DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
SOMEONE ELSE was loosely inspired by a re-viewing of Claude Chabrol’s 1959 film LES COUSINS. I borrowed the plot skeleton from Chabrol’s film—shy, studious young man visits his decadent playboy cousin in the big city—and came up with a new story that would allow me to explore some of my own pet themes and personal obsessions.
When people would ask what I was working on, I'd tell them a little about the plot and throw in something like: So basically it's about a good Asian boy and a bad Asian boy... People who didn't know me well would ask, Which one are you? Both, I'd reply--and neither, since the script wasn't directly autobiographical. But "both" was probably closer to the truth. When I started writing, I thought it was a story about the conflict between two very different young men, but before long I realized I was actually writing about different sides of my own character.
Yeats observed, “We make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Looking back on my twenties, I saw there was a quarrel taking place inside me that mirrored the split between Jamie and Will. (Now that I’m in my forties, I’m no longer troubled by the idea that we’re all made up of conflicting and contradictory impulses, that we’re different people at different times of the day. But it was the source of some agitation when I was younger.) I hope audiences will see something familiar in Jamie’s struggle to reconcile his different selves, his quest to exchange one identity for another.
When people would ask what I was working on, I'd tell them a little about the plot and throw in something like: So basically it's about a good Asian boy and a bad Asian boy... People who didn't know me well would ask, Which one are you? Both, I'd reply--and neither, since the script wasn't directly autobiographical. But "both" was probably closer to the truth. When I started writing, I thought it was a story about the conflict between two very different young men, but before long I realized I was actually writing about different sides of my own character.
Yeats observed, “We make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Looking back on my twenties, I saw there was a quarrel taking place inside me that mirrored the split between Jamie and Will. (Now that I’m in my forties, I’m no longer troubled by the idea that we’re all made up of conflicting and contradictory impulses, that we’re different people at different times of the day. But it was the source of some agitation when I was younger.) I hope audiences will see something familiar in Jamie’s struggle to reconcile his different selves, his quest to exchange one identity for another.