Magnetosphere Director Nicola Rose on Synesthesia and ADHD

Oh, hello, hello everyone. This is Danielle, and I also have Shay and Jessica here with the Indie Out Loud and the Hive team. And today we have Nicola here with us, and she is the director of a very cool new movie that's out, Magnetosphere. And I said that correctly. Took me three tries to get that right today. And we are going to be asking her some questions. But first, we are actually going to start with showing you the trailer because. This is so cool, especially for our community, and I wanna make sure we get the word out.

I'd like you all to meet a new student.

Maggie, can you come up here, please?

How can you move us across the country?

What's wrong with this house?

There's a toilet in the kitchen. Maggie, what's under your hands? Those are the sparkles from the water music. Have you heard of something called synesthesia? I don't think it's normal.

Everyone's got something. You can see and hear and feel colors. That really is cool.

What do you think you're really seeing?

This is one righteous I think that might be seeing what they're feeling on the inside.

He played, right?

How old were you the first time you fell in love? I guess I was 4. Who were you in love with?

Bugs Bunny.

You beat this. All you ever say is he loves this, he loves that.

What are you doing coming to the US, Camino? Would you please stop standing like that?

Depends.

Can you pop my toggles back in?

No.

You want my advice? Don't be in a hurry to grow up. It's overrated. Every time you hire me, you get a free gift.

Dog poop in our house!

There's plenty more where that came from.

I love that, and we have watched that so many times around here. We are so excited to see a movie that is so neurodivergent-based. Can you tell us why this movie? Why is this the thing you wanted to do?

Sure. Well, so for my second feature film, I should back up a little bit and say that actually my first feature film was not intended to be specifically for a neurodivergent audience, or nor was it supposed to be necessarily about a neurodivergent character. But a number of people ended up interpreting it that way. And it's not super hard to see why, actually, with that film, which is called Goodbye Petrushka, and which is streaming various places online. But kind of quite apart from that, and in parallel to that, I, for my second feature film, I wanted to write something that had to do with a child with either an extraordinary ability or an unusual difference of some sort. And synesthesia was something that I knew about. Neurodiversity was, you know, as a bigger category, was something I knew much more about. Synesthesia, I just knew what it was, and I sort of— the more I learned about what it was, the more I wanted to set myself a challenge of putting this on screen because it seemed like such a natural thing to put on screen, you know, for film, for TV, and for cinema. It was like, how is this not a very frequent thing to put on screen? So anyway, I ended up— it ended up being the center of my my next project, which was what ended up being Magnetosphere. And so in doing that, synesthesia, you know, I obviously wasn't just going to make up, oh, here's what I think it should look like. It should look like pretty colors. And I don't know, but it ended up— I ended up rather interviewing several dozen synesthetes. And I'm actually writing a sort of longer piece about this at the moment. That led me to realize as I was interviewing these people that I had had synesthesia myself as a young child, um, which I hadn't realized until, you know, until kind of deep into these interviews. So that was, that was an interesting, you know, it wasn't something that I knew when I started on this. It was just sort of a, a, an aesthetic challenge I had laid out for myself, like, hey, let's see what this— let's see if we can put this— see if we can't make a movie about this and make it come to life on screen, make it sound a certain way, make it, you know, certain kind of auditory experience and visual experience. But it turned out, oh, what do you know? I actually have some, you know, more connection to this than I realized.

That's really cool.

That's the origin story of Magnetosphere, sort of.

I love that. There's so many of us that are neurodivergent, and I think all of, at least my team, we're all neurodivergent here. And Finding that you connect with that in some other way, in some other layer, is something that happens when we tend to immerse ourselves in our community. And I just find that so cool. Um, so Magnetosphere is very much a sensory experience from what we can see from the trailer. And how did your brain influence the way you approach the storytelling and, and putting the film together?

Well, you know, I had a certain assortment of pictures in my head as I laid out what I wanted the script to be. But I am not an animator. I'm not a visual effects designer. I'm not a technician. So what I had to do was do what drawings I could, which are— I would define them as bad drawings. And I handed the bad drawings over to a good friend of mine, Tommy Cha, who is a very talented animator and cartoonist, and said basically, hey, do you think we could get a VFX effects team, a visual effects team, to, um, to make something that looks like this, that, uh, that suggests this neurological reaction, that suggests— and not always a good neurological reaction. Like, it's dealt with more than one, many more— it's dealt with many times in the film that synesthesia is not, for this character or for anybody, all pink sparkles and purple swirls, but that they're, you know, it's something that can cause very negative physiological reactions. It can make her nauseated. It can make her confused, discombobulated. It can upset her when she looks at certain things because they give her a bad visual, something that's ugly and upsetting to her and so forth. And, you know, a lot of the meat of the story has to, or at least the emotional meat of the story, has to do with how synesthesia, which is something she does not realize she has. I should say this, like, from the beginning, she doesn't know necessarily that she has synesthesia. She just knows, oh, there's something weird about me, there's something different about me, but like, maybe I shouldn't mention it because maybe it's bad and maybe I should keep it a secret. But, uh, yeah, a lot of it has to do with how synesthesia interacts with adolescence and growing up and, um, the way she sees herself and herself— how her self-image is and can be improved.

