I have long believed that a film should be about something although it’s not always immediately clear to me what that something is until I begin the process in earnest.

With First Person Singular, as with Cry Funny Happy, I wanted to begin with character rather than plot. I knew that I wanted to work with Darrill but that was really all. About six months before filming began, we started to meet regularly and exchange books, films, articles and music that we found interesting. I would tell him some of my ideas for the film and then change them all again the next week. But slowly some patterns did begin to emerge: we found that we were discovering similar themes in various arenas.

Whether it was because we were looking for it or that it really was there I couldn’t say for sure, but every where we turned we came upon examinations of grieving – both personal and collective. From Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) to Arvo Pärt (Lamentate) to Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Distant and Climates) there was this common strand of loss and its impact on those left behind.

It was out of this atmosphere that Seth Farber finally emerged - a lonely, distant figure in the grieving landscape of New York City in 2007. Darrill and I are both immigrants to this town – I think we have both been here for about nine years now – and we immediately started to seize upon Seth as someone through whom we could relate our growing feelings of isolation, disconnection and loss.

All of us who live in New York are aware how much our city has changed and how much it continues to change. At times it seems that we are all in mourning for our dying city: Seth is my contribution to that collective grief. I hope that through him we can investigate our relationships to one another and our environment and the responsibilities that must accompany our love for each other and our homes if we are to survive together.