What exactly is a photo novel?
It is a story that is told with photographs as well as words. You can read it as a book but also follow the through-line of the photographs. You can also read individual pages almost like poetry.
Is this a brand new format? What sort of appeal does it have to readers?
It isn’t, but I had never seen the format before to be honest. Someone told me there was a Star Trek comic book-type thing in this style in the 1980s, but I didn’t base the idea on anything I have ever seen. It really grew organically out of the story, and out of the style of writing I was using which is all about taking us deep inside the head of the protagonist Thomas Dedal (played by Friels), who is a corporate burn-out who decides he needs to re-discover the spark inside. I think the reason that some people seem to really fall in love with Modern Odysseus is that it is like a movie with most of the frames missing – and you can fill in the missing frames! This is a very expressionistic story, and the images are a springboard for thoughts and meditations just as much as the words. So it’s prose, but also a sensory experience.
What appeals to you about the book format?
In filmmaking, especially documentary making, the challenge is conveying meaning in a few images. I love the fact that an image can start thoughts as much as a word, and this book has always been so sort of cheeky and wild that it made sense to tell it in its own unique language. The story just seemed to scream out for scribbling outside the margins, so I went for it and worried about the consequences of promoting an unheard of format later – that’s how I seem to do most things for better or worse.
How did you come up with the idea for the project?
The story of this corporate guy Thomas Dedal who sort of has a nervous breakdown is inspired by my Dad’s experiences in the corporate world. That’s not to say he had an experience like the one in this book, but he is a very unique person who I always sensed in my childhood had moments of struggling with the way things are done in that world. It is a brutal place and I sort of took in a lot of the milieu of the book through osmosis and wanted to represent it satirically in this story. I actually first wrote what has become Modern Odysseus when I was in high school, quite obsessively, and it was my way of emotionally working through my parents' separation. I have developed it into a photo novel over the time that I’ve made my film Darling! It kept growing legs and as the text became more and more flowing and we went deeper into Thomas’s mind, I thought I should keep breaking the rules. That was when I began to imagine film frames through the story. I wrote it as a screenplay too but then I thought – maybe something in between would work really well for this!