Entry 1 - Finding a voice

Every story I've written has been asking the same question. I just didn't know it at the time. People often ask where a film begins. Most assume it starts with an idea, a character or a single moment of inspiration. Looking back now, I don't believe that's true. I think stories begin much earlier. They begin with the parts of ourselves we don't yet understand.

As a child growing up in suburban Australia during the 1980s, I was bullied because I looked different. My skin colour, my heritage and the fact that I spoke another language at home made me an easy target. Like so many children, I learned that survival often meant becoming quieter, smaller and less visible. Long before I understood what identity meant, I was already negotiating with my own.

Years later, my son experienced bullying of his own. His story was different, but the emotional wounds were strikingly familiar. Where mine was driven by race, his was driven by personality. He had a kindness and openness that should have been celebrated but instead became something others tried to exploit. As we began developing The Dealer together in 2016, those conversations slowly became something much more than discussions about story. We found ourselves talking about our own experiences, comparing two generations separated by decades but connected by the same psychological scars. The screenplay changed because we changed. What had begun as an exploitation crime horror gradually transformed into a grounded psychological crime story exploring identity, belonging and the search for a voice above the noise of abuse.

Without realising it, writing had become therapy.

But therapy doesn't always heal. Sometimes it simply uncovers wounds that have been waiting patiently beneath the surface.

People often say that time heals old wounds. I'm no longer convinced. I think old wounds open new ones we never knew were there. That discovery changed me as a writer. From that point forward, I stopped writing in search of answers. Instead, I began writing to understand. To understand how those early experiences had shaped the choices I'd made throughout my life. To understand how often I'd denied my own truth simply because it felt safer than confronting it. To understand why so many of us spend years becoming the people we believe the world needs us to be, instead of the people we really are.

The frightening thing about searching for truth is that it rarely rewards you with certainty. Instead, it demands confession.

It asks you to revisit the choices you've made, the lines you've crossed and the versions of yourself you've created in order to survive. I've come to believe that choices born from pain are rarely free choices at all. Pain narrows our world until self-preservation feels like the only option. And when our decisions are shaped by fear rather than truth, they often lead us towards the very self-destruction we're trying to escape. Looking back now, I realise this wasn't simply the message behind The Dealer. It has quietly become the thread running through much of my work over the past two decades.

Every screenplay has been another attempt to understand the same question from a different perspective. Not who we pretend to be. Not who other people tell us we are. But who we are when we're finally willing to confront ourselves honestly.

In many ways, Precious|Choices is simply the next chapter in that search. I don't know whether these journals will ever lead me to answers. I'm no longer convinced that's the point. Perhaps the work has always been about asking better questions.

If my work has taught me anything, it's that truth rarely reveals itself all at once.

It arrives a little at a time, usually just beyond the line we're most afraid to cross.

Welcome to Notes from the Line.