BRIAN MURPHY
 BRIAN MURPHY
Where do you live (City, State, or Country)?
We’re based in California. One of us is currently in L.A., the other in Lake Tahoe—reflecting a long-distance creative partnership that’s lasted decades. Your script stood out among hundreds of others. What was the inspiration for your story and why did you write a script instead of a short story or a novel? The original idea came from Scott Bloom and was rooted in a deeply personal experience he struggled to articulate. It felt cinematic from the start—but it resisted conventional narrative structure. The breakthrough came when we connected the idea to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Around the same time, we encountered a lecture drawing parallels between Paleolithic cave drawings and the compulsive, symbolic doodles of people experiencing psychosis. That connection unlocked something essential: the story wasn’t linear—it was nested, recursive, and symbolic. A screenplay felt like the only form that could hold that complexity. Film allows images, repetition, genre shifts, and physical space to carry meaning in ways prose can’t. The Infiniplex needed screens within screens, movies inside movies, characters watching themselves—cinema is the language of the story. How long did it take you to write your script...and what is your writing process? Do you outline...use index cards...white board...or just start with FADE IN? This script evolved over multiple drafts across several years. Once we cracked the underlying structure, we used index cards mapped to the stages of the Hero’s Journey—not as a formula, but as stepping stones. Each “world” inside The Infiniplex reflects a different stage of that journey. From there, the process became highly iterative:
Later drafts focused heavily on clarity, character agency (especially Alyson’s), and rhythm— treating the script almost like a piece of music. What is your ultimate ambition as a writer? To tell stories that stay with people—not because they explain everything, but because they resonate. We’re interested in genre stories that smuggle in emotional and philosophical questions: identity, responsibility, guilt, love, and the cost of avoidance. If a story can be entertaining, unsettling, and strangely comforting all at once—that’s the sweet spot. Was your entry at The Wiki Screenplay Contest a full script or “the first ten pages”? Why did you make that choice? We submitted the full script. The Infiniplex is designed to unfold, layer by layer. Its payoff depends on structure, escalation, and character evolution—especially Alyson’s agency in the third act. Submitting anything less than the full piece wouldn’t have represented the story honestly. What’s your all-time favorite movie or television show...and why? That’s a moving target, but a few touchstones loom large:
What advice do you have for writers hoping to win a contest or place as a finalist as you have? Listen carefully to notes—but don’t obey them blindly. The most useful notes aren’t instructions; they’re diagnoses. If multiple readers are confused or disengaged in the same place, something is off—but the fix has to come from inside the story, not from trend-chasing or panic. Also: protect what’s strange about your work. That’s usually the thing people remember. What else are you working on that the world needs to know about? Several projects, ranging from grounded dramas to genre-forward work, all exploring similar themes: identity under pressure, systems that consume people, and the quiet moments where characters choose who they’re going to be. But for now, The Infiniplex has our full attention—and we’re excited to see where it goes next. |
