The Liars of Black Mountain Road

Director's Statement

Some years ago, I was driving a rural road in upstate New York when a large dog ran out in front of my car. There was no warning. The impact was immediate and violent. I stopped the car and stepped into the silence that followed. The world had narrowed. Trees stood still. The sky pressed down. After what felt like a lifetime, the dog rose slowly, shaking, and bolted into the woods. That moment, suspended between violence and consequence, between guilt and reprieve, has stayed with me. It held something elemental. A reckoning. The Liars of Black Mountain Road is a film born from that moment. It tells the story of a couple driving through a desolate stretch of Castaic, California, when they hit and kill a stranger’s dog. In their case, the animal does not get up. And so they are forced to live in that moment I was spared. What follows is not dramatic in the conventional sense. It is quieter, stranger. A slow peeling away of the selves they have constructed. The incident becomes a mirror they cannot look away from. Though the film carries the shape of a dark comedy, it is not light. The humor is dry, often bitter. It comes from the desperate things people do to avoid the truth. I once heard someone define integrity as the harmony of thought, speech, and action. The film watches that harmony collapse. These characters, trying to make meaning where none exists, spiral into silence, self-justification, and small cruelties that reveal who they truly are.