It’s Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel

"It's Hard Not to be Romantic About Time Travel" is, at its honest core, a story about loss. It is about what happens when you let grief swallow you whole versus what happens when you choose, despite everything, to move forward. This is a personal story to me. I wrote it from experience, working through my own past loss and the slow, sometimes absurd process of learning that the past does not have to be a life sentence.

The trick is that I did not want to write a weepy grief drama. I wanted to backdoor the idea through a time travel action comedy with a weed bandolier and a dog and a gang of murderous Golden Girls, and let the grief live underneath it where it does its best work. The best genre films earn their emotional punches by making you forget they are coming. That's what I was going for.

The mirror at the center of the script is Swann and Stella. Two people who had something taken from them, making completely opposite choices about what to do next. One moves forward. One freezes herself in the worst night of her life for decades. It knows which one of them is right, and it makes sure you do too. It just does it with a love portal swallowing a hate portal with the power of love and friendship instead of a monologue. Yes, I understand how ridiculous that sounds. I stand by it.

It is a story about accepting what has happened to you and choosing to move toward something new anyway. It just happens to also have dinosaurs.

And weed. Lots of weed.