Chimera

Chimera arrived as something of a fever dream: an idea about crimes that went unpunished, and a detective in the future willing to go to extraordinary lengths to solve a series of murders. I shared it with my friend Tyler Hynes, and we spent roughly six months developing it through conversations.

What interested me was the feeling of the world as much as the premise. Of the personal films I have made, Chimera feels particularly close to how I imagine a film of my own: its tone, its images, and the atmosphere that holds everything together. It became a way to follow that instinct through the entire process of making something.

I took on a large part of the filmmaking: shooting, composing the images, directing, producing, and editing. Tyler was an extraordinary partner. Alongside playing the lead, he developed and produced the film with me, edited, and brought directing notes that helped shape what we were making.

For the shoot and its planning, the core team was very small: Tyler, Jason Encabo, and me. Jason handled production sound and helped us on the ground. We also had a wider group of friends and collaborators whose work became essential as the film developed.

I wanted to give Tyler room to show a side of his work that some of his audience might not have seen before. He is an incredibly talented actor and was completely open to the journey. That trust made it possible to follow the material into unfamiliar and difficult places.

The bathtub scene was one of the moments that mattered most to me. The detective reaches the point of taking his own life, while the scene suggests that something larger is happening. I wanted the audience to feel that threshold without having it explained to them.

The performance had to carry the experience. Rather than answering every question, we could let the viewer fall into what was happening and begin to sense the mystery through Tyler’s character. Watching him inhabit that moment was fascinating, and it remains one of the images I return to when I think about the film.

We had scouted a motel we loved months before the shoot. When we tried to secure it, we discovered that the room was booked out for months. Suddenly, the location we had been planning around was unavailable, and we had very little time to find another.

I spent a day driving around the Mojave Desert looking for a replacement. It was stressful, and it was one of many reminders of how unpredictable production can be when you are directing, shooting, and helping produce at the same time.

We eventually rented a house rather than the old motel room we had imagined, and covered the space in plastic. That material became a motif within the film. We were responding to what we had, and discovering something through that response. Part of making Chimera was finding out what kind of filmmakers we were, and how resilient we could be when the plan changed.

The entity and the visual effects needed a wider team. Carlos and I spent months working through the details of the Sentient, and the VFX artists helped bring that work into the finished images. The shoot may have been small, but the completed film carries the effort of many people.

PilotPriest and AEPH brought another level of emotion through the score. Music and sound could reach something in the material that the images alone could not. That sense of empathy became an essential part of the film’s experience.

The whole project took about two years. It was rewarding, challenging, and deeply humbling. Filmmaking means trying to hold onto a vision while responding to real limitations and constant unknowns. I learned an enormous amount, and I am proud of everyone who helped bring it through.