He can’t remember the words he types into the search engine but, before he knows it, on his screen, a photograph of the actress Ellen Page. A funeral, a single idea and pictures of Ellen Page. “This,” says David Cage, “is how everything started with Beyond: Two Souls”.
...
He’s about to meet Ellen Page for the first time and he is nervous; but not for the reasons you might expect. He will not be starstruck by Ellen Page. He won’t stammer over words or suffer the strange distance that comes with meeting a celebrity in real life. “When you’ve worked with David Bowie,” he says, “you’re no longer afraid of anyone.”
But David Cage is afraid. He’s afraid because he has spent the last 12 months looking at pictures of Ellen Page. In his studio a 2000 page script lies scattered with images of Ellen from the age of eight through to adulthood....
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A picture of Ellen Page. Sixteen years old. Hair cropped short against her scalp. A tiny human, face etched in vulnerable, stubborn resilience.
David Cage can’t remember the Google search that brought him here but, instantly, a spark. This was it. Ellen Page: his protagonist. His Jodie Holmes before Jodie Holmes existed.
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“So I started looking for images and I found a picture of Ellen that was exactly this.”
Cage began writing and the words came easily. Then later, another scene. A new perspective was required. David Cage needed something different and began a fresh image search. Another set of keywords, another ‘click’.
Another picture of Ellen Page.
“Again, it was exactly what I was looking for.”
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More pictures of Ellen Page. Ellen had been shooting movies since she was six years old: her entire life had essentially been documented. She never stopped filming. There were hundreds of photographs, a wealth of reference points at David’s disposal.
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“I just kept writing,” says David, “and putting more images of Ellen in my script. After a year of writing I had pictures of Ellen all over the place. I began to realise that might be a problem. Because I realised I was going to have to ask Ellen to be in the game.”
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Ellen arrived. David expected an entourage — a lawyer, an agent, a manager — but she came to that first meeting alone. A surreal moment. David Cage had spent an entire year looking at pictures of Ellen Page. Now she was in front of him. Star struck? No. More like an eerie dissonance. David was essentially face to face with one of his characters brought to life.
“The whole thing took like 10 seconds, but in my mind it was two hours,” says David, laughing.
“It was so strange to see her walking to our table. When we met for the first time I really saw Jodie Holmes, not Ellen Page. I remember thinking as she walked to our table, I hope that when she starts talking, she will still be Jodie Holmes, that she won’t disappear and become someone completely different.”
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