Live Show

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The line between the onscreen and offscreen is thinning. It’s getting harder to separate the virtual and the ‘real’. LiveShow is a film about entering a headspace where the onscreen and offscreen can no longer be separated.

Described by Academy Award Nominated Director Darren Aronofsky as ‘very clever and disturbing,’ it is a psychological thriller that contorts film form to immerse its audience in such a perspective.

Like so many people today, in a world of doom scrolling and a media landscape where the ‘real’ has become surreal, I have felt myself drawn into a desensitised state, feeling less and less in the face of ever more shocking things. Live Show takes this experience to its extreme. The dazed viewer, either in a voyeuristic fantasy or perhaps watching a real-life horrifying livestream, arrives at the most shocking and darkly satisfying experience possible: watching his own death.

In writing and directing Live Show, I hoped to expose the extremes of obsession, isolation and addiction possible in our relationship to technology. Yet, as the camera travels through the screen at the close, I want to leave the audience in a quieter, more transcendent space; in an experience of the reflective possibilities of film.