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About | Director's Notes & Writer's Note | Beyond The ShortDirector's Notes & Writer's Note
Writer's Note:
Perhaps the Beatles said it best when they succinctly defined humankind‘s greatest desire in a hit song — All You Need Is Love. Unfortunately, those four charming Brits didn‘t leave us a roadmap for exactly how to find the love that we all so desperately need. To complicate matters, it seems that just about everyone has his/her own notion of what love is, let alone how to get it. The terminology inherent in modern romance provided me with a good jumping off point for the story — people go crazy for one another, their hearts ache and, ultimately, love hurts. Love Me Tender is the story of a girl who takes the emotional pain she experiences in the trials and tribulations of college courtship and expresses them in a very literal, very messy fashion. Indeed, Emma is the quintessential bleeding heart romantic. She fights the good fight to keep romance alive in a time when chivalry is so callously labeled dead — and she‘s not afraid to get her hands dirty in the process. In the end, Love Me Tender is a tale simultaneously horrifying and hilarious, unsettling and touching, tragic and romantic. Young or old, woman or man — I like to think that there‘s a hopeless romantic in us all.
Forever a Lover and a Fighter, Director's Note (from March 2009):
This was supposed to be a film about a sailor. When I started the semester, I had written a script about a lonely sailor on shore leave trying to find the girl he loved before he left. It was a good script, but when I make a movie, the perfectionist in me won‘t just settle for a ”good“ script. When I make a film, it consumes me. I eat, breathe, and lose sleep over it everyday for at least a year. It has to be a real ”homerun“ of a script. Thinking back on my script about the sailor, it actually is remarkably similar to the story of Love Me Tender. A helpless romantic journeys to find love, but ends up not finding it. Kind of a downer, right? My sailor script was. But for some reason you don‘t get that feeling from reading Love Me Tender. It‘s a fun story. It‘s clever, it makes you want to shut your eyes- but the kind of shutting your eyes where you still peek through your fingers anyway. Call it an X factor, call it tension, good story structure and complex characters, or call it the talent of the screenwriter- but the one thing I know is that I felt a magic reading this script that I wasn‘t feeling when I read my sailor script. When you try to make something too perfect, sometimes you risk cutting its heart out. I turned my sailor script into a story by my head, but I am determined to keep Love Me Tender a story from my heart. Emma and I are both similar in the sense that we are hopeless perfectionists that try to chart our lives on a map, but if it‘s one thing I‘ve learned from Emma‘s story, it‘s that when life takes you off the map, its not worth killing yourself over. When I approached Brian McAuley, the writer, about making Love Me Tender into a short film, it wasn‘t what I had originally intended to make for my thesis film, but there‘s no doubt in my mind that it was the right thing to do. In the end, Love Me Tender was the script I was trying to write all along. My best, © 2009 - Matthew Morgenthaler |