Much like the screenplay from the previous year, Paradise also had three co-writers. Three teenage boys all of whom were top-notch English speakers and genuinely decent human beings. Remiz and Pavel grew up together and Artum was our workhorse. I don’t want to say too much about this dynamic and how it might land a long ethnic lines but it was an interesting group to be a part of. They were generally good kids. There was some lay back and laziness. But I think the script inevitably is successful and probably be amazing to look at and listen to.

How did we end up choosing science fiction? I asked the boys what general type of film they wanted to write and they decided science fiction was the most interesting to them. I asked them if we should have a beautiful woman space babe. They agreed 100%. I asked them if it should be full of violence and war. At first they thought this is how you were supposed to do it. Everyone knows you go off to space to shoot guns at each other. But then I asked them if we could maybe write a script that was anti-violence. Perhaps we could write a script that looked like it was going to go off but never actually does. What would they think if this was about cooperation and friendship between different species, different planets. They agreed it was a good idea.

I watched the 9 hour Beatles Restoration of the get back sessions. And George Harrison makes a comment that the way the Beatles would write a song would be to start completely simply and then make it more complex. I don’t know why we decided to create an entire language for the rival planetary group but we did. It was a trick how we created this language but it is a functioning language with a grammar. You can actually learn to speak Mutra. But we also needed a mythos. We needed a history. We needed to understand the socioeconomics of the planet and how they lived and what it might look like. And we talked about all of these things together and we created a wonderful species with four fingers and the greatest martial arts in the known universe.

Unfortunately I got sick at the end of the year, just a few sessions, maybe one or two weeks before the end of the year and we did not finish this play as a group. I was in the hospital for a while and I completed the writing of this play there. There is a famous story about the fellow I was sharing the room with. He was curious to hear what I was writing about and I told him that it was about people meeting God. He was blown away by the concept. He asked me to read him the entire script. And every time I would stop to take a break, he would ask me when they would meet God. And I said just wait wait, soon. And of course we finally got to the scene and when I finished reading that to him, it was the scene that I had just written, unfortunately he was already asleep and snoring.

I tried shopping the play and didn’t experience anything except that the movie Battleship had aliens with four fingers and a double amputee for a hero. Not that I take these things personally. The original scenario for Pod Kablukom got reimagined by Russian television where the physicality of the Russians and the frivolity of the Americans decides the story. Their American however already speaks Russian so there’s that.

There was a flaw in the original play. I didn’t see it until later. It only made sense if the aliens understood they were being recorded. So they said some things specifically so the turncoat spy would hear it. I needed this moment to be well illustrated. Perhaps it didn’t really matter and no one would notice. But I think it should be at least a little bit of an Easter egg or, we don’t believe them either. To this day, I’m still never sure if I’ve gotten it right or not but it’s better. But also, the last time I read through paradise, I decided to add a few lines of text about next time, leave the fish alone and that nobody likes carnivores hanging around.

Also during the Utopian fiction year of the upcoming elections books, I serialized most of paradise but not all of it.

Is it a good film? I say it is. Is it a perfect film? There is a little bit of dialogue in the beginning that I have because it is exactly the boys talking. A lot of their reactions are in this. We also played to make a movie that they would truly love to see and most of the themes we came up with made them very happy. And at the time of the writing, Megan Fox was the girl we would ask to go swimming with.

Do you need to learn to speak Mutra? No. It’s meant to be spoken with subtitles explaining what’s being said. Our only point is that if you listen very closely, it is a language. Words and concepts repeat and you can catch the rhythm of what’s being said. I say it’s cool and yes, it is pronounceable.

I think Paradise is a very rich movie. It can be as fantastically photographed with CGI background as you’d like but in the end, even with the presence of aliens, it is what you might call a human drama. I think what this means is that inevitably, there must be a part of us that understands we’re supposed to share the universe and not overwhelm it and tried to take it over. The humans in this case never had any chance to win it on a straight fight. And perhaps that was the thing necessary to make them reasonable. Perhaps we all need to be a little more humble so that we can all be a little more reasonable.

I like the message, I like the film and I like the story. I like it as a science fiction film going against type. I like that it’s a story about the possibility of peace. That would be paradise.