What would you do if you found out that your partner or spouse took medicine in order to intensify their feelings for you? Once the shock wears off, would you be able to let it go, or would the hurt be too insurmountable to ignore? In a world that feels like it’s growing more and more synonymous with all things Black Mirror, Jake Borelli’s IGNIS takes the lens of a romantic comedy but twists it with grounded emotion and confronts the audience with the dilemma of its characters. Can love be manufactured, and, if so, would it be considered too artificial or is there an upside lingering at intersection of science and romance?
One of the things that struck me immediately on my first watch of Borelli’s directorial debut is the opening montage. Even though IGNIS is about the thorny conversations that take place after one takes this newfangled drug, we see how the drug is created. There’s an optimism accompanying this process as Alexis Floyd’s “Lifted” plays in our ears. We automatically assume that this new medicine is a good thing–surely nothing bad will happen because of such a breakthrough…right? Jason and Camille, the couple at the heart of Borelli’s film, come face-to-face with the idea that a medicinal advancement might have more emotional side effects.
“The opening actually isn’t in the script at all,” Borelli admits. “From the very beginning, I was always fascinated by the actual drug trial itself, so I was curious about exploring the effects of the drug on Jason in a visceral and visual way. It went through several iterations, and we almost had this cold open with him walking down the street, coming home from work, and fully feeling elated and bubbly from this drug with this Carley Rae Jepsen-esque song playing as that all happened. We ended up cutting that to focus on what was in the script. I just started buy all this random medical supplies, which harkened back to my time on Grey’s [Anatomy], and I even called one of our medical advisors to see if she had a pill maker. I wanted to show this juxtaposition between the sterility of pharmaceutical companies and also the joy and the brightness that this drug is intended to bring to this person in terms of this feeling of love.”
Floyd, Borelli’s co-star from Grey’s for a number of seasons, lulls us into the exact right feeling with her song, and it sinks its hooks into our ears not unlike how a new feeling of excitement feels when you feel like you’ve found “the one.”
“Alexis was a PA on the film, and I asked her how hard it would be for her to write a song,” he says. “What she did really captures the bouncy, bubbly elation, and I had asked her to write me a mix between Carly Rae and Kesha’s “Your Love Is My Drug.” I love that our film has an original song that evokes that vibe, even if, on your first watch, you might not know how that connects to the plot until after you see the film.”
A compelling aspect to Borelli’s direction is how the humor at the beginning of the film settles and slowly evaporates as the dramatic stakes take hold. Britt Baron’s Camille and Karan Soni’s bestie Sam, banter and bicker about how this drug could actually be a good or a bad thing before the sudden arrival of Allen Leech’s Jason. Camille thought she had time to parse through her feelings but Cohn’s script doesn’t give her time to overthink alone, and she is forced to figure out her feelings in the moment. Borelli loved enhancing the comedy before the drama settles the narrative into overdrive.
“In terms of tone, I’ve always been obsessed with dramedies, and I love being able to mind the comedy out with this true-to-life dramatic situation,” he says. “Julie Cohn’s script that had baked into it. When I was fleshing out the Sam character, I was looking at the wider scope of how this drug is used–not only does it affect you in terms of synthetically making you feel love, but what are the reverberating effects of that on your life? If you can imagine being in love and constantly putting that energy out, that same energy is going to come back to you. We sort of hypothesized that Jason not only is in love with Camille, but because he has this energy in him, he’s more successful at work and people gravitate towards him. That brought us to Sam in the sense that Sam is Camille’s best friend, and he loves everything about her. With Sam being a single, gay guy who’s sort of stuck in this loop of trying to find love on apps like Hinge or Grindr, he becomes enamored with Jason too.”
Your eye will be drawn to the view from Jason and Camille’s apartment, and that was wholly intentional. The filmmaker knew exactly what he wanted in terms of how the space made the characters feel what was on the line.
“We shot this in a building right next to MacArthur Park, which overlooks beautiful Los Angeles, and that spot was very important to me from the beginning,” Borelli says. “It also stems from when we put the play up, because I was trying to amp the stakes for the actors as they play. There is a pace to this story–an urgency. One of the early images that I started instilling in these actors was that there’s almost a time bomb going on, and if Camille leaves, the relationship is over. If it doesn’t work out, your entire life is going to crumble, so I told her to imagine that she made it to this top form of life. You have the penthouse apartment, and your life has completely changed because of being in this relationship. If she walks away, she will also lose the life that she loves living, and when we were adapting the play into a film, I knew that I wanted it to be shot in a skyscraper. It had to be aspirational but also sterile, and this design has this almost skeletal overlay on it. It looked biological.”
As the fight continues to evolve and deepen, Borelli allows the camera to come physically closer to the couple experiencing this conflict. Are we a friend offering help? Are we someone on the sidelines witnessing this fight in a voyeuristic fashion? We are closest to them towards the film’s very end. You feel that tension about to erupt and it makes you look inward even more as the camera closes in on the actors’ faces.
“There’s that old adage in theater where if you get close to someone, you either need to slap them or kiss them, and we definitely wanted to play with that tension,” Borelli reveals. “The space was so big that we played with the blocking in terms of the distance between them–either when they are apart from each other or close to each other as a visual representation of how close they are to resolving this issue versus how close Camille is to leaving. The closest they ever are in the short is at the end when she is right at the door. There’s a chance she’s going to leave, which would crush Jason. Early on, that was one of the first places that I blocked, so we had bent over backwards to get this location and I had all these beautiful windows, but I knew it had to end by the door. Is Jason going to be able to get out of it?”
Every time I have seen IGNIS, my viewpoint on this situation has changed. The first time I was one person’s side, but, on my first rewatch, I felt the exact opposite in terms of whose side I was on. We are so used to wanting things to be black-and-white–we are comfortable in that binary of “what is right and what is wrong,” and our society almost always wants us to take umbrage with conflict itself.
“Even the crew was talking about it,” he says. “They were talking about whether they would take the drug or if they found out that their partner was taking it. It was so fascinating to hear the discourse even amongst the crew in terms of the ethical side of this medication. We shot in order, and you could see the crew learning more about the story as the shooting went and then you could see their opinions starting to change. It’s been wild showing it to people and some of them are pissed at Jason. Some people are pissed that we even gave him an ounce of justification. Others are glad that we did because they could see why this drug would be important for someone like him if this was a physiological issue.”
Borelli leaves us, the audience, in a vulnerable moment at IGNIS‘ end, and he revels in that tension with the audience.
“It brings people together or it shoves them apart,” Borelli says. “I love stories that bring that debate.”
IGNIS will next play LA Shorts International Film Festival in Program 38 on August 6th.
