I wrote the script for What You Wish For at the end of 2018. Soon after this another film I was deep into pre-production with fell through - the third one for me in about five years. In the summer of 2019 I decided to stop asking permission from other people and produce What You Wish For myself. With my wife’s help we began the process of raising money, and a couple of years later we had a modest budget. I found an excellent production services team in Bogota, enlisted a couple of other producers to help and in the fall of 2021 during the pandemic we began production. I’ve always felt that a genre film is the best Trojan horse to express philosophical or societal ideas. Before writing the screenplay I was struck by an overwhelming feeling that the powerful in America had become completely uninterested in the world as a community. In particular I was stunned by the inaction concerning climate change, and when I thought about it further, it was clear to me that greed was the reason for all of it. The film’s location is never mentioned in the story, I wanted ambiguity in where it is actually happening, but the production was shot over 23 days in a Colombian town three hours south of Bogota. One of our principal cast dropped out days before production, there was no hot water in our lodgings and Nick Stahl had a 2-foot iguana as a roommate. Some of my favorite films are the ones that feel like a spell. You enter them and become immersed in their bubble. I really felt this story needed to be told in that same way. And so the cinematographer and I limited our focal lengths, the production designer and I designed a color chart, where each color has a meaning, and the composers and I found a way to use the same musical theme with variation. All of these techniques go a long way to create a unique and consistent identity. What You Wish For is a noir thriller and also a morality tale. It has a point to make about greed, but hopefully not didactically, rather simply through the story we have told. Read less