Above All Things was inspired by a trip out to a lake house in Putnam County, New York.  The day after the visit, I felt compelled to sit at my computer, open up Final Draft and just start writing. As the great writer and champion of artists everywhere, Steven Pressfield says, ideas for our stories come from something outside of ourselves and we are merely the vehicle through which the body of work, be it a novel or a screenplay, comes forth and this is the case with this film.

Above All Things started out more as a horror story. From there, I started focusing on things that scare us in the daytime. I discovered it is not so much scary things as it is just being alone with our thoughts that scares us the most, so the story grew from there.  This helped me conceptualize Bobby Larson, an everyday/everyman type of guy who retreated to the woods in order to heal from the recent death of his wife.  This dramatic feature encompasses elements of the supernatural genre, the comedy genre, the buddy movie genre, and the horror genre to tell the story.  I believe all great films use little bits of each genre to make a well rounded tale.  

Above All Things is at its core a love story but a supernatural story too.  It is the haunting of a grieving husband by his deceased wife. She feels his pain so much that she comes back and tries to deliver him from his bereavement.  Horror stories have a tendency to use cheap tricks to frighten us. With this story, I wanted to use the supernatural to do something caring, appropriating and repurposing an overused technique.  Bridgette’s motives are not revealed until the very end. We learn that the ‘haunting’ of her husband is a self-sacrificial act. Bridgette is letting Bobby go so that they can both heal.  Often when a person loses someone close, they see traces of them everywhere. So when Bobby starts seeing things, it’s not such an odd phenomenon; the talking Frangelico bottle is. The audience realizes when this happens that maybe Bobby is losing grip on reality.  He is on medication and keeps hitting the Frangelico bottle pretty hard. The point is that this type of self-medicating doesn’t work out well;  we don’t heal on our own, we need others to help the process along.  At one point the neighbor Maggie Moss removes a glass shard from his foot … once she removes it, she declares “Now, maybe that can heal” and Bridgette (his deceased wife) in essence comes back to do the same thing – to remove the shard of glass from his broken heart so now maybe that can heal.