Director's Statement

I envisioned Birthday Party to be both a visual experience as well as an atmospheric mystery about a young woman’s odd behavior.

I wanted to make a film that would require the audience to actively interpret what is happening in order to lend meaning to the story.  Has the young woman flown the cuckoo’s nest?  Is she a social recluse?  Why has she draped a black veil over a globe – is she mourning something that has happened to the world-at-large, or is she commenting on the state of her own personal world?  As writer and director, I have a definite sense of what is actually occurring; however, different viewers may interpret the film in different ways.

In Birthday Party, I also wanted to pay homage to the films that have influenced me to pursue filmmaking.  The nod to Citizen Kane is obvious and unmistakable.  On a subtler note, the fact that the young woman is named Laura, collects a “paper menagerie,” and folds a paper unicorn is an allusion to Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie and the 1950 film adaptation of the play.  In addition, the origami unicorn is meant to carry the enigmatic resonance that it does in Blade Runner.

The teasing Southern belle accent, which the young woman resorts to occasionally, is a suggestive take on Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind.  At an emotionally poignant moment, the woman utters a romantic line, which fans of Casablanca will be intimately familiar.  Also, the young woman’s relationship to her plant is reminiscent of the relationship between Tom Hank’s character and Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away.

Finally, the montage sequence featuring the young woman and a boiling kettle is my small tribute to Sergei Eisenstein and his groundbreaking theory on montage (as famously illustrated in his pioneering film, Battleship Potemkin).  Eisenstein posited that two dissimilar images intercut together can create a third meaning.  In Birthday Party, the young woman looking outside her window intercut with a steaming kettle yields a dramatic new impression—a young woman screaming in turmoil.

In short, I made Birthday Party to show an imaginative story on screen that I have not personally seen before, while simultaneously paying homage to some of the great films and filmmakers that have inspired me.