So we all have our own experiences being teens, because being a teen is never an awesome thing for anybody, whether you're neurodivergent or not. Um, did anything from Maggie's character evolve from your own experiences of hearing that you were too much, or you're different, or you don't quite fit what the world thinks your mold should be?

Uh, well, I mean, that was You've definitely just described my adolescence. But Maggie herself is actually a very different sort of character, very different sort of personality, very— not very much like I was. You know, she's very cautious. She's very shy. I probably would have told everybody within, you know, a 10-mile radius that, hey, I see this weird thing. Do you see this weird thing? I, you know, there's— I would have left no secrets. anywhere. And I would have, I would have been very vocal and very outspoken about it. But, you know, there is no story if she immediately reveals what's going on, if she doesn't keep it to herself, if she doesn't try and, and, and hold some of her own secrets to herself the way that she does. I was probably a lot more like the character of her little sister, who is loud and proud and, you know, sings a lot at the piano. And yeah.

I think a couple of us were smiling here. There are at least 2 of us that can relate to that. So were any of the actors that played some of these characters in that neurodivergent community that you got to work with?

Yes.

And I can't claim to know everybody's neurodivergences or anything like that.

Absolutely.

I, I don't know if I know them all, and I don't know if they— if, if I'm remembering them all, but I know that, um, of the principal actors that Shailene Martin, who plays Maggie, and Patrick McKenna, who plays her dad, both have ADHD. And apparently I have ADHD, which I did not know until, you know, this year. Didn't get diagnosed until this year, although I suspected it. And so, you know, I'm sure there's other stuff too. You know, I did a mini interview of each actress as I was getting promotional materials ready on my end for our release, which just happened. And a lot of them discovered— a lot of the actors, rather— a lot of the actors did indicate experiences with synesthesia or something kind of like synesthesia or synesthesia adjacent. So I would not be surprised for a moment to find that they all have something. And there's a character in the movie who says, you know, everybody's got something. It's just not necessarily all— it could be very subtle, or it could be very extreme. You know, it just depends on The brain.

So what are— what was one of your favorite scenes that really just still sticks in your mind as your absolute favorite scene from the movie at this point?

I don't want to spoil it, but it has to do with where the little girl and— the little girl being Maggie's little sister Evie and Colin Mochrie's character Gil have a duet. I don't really want to go into what happens here just because really nobody is going to see it coming. Despite the thousands of numbers of times I have had to see this movie in various stages of editing, post-production, and this and that, I always sort of, when I see that one coming, I'm like, okay, oh boy, here we go.

Here we go.

Here's our fake out.

That's a little bit of a teaser for community, because we're actually going to be streaming this community to our community and with our community so that all of our ADHD and autistic members can watch it together, because I think that is going to be wonderfully and amazingly chaotic and insane.

So it should be. I mean, yeah, and it's available— I should have said this straight off, but it's available all over North America on Amazon Prime and on Apple TV and on about a dozen other platforms through our distributor, which is Freestyle Digital Media. And if you were to Google Magnetosphere movie, you would find Easily.

You can easily find it, and we are— we will have links to where you can rent it or purchase it and watch it, and we will be doing that here. Well, I've already purchased it for us through all of that part. I'm purposely not watching it until I get to watch it with my community though.

Oh good, okay.

It's really hard, I have to say, because I have now watched the trailer about at least 50 times because I'm just I've seen it 50 times, so my hat is off to you. I'm sure you've seen it way more than 50 times. So what are— because we are in ADHD and neurodivergent community here, what were some of the struggles that your ADHD brought up in creating this movie for you? Like executive dysfunction, or—

There did start— yeah, the executive dysfunction started to become apparent to me in pre-production. I would be trying to get something done. And I would realize that my mind had simply gone blank. And I had no idea what it was I was trying to get done. And my body or whatever was still trying to do it, but my mind was no longer connected to it. And so, you know, the wheels were turning and turning and turning and turning, but the car wasn't going anywhere. And that, that would happen over and over and over. And, or I would, you know, I would have a certain task in mind. And, you know, you'd ask me, what, what is it? What do you need done? I really don't know. And it was extremely stressful, and I would find myself just sort of browning out and melting down because I couldn't communicate any longer what it was that needed doing.

So did you find that having somebody body double with you or having a group with you to help guide you, even if they weren't doing the same thing as you, did you find that that was helpful to you while doing this, or was it super distracting?

Uh, sorry, what do you mean about a body double?

Oh, so body doubling is something that we use a lot here in our community to help people get things done, and it is literally sitting next to each other in a Zoom room to set an intention to get a task done and sitting next to each other and getting it done. So co-working.

Oh right, so study buddy of a kind.

Yes, kind of.

