Director & Writer Nicholas Tomnay – What You Wish For starring Nick Stahl

Nicholas Tomnay talks about his latest film “What You Wish For” which opens in theaters May 31st, 2024. Tickets are available at: https://www.magnetreleasing.com/whatyouwishfor/

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

I wrote the script for What You Wish For at the end of 2018. Soon after this another film I was deep into a pre-production which 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 raising money, and a few 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 production began

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 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 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 had a meaning, and the composers and I found a way to use the same musical theme with a 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.

– Nicholas Tomnay

“What You Wish For” which opens in theaters May 31st, 2024. Tickets are available at: https://www.magnetreleasing.com/whatyouwishfor/

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