I used to tell this story from when I was 22: I’m broke and trying to meet a girl at 4 a.m. I borrow my friend’s stick-shift, I can’t drive it, and I end up trapped on a hill for hours. It’s a funny story – because that’s how I frame it – but the truth is, it was humiliating. Looking back at why I’ve told and retold this story, I realized I was covering up my shame with comedy. We talk a lot about masculinity (toxic or otherwise), but not about the constant, small humiliations men experience trying to live up to an archaic idea of what a man should be. I think this is responsible for so many male-driven transgressions in modern life. At its core, that’s what Wish You Were Here! is about: the thousand hits to the male ego; the humiliation we face daily, hourly, trying to be the man “we’re supposed to be,” all while never talking about it. So, I wanted to talk about it – lightly. Not a circle of chairs in your living room, but a ride you can laugh through and then feel. My hope is the film offers an on-ramp to an uncommon conversation about the humiliation at the center of the performance of masculinity. Formally, we built the language of the film around this idea. The story is set in 2006 on a classic “guys’ road trip,” a dominant early-2000s trope. The stick shift stands in for a bygone male power (the American Graffiti/Steve McQueen fantasy) that’s irrelevant now and yet, for some reason if you can’t drive a stick, you're not a “real man.” The car, a Porsche 911, is the one my dad dreamed about for my whole life. He built an amazing life but never got that Porsche. Because the story lives in the early 2000s, our cinematographer, Carlos Cardona, and I limited ourselves to period-true techniques: pans, dollies, in-camera whips; with lighting and color inspired by a time before digital cameras outpaced celluloid (touchstones: Out of Sight; Synecdoche, New York; My Blueberry Nights). The soundtrack pairs masculine dominance and lonely grief. Rappers Chingy and The Game move from score to source as our characters move in and out of their performance of masculinity, and The Strokes underline the quiet sorrow of facing our failures alone. Growing up as a mixed kid (half Puerto Rican, half Irish), I learned early that trying to belong, and trying to prove yourself – especially as a man – is often a performance, and often humiliating. This film is my funny, heartfelt way of cracking that performance open.