colin spoelman

I began working on the script seven years ago, as a sophomore in college taking an introductory psychology course. At the same time, I was also studying surrealist plays, including Strindberg’s Dream Play, for a theater class. I became fascinated the independence of each approach to understanding the subconscious: one clinical and rational and the other purely emotional, poetic, and lyrical. I did a number of writing exercises about a scientist trapped inside a dream, trying to figure out how he might explain the experience to an audience. These writings formed the idea for a story that became this script.

One of the things that was important to me while writing the script was the representation of dreams in the film. So often our dreams are fragmented, non-narrative, and nonsensical yet at the same time so poetic and emotionally raw. In movies, dreams are often treated as a plot device or a gimmick to help shape an aspect of a character: a cheap trick to bring the audience inside the head of a hero or heroine. Even the work of the surrealist filmmakers often feels designed to shock more than record actual dreams. As a result, these fictitious dreams bear little resemblance to what I experienced while dreaming. I wanted to write dreams that were authentic, and to that end, I found myself transcribing my own dreams, almost moment by moment. The movie gets to do what science can’t—record and interpret the images created and seen by the mind’s eye. This allows the audience to experience a thought experiment hypothesizing the way people perceive their own subconscious.

The movie also explores the fine line between the use of science for healing and the abuse of science, as the characters push beyond ethical boundaries in an effort to forge new discoveries. The students recognize the healing powers of the drug compound, but are far more interested in its recreational uses. Ensnared by the lure of exploring their subconscious desires, the character’s personal lives start to disintegrate as they lose touch with reality—a problem that is often associated with the abuse of recreational drugs. Coming Down the Mountain examined a similar dilemma with the prescription drug epidemic in Appalachia. As a writer and storyteller, I am interested in the way people deal with substance abuse, and how beneficial medicines can become incredibly harmful in the wrong context.