Magnetosphere: A Neurodivergent Film About Synesthesia

Meet Nicola Rose, director of Magnetosphere

Danielle: Hello, hello, hello, everyone. This is Danielle, and I also have Shay and Jessica here with the ND OutLoud and ND Hive team. Today we have Nicola here with us. She is the director of a very cool new movie that’s out, Magnetosphere. And I said that correctly, it took me three tries to get that right today. We are going to be asking her some questions, but first we’re actually going to start by showing you the trailer, because this is so cool, especially for our community, and I want to make sure we get the word out.

[Trailer plays. Maggie, a new student, sees “sparkles from the water music” and wonders if she is seeing what people feel on the inside. “Have you heard of something called synesthesia?” “Everyone’s got something. You can see and hear and feel colors. That really is cool.”]

Danielle: I love that, and we have watched that so many times around here. We are so excited to see a movie that is so neurodivergent-based. Can you tell us, why this movie? Why is this the thing you wanted to do?

Why make a film about synesthesia

Nicola: Sure. Well, I should back up a little bit and say that my first feature film was not intended to be specifically for a neurodivergent audience, nor was it necessarily supposed to be about a neurodivergent character, but a number of people ended up interpreting it that way. And it’s not super hard to see why, actually, with that film, which is called Goodbye Petrushka, and which is streaming various places online.

Quite apart from that, for my second feature film I wanted to write something that had to do with a child with either an extraordinary ability or an unusual difference of some sort. And synesthesia was something that I knew about. Neurodiversity, as a bigger category, was something I knew much more about. Synesthesia, I just knew what it was. And the more I learned about it, the more I wanted to set myself a challenge of putting this on screen, because it seemed like such a natural thing to put on screen for film and TV and cinema. I was like, how is this not a frequent thing to put on screen? So it ended up being the center of my next project, which became Magnetosphere.

In doing that, I obviously wasn’t just going to make it up: “Here’s what I think it should look like, it should look like pretty colors, I don’t know.” Instead, I ended up interviewing several dozen synesthetes. I’m actually writing a longer piece about this at the moment. That led me to realize, as I was interviewing these people, that I had had synesthesia myself as a young child, which I hadn’t realized until deep into these interviews. So that was interesting. It wasn’t something I knew when I started. It was just an aesthetic challenge I had laid out for myself: let’s see if we can’t make a movie about this and make it come to life on screen, make it sound a certain way, a certain kind of auditory and visual experience. But it turned out, what do you know, I actually have more connection to this than I realized.

Danielle: That’s really cool. There are so many of us that are neurodivergent, and I think at least my team, we’re all neurodivergent here. Finding that you connect with it in some other way, on some other layer, is something that happens when we immerse ourselves in our community. I just find that so cool. So, Magnetosphere is very much a sensory experience, from what we could see in the trailer. How did your brain influence the way you approached the storytelling and putting the film together?

Putting a neurological experience on screen honestly

Nicola: Well, I had a certain assortment of pictures in my head as I laid out what I wanted the script to be. But I am not an animator. I’m not a visual effects designer. I’m not a technician. So what I had to do was do what drawings I could, which I would define as bad drawings. I handed the bad drawings over to a good friend of mine, Tommy Cha, who is a very talented animator and cartoonist, and said basically, “Hey, do you think we could get a visual effects team to make something that looks like this?” Something that suggests this neurological reaction, and not always a good neurological reaction.

It’s dealt with many times in the film that synesthesia is not, for this character or for anybody, all pink sparkles and purple swirls. It’s something that can cause very negative physiological reactions. It can make her nauseated. It can make her confused, discombobulated. It can upset her when she looks at certain things, because they give her a visual that’s ugly and upsetting to her.

A lot of the emotional meat of the story has to do with how synesthesia, which is something she does not realize she has, interacts with adolescence and growing up. I should say this from the beginning: she doesn’t know that she has synesthesia. She just knows, oh, there’s something weird about me, there’s something different about me, but maybe I shouldn’t mention it, because maybe it’s bad, and maybe I should keep it a secret. It’s about the way she sees herself, and how her self-image is, and can be improved.

