on directing actors

I Nearly Lost You — Feature Screenplay

from the writer, for the director

There is something a script does that I didn’t fully understand until I heard it read aloud.

In the table reads for I Nearly Lost You, the actresses playing Rachel and Ann made a discovery independently of any direction: they began playing, beneath every surface exchange, a private knowing. Not a certainty; more like a recognition that neither character allows herself to name. Each woman sensing, from their very first scene together, that something between them is not accidental. That this stranger is not a stranger.

They held that subtext quietly, underneath the dialogue, through the entire first half of the film. And what happened was extraordinary: every scene gained a second layer of meaning that no amount of visual storytelling could manufacture. The comedy became more tender. The friction became more devastating. The silences filled up.

The reveal at the midpoint — when the knowing finally breaks the surface and the shame rushes in — landed with a force none of us expected. Because the audience hadn’t been told what the characters already felt. They’d been watching two people perform the careful, painful work of not knowing what they knew.

An audience on a second viewing would see the entire film differently.

I offer this not as direction but as discovery.

Writer’s statement →