high on that lost memory). The past timeline spans years and sequences memories in reverse. Nostalgia serves as the portal into Adam and Loli’s history, offering glimpses into memories that, save for the prologue, begin in the recent past and recede in drastic temporal leaps backwards.
The final memory sequence sees Loli get high on a memory, in which she gets high on a memory, in which she gets high on a memory. We journey back in time to her first high, all while she’s overdosing on Nostalgia back home in bed where we left her. The final scene opens precisely where the present began at the beginning of the film. It’s just one day later but now skewed by the audience’s memory of what’s transpired and Loli’s obliviousness to it. Through the construction of this duality, I wanted to comment on the nature of now, how its significance is entirely altered simply by its link to or severance from the past.
Mirage is incredibly accomplished for your first film, what have you been working on since and what’s next for you in the world of film?
Thank you! My heart was really in this one, and I was lucky enough to work with people whose hearts were just as deep. For me, the limitations of COVID were a blessing because I produced Mirage while only phoning into NYU. After the film wrapped I was back in the classroom. The following couple of years, I focused on shorts with much smaller scopes. Where Mirage came out naturally, I made student films to experiment with my voice and to venture out of my comfort zone stylistically. I asked myself — Can I do humor? Can I write with no dialogue? How about ensemble casts? Am I a minimalist or a maximalist, a realist or surrealist? In all of this experimentation, I found a lot of the answers I was looking for. Self-discovery as an artist is an ever-evolving pursuit though.
These days, I’ve been writing the feature I plan to direct in the coming years. I’m also directing music videos and aim to build a career in the commercial space, simultaneous to the narrative world. On the side, I EP other shorts, connecting the network I’ve been blessed to work with so far!
