The documentary short The Hemingway captures co-director Patrick Sean O’Brien’s life with ALS. O’Brien reached out to longtime collaborator Evan Mathis with a script asking for help bringing it to fruition. The pair spoke with Deadline’s Matt Carey at Contenders Documentary about their short, and Mathis explained how they acknowledged ALS’ effect on bodily functions without showing graphic detail on screen.
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“The hard challenge was to try and tell the story in all of its sort of brutal, veristic truth without making it disgusting,” Mathis said. “As much of the subject matter in this film could be very easily turned dark and kind of disgusting, Patrick’s sense of humor and his joy of life, I really wanted to make sure that that shined through.”
J.R. Reed speaks as O’Brien’s voice in the film. For the Contenders panel, O’Brien used his digital voice synthesizer to answer questions.
“Using a synthetic voice is a curse and a beautiful blessing,” O’Brien said. “When I was still able to speak, I would dictate stories and eat Lindt chocolate balls. Those were the days.”
O’Brien continued to elaborate on the developments that led to Reed as his speaking voice.
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“Evan was initially thinking of using his own voice,” O’Brien said. “Then when artificial intelligence dropped, we didn’t spend as much time in that world as we might have, because we were settled on a human. J.R. was the perfect fit. I felt early on that we would need a human voice.”
Mathis was able to use visual effects to represent O’Brien’s spirit. One sequence transports O’Brien, still in bed, to the forest showing — at least metaphorically — that he is not confined. He explained using iPhone’s LiDAR Scanner to capture O’Brien in his bed and transpose it to a different background.
“The idea was that the wall breaks away behind him and Patrick’s mind, basically, is able to elevate him out of his room in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and take him back to where his heart longs to be, which is New York City,” Mathis said. “In the city of the future, as we rise up on the skyscraper, we put a model of Katz’s deli, which was Patrick’s favorite place to eat a pastrami sandwich. And as we go by, you’ll see one of the Easter eggs that we put in the film, that LiDAR scan that we used of Patrick in the forest is also inside the Katz deli.”
That sequence, like the entire film, represents O’Brien’s continued efforts while coping with the realities of ALS, said Mathis.
“One of the things that’s so special about Patrick is that his wonderful, brilliant, creative mind is still all gas no breaks, even inside a body that doesn’t do what his brain wants anymore,” Mathis said. “For those that don’t have the experience of someone with ALS in their life, it really shows that there’s a lot more going on than initially you would see just from the outside.”
Check out the panel video above.