A husband and wife debate the idea of uploading her consciousness to an AI after she’s impaired in a severe car accident.

Director’s Vision

Blackbird is a film that served two purposes for me as a filmmaker. It allowed me to work in a genre that I’ve loved since I was a kid, a lot of my early cinematic loves were sci-fi films, but it also helped me cope with a personal experience.

A few years before this film was even an idea, my wife went through surgery to remove something that the doctor believed could be cancerous and all seemed well. Years later, we were told that a second surgery would be necessary and, needless to say, my mind went to all of the worst places and an overwhelming sense of fear and sadness took over. I didn’t want to express those feelings to her, my role as a partner was to be positive and support whatever fears were creeping into her mind, so I decided to use a short script to allow me to express what was going on in my head.

The script was written in the Salt Lake City airport returning from Sundance. I outlined it like a drama using all of the thoughts I had about what was going on and ended up deciding to turn it into a genre piece inspired by films like Solaris, Blade Runner and even Starman. I always loved that those films were these vast concepts involving space, artificial intelligence, and alien beings, but, at their core is a love story that pushed the boundaries of what love can actually be.

Blackbird is a love letter to those films and other films like it and I can only hope that it accomplishes even half of the emotional pull that I feel when watching them.