Little Man: A Film That Starts at the Funeral and Ends at Birth

Most of the ideas in this drawer have spaceships or time machines in them. This one has a parking lot, a dinner table and a nursery at three in the morning. It's the smallest idea I've got, and probably the heaviest.

Heads up

This one is about grief and the death of a child.

The premise

David Chen is standing at his son's funeral while people tell him how sorry they are, and he can barely hear them. Then the film steps backwards.

A driving lesson in an empty lot. A graduation dinner where David goes quiet. A bedtime story about a scared dragon his son names Scared-y Rex. A first word. And finally a new father alone with a baby at three in the morning, whispering that nobody gave him a manual.

It's told one real-time scene at a time, from the end to the beginning. You meet Marcus as a young man you've already lost, and every scene after that hands you a younger version of him.

Where it came from

The seed was a note in my ideas folder with a working title, Reverse Time's Father: a film that opens with a son's death and plays in reverse chronological segments. The note is short, but it already had the part I like best, a plan for how the film should look as it runs backward:

Stretch of his life	What the film looks like
The recent past	Destruction, landslides, things falling apart
Adolescence	Turbulence, change, him pulling away
Childhood	Growth, wonder, pure connection
Birth	Pure light, everything still possible

So the images get gentler as the story gets closer to the beginning. That's the trick of it. The further back you go, the happier it gets, and the more it hurts, because you already know where it ends.

The note also had the ending. The last scene is David's first quiet vigil over his sleeping newborn. Then the film cuts straight back to the funeral, and you're standing there with everything you just watched.

How it's built

The plan on the Little Man page keeps it tight:

• Two main characters, David and Marcus, with Marcus's mom, Sarah, close by.
• Quick abstract cuts break into the scenes to show what David is feeling. That's where the landslides and the light come in.
• Each scene plays in real time. No montage. You sit with them for the whole driving lesson.

Five scenes are written as dialogue: the driving lesson, the graduation dinner, the bedtime story, the first word and the first nights home. They're posted on that page in the order they'd play.

What's broken so far

Writing it down in one place made the problems easy to see:

• Marcus's age doesn't add up. The graduation dinner makes him 21 and out of college, but my notes have him dying at 19.
• The first two scenes are out of order. In a film that runs backwards, the graduation has to come before the driving lesson, not after.
• I haven't decided how long it is. Early notes call it a feature. The page calls it a short. The runtime decides how many scenes it can hold.
• The two scenes that matter most don't exist yet: the funeral it opens and closes on, and the last conversation between David and Marcus.

Note

That last one is the real work. Everything else is fixable with a pencil. The funeral is the scene the whole film hangs on.

Where it fits

If you've read When I Was Old, you'll see the same itch. It's a man going back over his life, except here nobody gets to change anything. There's no machine, just the order the scenes play in.

It's also a good example of how seeds grow in this drawer. The dream I wrote down as Space Poem turned into a whole book, The Starship Ginsberg. This one went from a paragraph to five scenes. I've got the rest of the seeds in Story Seeds.