Growing up “too much”: Maggie versus Nicola

Danielle: We all have our own experiences being teens, because being a teen is never an awesome thing for anybody, whether you’re neurodivergent or not. Did Maggie’s character evolve from your own experiences of hearing that you were too much, or you’re different, or you don’t quite fit what the world thinks your mold should be?

Nicola: Well, you’ve definitely just described my adolescence. But Maggie herself is actually a very different sort of character, a very different personality, not very much like I was. She’s very cautious, very shy. I probably would have told everybody within a 10 mile radius, “Hey, I see this weird thing. Do you see this weird thing?” I would have left no secrets anywhere. I would have been very vocal and very outspoken about it. But there is no story if she immediately reveals what’s going on, if she doesn’t keep it to herself, if she doesn’t hold some of her own secrets the way that she does. I was probably a lot more like the character of her little sister, who is loud and proud and sings a lot at the piano.

Danielle: I think a couple of us were smiling here. There are at least two of us that can relate to that. So, were any of the actors that played these characters in that neurodivergent community?

ADHD in the cast, and a director diagnosed this year

Nicola: Absolutely. I can’t claim to know everybody’s neurodivergences, and I don’t know if I’m remembering them all, but I know that of the principal actors, Shayon Martin, who plays Maggie, and Patrick McKenna, who plays her dad, both have ADHD. And apparently I have ADHD, which I did not know until this year. I didn’t get diagnosed until this year, although I suspected it.

And I’m sure there’s other stuff, too. I did a mini interview with each of the actors as I was getting promotional materials ready for our release, which just happened, and a lot of the actors did indicate experiences with synesthesia, or something synesthesia-adjacent. So I would not be surprised for a moment to find that they all have something. There’s a character in the movie who says, you know, everybody’s got something. It could be very subtle or it could be very extreme. It just depends on the brain.

Danielle: So what was one of your favorite scenes, one that still sticks in your mind as your absolute favorite from the movie at this point?

Nicola: I don’t want to spoil it, but it has to do with where the little girl, Maggie’s little sister Eevee, and Colin Mochrie’s character, Gil, have a duet. I don’t really want to go into what happens, just because nobody is going to see it coming. Despite the thousands of times I have had to see this movie in various stages of editing and post-production, when I see that one coming, I’m like, okay, oh boy, here we go.

Danielle: Here’s our little teaser for our community: we’re actually going to be streaming this with our community, so that all of our ADHD and autistic members can watch it together, because I think that is going to be wonderfully and amazingly chaotic.

Nicola: Oh, it should be. And it’s available, I should have said this straight off, all over North America on Amazon Prime and on Apple TV and on about a dozen other platforms through our distributor, which is Freestyle Digital Media. If you were to Google “Magnetosphere movie,” you would easily find it.

Danielle: We will have links to where you can rent it or purchase it. I’ve already purchased it for us, and I’m partly not watching it until I get to watch it with my community. It’s really hard, I have to say, because I have now watched the trailer at least 50 times, because I’m just excited.

Executive dysfunction while making a movie

Danielle: Because we are an ADHD and neurodivergent community here, what were some of the struggles that your ADHD brought up in creating this movie? Like executive dysfunction?

Nicola: Yeah, the executive dysfunction started to become apparent to me in pre-production. I would be trying to get something done, and I would realize that my mind had simply gone blank and I had no idea what it was I was trying to get done. My body was still trying to do it, but my mind was no longer connected to it. The wheels were turning and turning and turning, but the car wasn’t going anywhere. That would happen over and over and over. Or I would have a certain task in mind, and you’d ask me, “What is it? What do you need done?” And I really didn’t know. It was extremely stressful, and I would find myself just sort of browning out and melting down, because I couldn’t communicate any longer what it was that needed doing.

Danielle: Did you find that having somebody body double with you, or having a group with you to help guide you, even if they weren’t doing the same thing as you, was helpful while doing this? Or was it super distracting?

Nicola: Sorry, what do you mean about a body double?

Danielle: Body doubling is something we use a lot here in our community to help people get things done. It is literally sitting next to each other in a Zoom room, setting an intention to get a task done, and getting it done together. Co-working.

