On February 13th, 2025, I typed the last scene of my screenplay.
A wrongfully convicted man. A priest who knows the truth. A confession sealed by God and broken by guilt. I called it The 12:01 Stations. I started writing it in November of Grade 11. I finished it fifteen months later, across two academic years, somewhere between calculus problems and chemistry practicals.
I don’t know if it’s good. I know it’s done. And I know that finishing it required understanding something most people miss about the movies they watch: that what you’re seeing on screen is the last thing that got made. Everything real happened before the camera turned on.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Boy Who Needed Everything to Make Sense
I’ve always had an analytical mind. That’s not a compliment I’m paying myself it’s closer to a confession. I couldn’t just experience things. I needed to understand the machinery underneath them. Why did this work? What rule was being followed, or broken? Where does the load bear?
For a long time, movies were the only place this felt like a gift instead of a curse.
A film is a system. Every frame is a decision. The angle of a shot, the color of a room, the pause before a character speaks none of it is accidental. There’s a director somewhere who made a choice, and if you’re paying attention, you can reverse engineer what they were thinking. You can feel the intention underneath the image.
This is what people mean when they say cinema is an art form. Not that movies are pretty. That they’re argued. Every film is a director making a case to you about how the world works, using light and time and human faces as their evidence.
I found this intoxicating. Still do, on the days I can access it.
Dialogue Is Architecture
The first time I watched Pulp Fiction, I was probably too young to be watching Pulp Fiction. I didn’t understand everything that was happening. But I understood that something was being done.
What Tarantino did, and what I wouldn’t be able to articulate for years, is use non linear structure as meaning, not just technique. The events of Pulp Fiction don’t unfold chronologically because chronology isn’t what the movie is about. It’s about how we construct significance how the same moment hits differently depending on what you already know, what you’re still carrying, what you haven’t yet been told.
The ending, which is also the beginning, only works because you’ve already seen the middle, if we talk about Christopher Nolan most of his movies our confusing but this non linear structure is what we see in the 2000s film Memento coming back, Vincent Vega walking out of that dinner is either triumphant or tragic depending on when you arrived. and we are forces you to hold both at once.
But what got me even more than the structure was the dialogue. People talk about Tarantino’s dialogue like it’s decoration like the point is that his characters are funny or interesting or use obscure pop culture references. That’s missing it entirely.
His dialogue is architecture. It carries the weight of the scene. When Jules and Vincent debate the significance of a foot massage on their way to kill someone, the absurdity of the conversation against the gravity of what they’re about to do tells you everything about how these men, well nit everything but most of it.
Curiosity Is a Moral Stance
David Fincher gave me something harder to name.
Watch the opening of Zodiac. Or the first twenty minutes of Se7en. Or the way Gone Girl withholds and then reveals and then withholds again, making you realize that what you thought you understood was a construction, and so is everything else you believe.
Fincher is interested in a specific question: what does it cost you to need to know the truth?
His protagonists are almost always people who can’t leave a thing alone. They pull threads. They follow leads past the point of reason, past the point of safety, past the point where any sane person would have stopped and gone home. And what Fincher shows, film after film, is that this compulsion is both their greatest quality and the thing that ruins them.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s cartoonist in Zodiac loses a decade of his life to a killer he never catches. Mark Zuckerberg, as Fincher frames him in The Social Network, builds the most connected platform in human history out of a desire to belong and ends the film more alone than when he started. The knowledge doesn’t set anyone free. It just shows them the shape of the cage more clearly.
look at what you’re doing. Look at why.
What I Actually Missed
Here’s the thing about growing up loving movies the way I described: you develop a sensitivity that most people don’t have, and that sensitivity is double edged.
When it’s working, it’s the best thing in the world. You watch a film and you feel the director’s mind working against yours, feel the decisions resolving into meaning, feel the accumulated weight of a story landing exactly where it was always going to land. The analytical part of you and the emotional part of you are finally running in the same direction.
Painfully this translated to almost every part of my life.
When it’s not working when you’re tired, or stressed, or have been through enough cycles of examination prep that your brain won’t slow down you lose access to it.
This is what I mean when I say I’ve lost it. Not forever. Not completely. But the channel gets static. And when you’ve known what it’s like to receive it clearly, static is its own kind of grief.
The Script
I started writing The 12:01 Stations because I needed to do something with what I’d learned. That’s the honest reason. Not because I thought I was talented. Not because I had a career plan. Because I had all this understanding of how stories work and no place to put it.
The story came quickly: a man on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. A priest who was assigned to give him last rites and discovered, through the seal of confession, that he knows who actually did it. An execution scheduled for 12:01 AM.
What I wanted to do what Tarantino and Fincher and a hundred films I’d absorbed made me want to try was tell it out of order. Not as a gimmick, but because the story is about how we sequence guilt. We meet Marcus in the execution chamber before we understand what happened. We meet Father Thomas confused and guarded before we see what he’s carrying. The revelation lands harder because of what you’ve already seen.
The structure I built looks like this: present day intercutting with flashbacks to 1984 and 1985, a midpoint revelation that shows you the actual night of the crime, and a final act where three people race toward the same truth from different directions. The execution happens at 12:01. The last scene is six months later, at a grave, in the rain.
I wrote it the way you’d expect a seventeen-year-old who’d studied non-linear narrative to write it. Which is to say: too on the nose in places, more ambitious than it should be in others.
But here’s what I learned in the writing that I couldn’t have learned any other way:
Structure is not the same as story. You can have a brilliant non linear architecture and still have nothing to say. What makes the best films work what makes Pulp Fiction land, what makes Zodiac haunting is that the structure is in service of something true about human experience. The how of the telling has to earn its complexity by illuminating the why.
I don’t know if I fully achieved that. But I understand now what I was trying to do, and why it was worth trying.
On Directors and the Ground They Lay
One more thing before I let you go.
We talk about movies like they’re the performances. Like what matters is the actors we see, the plot we follow, the twist we didn’t predict. We consume the surface.
But every frame of Pulp Fiction is built on the fact that Tarantino spent years watching spaghetti westerns and Hong Kong action films and French New Wave and American B-movies and genre films that nobody else was treating seriously. The dialogue works because he understood language. The structure works because he understood convention and convention is only useful to subvert once you’ve internalized why it exists.
Every Fincher film is built on his obsession with process. The 99 takes. The controlled lighting. The camera placements calculated to create unease so specific you feel it before you can name it. He builds the ground before he builds the story.
This is true of every director worth watching. What we see on screen is the harvest. The soil was prepared long before we arrived.
I think about this when people ask why I spent months writing a screenplay instead of focusing on marks and entrance exams. The answer is that I was preparing soil. I was learning by doing the thing I wanted to understand. And whatever comes next whether The 12:01 Stations ever becomes anything more than a PDF on my hard drive I know things now that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
NOTE:
The shot list is done. The locations are locked. The cast is confirmed a group of friends who believed in the vision enough to say yes.
We start shooting in 40 days.
I don't know how the film will turn out. I don't know if it'll be good. But I know that somewhere between the 10th boards and the 12th boards, I figured out yes, I loved films enough to try making my own.
The movies taught me to think. The writing taught me what thinking is for.