THE GATE and our relationships with end of life
Day 001 for audience building for a new fiction feature
At most parties or industry events, when someone asks what I’m working on, I run through the latest. Different projects resonate with different people, the doc in post, the branded short, the co-production still finding its financing. And then I get to one that always lands differently.
A fiction feature about how to die well.
And then I watch their face.
Sometimes there’s a flicker of discomfort. Sometimes genuine curiosity. Occasionally both at once. But there’s always a reaction. Which, honestly, tells me yup there’s something here.
One thing I’ve always believed about the films I want to make, I’d rather someone walk out hating it than walk out with nothing. Love it, great. Hate it, also great. A strong reaction means the film did something, landed somewhere, got under someone’s skin. The response I can’t stand is the shrug. The “it was fine.” We make things to move people. And this film is built for that. The subject matter pretty much demands it.
The film is called THE GATE.
It’s a co-production between three countries, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the UK. We’re working our way through the final budget gap fundraising phase and heading into pre-pro later this year and filming starts in early 2027.
The story centers on a man living with ALS (also known as MND in the UK) and how he approaches his final days. But the film isn’t really about dying. It’s about living. About transitions. We move through transitions every day, waking up, going to work, coming home, relationships that begin and end. All of it is transition.
Maida Lynn wrote something recently that was so timely alongside this film. She references William Bridges' distinction between change, which is situational, and transition, which is psychological.
"Without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture."
THE GATE is interested in the transition part.
Death is one of them, maybe the biggest, but it’s still one of them. And somewhere along the way, in Western culture at least, we decided to put it in a box, push it into the corner, treat it as something to be afraid of rather than something to understand.
There’s a long lineage of thinkers, communities, and traditions that had a different relationship with death. Not a morbid one, not a fatalistic one, a clear-eyed one. The kind where understanding the end of life actually makes you better at living it.
One example that surprised me when I was doing some research is the handbook called Ars Moriendi. In 1415, in the aftermath of the Black Death, an anonymous Dominican friar wrote the Ars Moriendi, "The Art of Dying Well." It was one of the first books printed with movable type, translated into almost every European language, and circulated in nearly 100 editions before 1500. For centuries it was as common a household text as anything else people owned. It didn't argue that death was something to fear. It argued that dying well was something you prepared for, throughout your life, the same way you prepared for anything that mattered. We lost that. Somewhere between the Enlightenment and the hospital bed, we decided death was a medical problem to be solved rather than a human experience to be navigated. The Ars Moriendi tradition didn't disappear overnight. It got slowly absorbed, diluted, and eventually crowded out. But the question it was asking, how do we die well, didn't go away. It just went unanswered.
Buddhist traditions have been asking the same question for a lot longer. The Dalai Lama writes in his book Advice on Dying: And Living a Better Life
Analysis of death is not for the sake of becoming fearful but to appreciate this precious lifetime during which you can perform many important practices. Rather than being frightened, you need to reflect that when death comes, you will lose this good opportunity for practice. In this way contemplation of death will bring more energy to your practice.
That’s not morbid. That’s the opposite of morbid. That’s death as a clarifying force. As a reason to live more fully, not less.
That’s the territory THE GATE is working in.
If you’ve seen a film like Come See Me In The Good Light, you’ll have a sense of the register I mean. A film that, on paper, is about something heavy, but when you put it on it feels like the opposite. It’s all about LIVING.
So why I’m talking about this now?
The old instinct is to keep things quiet. Make the film, keep expectations in check, don’t over-hype, don’t reveal too much. I understand that instinct. There’s how I roll basically.
But I keep coming back to a different question, if you believe a film has something real to offer, what does it mean to wait until it’s finished before you let anyone in?
Producer Daren Smith wrote a piece for IndieWire recently that names this honestly. He writes that filmmakers default to finishing the film first and marketing it after
...not because it works, but because it protects our identity. Starting audience work on day one means admitting the art alone isn’t enough to fill a theater. That’s an uncomfortable thought for any filmmaker. It’s easier to stay in the creative cocoon, finish the movie, and then hand a budget to an ad buyer six weeks before release.
I see that. I also see a slight variation, which is that willing a film into existence is pretty damn difficult. To have to work on developing the audience in parallel is just making the boulder you’re pushing up the hill even bigger! Also we lived under the false pretense that once you score a distributor then you’re set!
For THE GATE specifically, the community piece feels important. There are people and organizations working right now on end of life care, on ALS and MND support, on how society approaches death, people doing vital, difficult work who might see this film and feel that it reflects something they care about. We want to find those people. We want to build those relationships now, not after we’ve locked picture.
The co-writers spent years researching this story. They talked to people living with ALS and MND, to family members, to caregivers, in both the US and the UK. We’ve had feedback from people in those communities that tells us we’re heading in the right direction. And we’re committed to continuing that. Not in a defensive “we’ve done our research” way, but in an ongoing, genuinely listening way. There’s always more to learn. That doesn’t stop when the cameras start rolling.
So where are we? Financing is largely in place. We have a small budget gap remaining, less than 15% of the total, and we’re zeroing in on closing that. Casting is done. Location scouting is underway. Our director has been meeting crew and assembling.
We’re making this film. And we want to make it well.
I won’t share names yet, cast, crew, creative team, that’s coming. But what I can say is that the people involved in this project are people who understand what the film is trying to do and care about doing it right. That matters to me as much as anything else.
If this resonates with you, reach out.
If you work with or know organizations in the ALS or MND community, in palliative care, in the broader world of end of life support, I want to hear from you. Not to pitch you anything, just to connect.
If you know someone who would want to follow this film’s journey and be part of building the audience for it, share this with them.
And if you just want to stay across how it develops, that’s what this newsletter is for. I’ll keep talking about it here as we go, openly, honestly, as much as I can.
As I wrote in this piece a couple weeks ago, filmmakers need to think about their storytelling beyond the single format of the feature length film. What are the other supporting pieces of storytelling we can build for this film that sits across Substack posts, Instagram stories, podcasts etc etc. As Daren Smith references in the IndieWire story, we need to be thinking about the 7-11-4 principle.
Before the average buyer says yes, they consume seven hours of content, across eleven touches, on four different mediums.
THE GATE is one of those projects where the film and the conversation around it feel like they’re part of the same thing. I’m starting that conversation now.
More soon. Consider this touch point 001 of our audience building campaign. Although technically that started on day one when the writers spoke to someone when researching the script.
If we wish to die well, we must learn how to live well.
—The Dalai Lama
Welcome to the new subscribers and followers. If you want to know what this substack is all about, start here and then work through some other older posts like this one and this one. Participate with your comments and suggestions. Share things you like and get your friends to stop by. Here’s another plug for the OG case study post which I’m constantly updating, so send me any case studies I’ve missed that you found useful! I’m in the middle of creating a budget template for direct to audience distribution and looking for you to share with me your data around what you spend your budgets on. DM me! Lastly this past post about audience is a good companion to today’s reading.
