Hebron Simckes Joffe
 11 Questions with Hebron Simckes Joffe. A WILDsound SUMMER 2009 Short Screenplay Finalist 1. What is your screenplay about? My screenplay is about a phenomenon in which two individuals named Alice and Jim meet in their recurring dreams of each other even though they never met in reality. Jim dreams of killing his "beautiful nightmare" and she dies in real life, half way across the world. 2. Why did you decide to write this screenplay? I have always been fascinated by dreams. I combined my interest in dreams with the notion of the butterfly effect without our collective unconscious and added an element of "the illusion of doubles." It was the intrigue of a love story with fantastic and dark elements, approached from a phenomenological perspective, that interested me. 3. How long have you been writing screenplays? I have been writing dramatic dialogue since I was a child. I started by speaking short haiku-like statements, which were generally interpretations of phenomena such as the sun rising, the sky filing up with clouds or the bathtub's drain being connected to the water of the ocean. I wrote dialogue poetry in middle-school and adapted my first dialogue poem to the stage when I was in eighth grade. The play, which was titled "The End," won grand prize at Yale's first annual October Playwriting festival for high-school students and was performed. I continued my interest in dramatic arts at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where I majored in Film & TV Production. My recent screenplay "Hit and Run" was a 2007 WildSound finalist. I am delighted to have "Two Lives" considered for the 2009 WildSound festival! 4. What film have you seen the most in your lifetime? I have seen "Exotica," by Atom Egoyan, more times than any other movie. 5. What artist in the industry would you love to work with? I would love to work with Tetsuya Nakashima and Wong Kar Wai. I would also love to work with Gen Sekiguchi and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. 6. Who was your hero growing up? My hero growing up was Leonard Cohen as well as Big Daddy Kane (a mixture of both of them). 7. Ideally, where would you like to be in 5 years? In five years I would like to be living part-time in North America and part-time in Japan, directing movies,music videos, commercials, stage-plays and teaching. 8. Describe your process; do you have a set routine, method for writing? My process is very organic; I treat each project with an entirely different mind-set. I go into each venture with an open mind in order to discover the needs of each. Therefore, some projects rely on more rules than others. Generally speaking I would consider myself more "postmodern" than anything else only because I do believe in plurality of approaches. 9. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about? I heard amazing things about the group running the festival and was impressed and the level of audience feedback at WildSound. 10. What influenced you to enter the WILDsound Script Contest? I liked the idea of the contest being monthly, as opposed to a once-a-year thing, so there would not be a long delay in hearing the results. I also liked the idea of getting good-quality feedback as part of the submission fee. But the main thing is that there was a chance that the script would actually be read out-loud by actors on stage to an industry audience, thereby giving the script real exposure. 11. Any advice or tips you’d like to pass on to other writers? Imagine your film, meditate on it, and let it woo you into a state of hypnosis before you begin re-writing it.
Hebron Simckes Joffe
|
FESTIVAL INFO
CREATIVE IDEAS
