I’m thrilled that you are about to read this script. You may want to take in this note now to tee up your read, and then come back to it again afterward in reflection. Actually, I don’t know why I’m trying to micro-manage you. Well, I do know why - it’s because of patterns I learned in an effort to survive an extreme childhood. But you’ll soon be halfway through this screenplay and confronting your own shadow, too.

This movie came to me in a flash. A year and some months ago, I looked up at the sky and was suddenly struck with an idea. It was an entire story arc that I was meant to intuit and figure out. It felt kind of mystical and crazy, and it took me a year to understand what this film was asking to become. It has become Caterpillar.

My favorite storytellers, like Stanley Kubrick or Charlie Kauffman, create work that somehow says everything that there is to say about the idea that they're taking on. Their stories are dripping with every possible notion about its theme - like how The Shining channels the haunting totality of the past, or how Adaptation constructs endless layers around the concept of adaptation. I want to do that with this movie and the theme of change.

Caterpillar is about change on a few levels: personal, collective, historical, biological, spiritual, technological. It tests what it would take for the most unchangeable archetype - the tyrant - to change. If someone like this can change, then so can we all. But to what degree can people actually change? And why has our species always been so attracted to change? And what will tomorrow’s changes do to us? And what even is change?

Beyond that, I want to make a movie that announces exactly where we are headed; something that evokes the inevitable infinity mirror of technology and humanity. It is destined to be both the birth and death of us. I want to make a movie that speaks to this time that we are in now; we have lost the plot as a culture, a nation, and a planet. It's an era of villains, so much so that no one can even agree on who the villains are anymore. This movie is about how we got here, and what happens when you don’t do the work: the self-examination, the self-compassion, the forgiveness, the empathy, the turning to love. Leo Hopper is the world today and we, like him, have some major healing to do.

There are a lot of things that I want to stuff into this movie but ultimately, I just want to make something that people really really want to watch. I grew up enchanted by Spielberg and the feeling of big feelings. I love an original movie with a capital m, and I know that people miss them. So let’s make one. Let’s trojan horse an art film inside of a blockbuster. Let’s have people come for the spectacle, but leave thinking about their own lives. Let’s give them something new.

Caterpillar will be new in that it’s a singular tone, but it plays with genre conventions. My series, Search Party, was an homage to genre. It paired extreme dark and light in equal measure, as each season took on a new genre. I want this film to be an evolution of that approach. This is an epic and ironic journey to Hell and back (and back to Hell again, oops) that believes in the total emotional reality of its funny but difficult characters. The screams are as loud as the laughs, the stakes couldn't be higher, and the twists are never what you think they’ll be.

This is the recipe for a cultural moment - like The Substance, Saltburn, or Everything Everywhere All At Once. Today, movies come and go, and the goal has become bigger. We have to seize the public consciousness. We can’t just make movies anymore, we have to make culture. I want Caterpillar to take social media by storm, make younger audiences go to the theater, and be a contender on the awards circuit. It’s provocative, it’s iconic, it’s in step with the zeitgeist, and it’s built for movie stars. I have a powerful feeling about this film.

I want to work with people who not only get what this is, but what this can be. I want to share the vision with collaborators who have an instinct for how to make this script, film, and packaging as undeniable as possible. I'm eager for smart notes and strong plans. I want an honest and ambitious partner. And I believe that there will be something very good waiting for us on the other side. But first, we will have to surrender, and that is no easy feat.