Flat Love: The Idea.

It all began with an application to the New York State Council of the Arts for a film production grant. My sponsors were again the guys at FLUX FACTORY, who had supported my previous short Bedford. I applied to NYSCA (http://www.nysca.org/) with a project titled Spiritu, about a mischievous atheist ghost who refuses to accept his death.

Six months later, I received a letter announcing that I was awarded with the total amount of my request: $15,000. It was the largest sum I'd ever gotten for a project so I couldn't be happier. However, by the time the NYSCA grant arrived, my initial enthusiasm in Spiritu had started to melt. The screenplay wasn't finished; I was having a hard time finding an ending to the story. In short, I was stuck.

One night, while I was surfing the internet and avoiding my writing duties, I found a website announcing a multidisciplinary art contest on Don Quijote, the universal masterpiece of Miguel de Cervantes. All kind of artists were invited to create a new piece (literature, music, dance, painting, film, you name it) based on any of the themes of the book: reality vs. fantasy, adventurous life, utopia, the ideal of justice, madness, etc. But the theme that hit me unexpectedly was platonic love: Does perfect love only exist in our imagination? Rapidly I wrote on a piece of paper: "He was in love but she was flat". 

The idea was: two people are in love but one lives in a three dimensional world and the other is two-dimensional. Unfortunately I couldn't apply for the "Don Quijote" contest because the deadline was due in only a few days. But no matter, it gave me a perfect excuse for a fresh start (with a muse called Dulcinea).