Nothing on a film gets done alone

Nicola: Oh, right. A study buddy of a kind. Sure. I was thinking, you know, as the director, I didn’t have to do any nudity. But I will say, this never, ever, ever is done by one person. I don’t know if I would call them your body doubles, but you have your producers and you have your assistants and so forth, and I had different ones for different stages and different parts of the procedure at different times, who helped me get things done. I don’t know if we were ever side by side co-working in that sense, but it’s never all on the shoulders of one person. And if it is, it’s probably not the director. It’s probably the first assistant director at certain stages, or some producer at some stage.

Certainly a lot lies on the director, creatively. I don’t want to say everything, because you have animators come in and do things you can’t do. But you’re still the one who’s saying, okay, we have to winnow this down so that the design is more like this. So certainly there’s nothing that you’re doing completely alone, I would say, at any point.

Danielle: That’s very cool. And we talk about building the hive mind and always having a community. Our online community is called ND Hive, we are the neurodivergent hive, and we talk about community being a necessity to our minds. So, are you going to be doing more movies like this?

Nicola: That depends entirely on factors over which I have no control. It would depend on somebody giving me a bunch of money, and it would depend on my having more ideas that I was sufficiently pleased about to actually want to go the distance with. Neither of those things have happened lately, so I’m in a little bit of a holding pattern. I’m never saying never, but I consider myself on sabbatical at the moment, simply because this was an enormous project.

I don’t know how much that comes across when people see it, but any feature film, and especially an independent feature film, where you’re working with what they call a skeleton crew, a reduced team, is by nature an enormous amount of work for pretty much everybody associated with it. And more so as you go up the chain: more work for those further up, such as myself, the producers, the first AD while you’re on set, anybody supervising any part of pre-production or post-production, animation supervision in this case. And the actors have loads on their shoulders. So I don’t see anything specific coming down the pike at this point, but that really doesn’t mean much, because it could be coming down the pike tomorrow.

Why neurodivergent stories don’t get funded

Danielle: Something could strike you, and you could just want to dive into the project, and then have to find money for it.

Nicola: Yeah, you have to find money. Unless there’s actually a studio giving you money, and that is kind of the very opposite of what an independent film is. There are well-meaning people who ask, “Why don’t you go studio? Have you ever considered working for a studio?” And you think to yourself, shall we just think about it for a moment? I’m not saying those people are dumb, not for a moment, it is a logical and reasonable question. But the very definition of doing an independent film is: nobody else wants you to be doing this. You do not have the money and the connections to simply knock on Disney’s door and say, “Hi, I would love to work for you, give me a job, please.” That doesn’t happen for just about anybody who is not already deeply enmeshed within the company.

Danielle: Absolutely. And by doing this independently, I think you were able to tell a story that one of those big studios just wouldn’t care to hear. People ask, why don’t we see more stories like this? Because they’re not getting funded. It’s the neurotypical stories that are getting funded.

Jessica: Or they’re getting funded, but the production studio goes, “No, it needs to be told this way,” and then it veers off from being the actual lived experience.

Nicola: I think it gets more and more normalized and more and more group-thunk until finally there is very, very little of whatever spark of inspiration might have been interesting in the first place, and you have something that has been focus-grouped to absolute death and beyond, and whatever might have been interesting about it in the beginning is no longer visible.

Danielle: Absolutely. That’s why we have a very similar mission here. We have not gone after venture capital, because we want our mission and our message to stay exactly the way we know it needs to be, because we’re part of the community that we want to reach.

So we want to put the message out: go rent this movie, go purchase this movie, go watch this movie, so that it can get the funding and get Nicola what she needs to make the next amazing neurodivergent movie. If you have any questions, reach out. We will have links below so you can reach out to her and her production company. I will funnel questions to Nicola if they come in under these videos and under our podcast. And if you want to join us to watch this movie, just reach out and message us, because we will be watching as a community sometime in the next week or so. Everybody’s going back to school, so we’re trying to find a good time when everybody can watch, and we want the teens involved as well.

We are so excited and so happy to have had you here with us. We want more messaging out there like this. We want more movies about us and our community. So let’s put the support where it needs to go. Have a good day, everybody. Thank you guys so much.