Will "The Machine"

Director's Statement

Why do we find highly-functioning, dysfunctional people so interesting? Maybe we wonder whether they achieved so much success despite, or because of, their stunted development. Maybe we like to consider trading shoes, imagining if their success and acclaim is worth the price of their baggage. Or maybe we’re simply waiting for the fireworks when their narrow scope of dominance, now their whole identity, inevitably gets threatened. Will “The Machine” was an opportunity to explore that. My writing partner/lead actor, Chris, and I had been discussing the lack of character study in sports films for years. And as a former USC running back himself, he was intimately familiar with the inner worlds of elite athletes. We planned to shoot the film in Los Angeles, where we live today. But the tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, so close to our hometown of Richmond, brought another set of questions about dysfunction that we couldn’t answer. Why do some of us cling to the past? Why do people become so rigid in their thinking, even in the aftermath of total defeat? Is there any hope that a hardwired sense of superiority can evolve into something healthy? Once we realized our story already mirrored the turbulent history of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, we knew we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to explore those ideas through our protagonist in our own hometown. Kent Lamm, Director