Writer/director Colin West brings us a hopeful, yet surreal sci-fi comedy/drama with Linoleum.
Director’s Statement:
It’s hard to summarize in a few paragraphs the nature in which this story came to be. I don’t say this to be enigmatic or heady, but rather because I just can’t totally figure it out myself. To steal an oft-stated phrase from the film, “It’s just not that simple”. The script was written over the course of many years and, and in a way became a kind of repository for my ideas at the time which all seemed to center on themes of identity, loss, and, for lack of a better term, cosmically-existential-brain-loops.
I can say, though, that the first spark came in 2015 when I visited my grandfather soon after my grandmother had passed away. He looked at me and said “Hi Michael.” Michael is my father’s name. Watching my grandfather’s slow slide into dementia from that point onward I witnessed his subjective history start blending, overlapping, and becoming a kind of array of memories once-lived (or seen on TV). In his mind, reality seemed to have different rules – so out-of-this world they almost felt like science fiction. I particularly wondered about what it must have been like for him to experience the memories of his late wife whom he’d started dating when he was 16 and been married to for over 60 years.
And so, armed with a kind of narrative framework rooted in an unreliable, subjective mind, the task at hand became clear and the methodology for concocting this story revealed itself — to set the film in a distinct tone rather than a defined time. It would be a process of discovery and investigation centered on emotional relevance rather than clear narrative cohesion. These tonal threads braided themselves into a fantastical tale that weaved a lifetime of significant generational moments into one sort of cosmic tapestry of life events as someone might remember them, rather than how they happened in reality. And so it became a unique story in terms of plot, one full of magical realism, situational humor, and heartfelt family drama, and yet it was all grounded in the relationship between two people, a husband and wife, over the course of a lifetime.