Yeah, sure. Um, I was thinking, you know, as the director, I didn't have to do any nudity. Um, I will say, this never is ever, ever, ever done by one person. You have your, I don't know if I would call them your body doubles, but you have your producers and you have your assistants and so forth who, and I had different ones for different stages and different parts of the procedure at different times, who helped me with this and who helped me get things done. I don't know if we were ever side by side coworking in that sense. But it's never all on the shoulders of one person. If it is, it's probably not the director, it's probably either the first assistant director at certain stages or it's some producer at some stage. Certainly a lot lies on the director. Creatively everything— I don't want to say that because you have animators come in and do things you can't do and so forth. You're still the one who's saying, okay, but we have to winnow this down so that the design more like this or whatever. Um, so, you know, certainly there, there's nothing that you're doing completely alone, I would say, at any point.

That's very cool. And we talk about building hive, hive mind and always having a community.

Is that what the hive mind is?

Yes.

So our, our online community is called ND Hive. So we are Neurodivergent Hive, and that's, that's all of the hive things around here. And we talk about community being a necessity to our minds. So are you going to be doing more movies like this?

I, you know, that depends entirely on factors over which I have no control. That would depend on somebody giving me a bunch of money, and it would depend on my having more ideas that I was sufficiently pleased about to actually want to go the distance with them. Neither of those things have happened lately. So I'm in a little bit of a holding pattern. I'm never saying never, but I am, I consider myself on sabbatical at the moment simply because this was an enormous project. I don't know, you know, how much that comes across when people see it, but any feature film, and especially an independent feature film where you're working with, you know, what they call a skeleton crew, kind of no matter what, it's a reduced team by nature. an enormous amount of work for pretty much everybody who's doing anything associated with it. And more so as you go up the chain, like more work for those further up the chain, such as myself, such as the producers, such as, while you're on set, the first AD. Anybody who's supervising any part of the pre-production or post-production process, animation supervision in this case. Not that there's always animation, but like here. And, you know, the actors have loads on their shoulders. Um, so, uh, I don't see anything specific coming down the pike at this point, but that really doesn't mean much because it could be coming down the pike tomorrow.

Something could strike you and you could just want to dive into the project and then have to find money for it.

So yeah, you have to find money. I mean, you know, unless there's actually a studio giving you money, and that is kind of the very opposite of what an independent film is. There are people who, well-meaning people, who ask the question, why don't you go studio? Have you ever considered working for a studio? Have you ever? You think to yourself, what is wrong with your question? Shall we just think about it for a moment? I'm not saying those people are dumb, not for a moment. It is a logical and reasonable question, but the very definition of doing an independent film is nobody else wants you to be doing this.

Mm-hmm.

You do not have the money and the connections to simply knock on Disney's door and go say, hi, I would love to work for you. Give me a job, please. It doesn't happen to just about anybody who is not already deeply enmeshed within the company.

Absolutely. And by doing this independently, I think you were able to tell a story that one of those big studios just wouldn't care to hear or care about necessarily. And that happens. We see that happen a lot in independent worlds.

Why people ask, there was, there, people ask, why, why don't we see more stories like this? And because they're not getting funded, because getting funded, it's the neurotypical stories that are getting funded. This seems pretty obvious.

Yeah, it's either they're not getting funded or they're getting so much because the production studio goes, no, it needs to be told this way. And then it veers off of from being the actual lived experience.

I think—

and that's—

sorry, go ahead.

Oh, sorry, hold on.

No, no, no, no, no.

Oh, she's got something going on in the background behind her.

Oh, sorry. I think it gets more and more normalized and more and more group funk until finally there is very, very little of whatever spark of inspiration might have been interesting in the first place, and you have something that has been focus-grouped and co-worked to absolute death and beyond death, and whatever might have been interesting about it in the beginning is no longer visible. Absolutely.

It's why we have a very similar mission here. We do things— we have not gone after venture capital because we want our mission and our message to stay exactly the way we, we know it needs to be, because we're part of the community that we want to reach. Yeah, absolutely understand. So we want to put the message out, go rent this movie. Go purchase this movie. Go watch this movie so that it can get the funding and get Nicola what she needs to make the next amazing neurodivergent movie. If you have any questions, reach out. We will have links below so that you can reach out to her and her— the company that is helping her in her production company. Ask the questions. We want to know what the questions are. I will funnel questions to Nicola if they come in under these videos and under our podcast. We will be here to support everybody. And if you want to join ND Hive to watch this movie, just reach out and message us because we will be watching as a community sometime in the next week or so. Everybody's going back to school, so we're trying to find a good time where everybody can watch it.

Yeah.

Uh, we want the teens to be involved as well. So if you have any questions, if you want to learn more from Nicola, reach out. We will have all of our contact information below. We are so excited and so happy to have had you here with us because again, we want more. We want more messaging out there like this. We want more movies about us and our community. So let's put the support where it needs to go. Have a good day, everybody.

Thank you guys so much.

Bye-bye.