A Story to Tell through Music: An Interview with ‘O’Dessa’ Writer-Director Geremy Jasper

Set in a post-apocalyptic future, O’Dessa is an original rock opera about a farm girl on an epic quest to recover a cherished family heirloom. Her journey leads her to a strange and dangerous city where she meets her one true love – but in order to save his soul, she must put the power of destiny and song to the ultimate test.

Hot on the heels of its premiere at SXSW, the sci-fi opera, visual mind melt that is O’Dessa from visionary filmmaker Geremy Jasper, is now streaming exclusively on Hulu. From the visual language to the wide-ranging music backbone, you’re in for a wild ride. It’s like the love child of Baz Luhrman’s Moulin Rouge and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element.

Writer-director Geremy Jasper recently spoke with Script about the origin of the idea, his creative process, and underlying themes. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration with his key department heads, particularly in world-building and creating the visual language. Geremy also discusses the symbolic role of the titular character O’Dessa’s guitar, inspired by the Orpheus myth, and the intertwined process of writing and composing music, which influenced the film’s narrative.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: What came first for you? Was it this world? Was it the character? Was it the music?

Geremy Jasper: It's a good question. The first thing that came was the character, or at least what she looked like. I tend to draw little cartoons and she just came out. The look of her just came out, a couple decades ago. So, this little waif with the pompadour and a guitar, and I didn't know what I was going to do with her, but I just kind of knew that I wanted to create my version of The Wizard of Oz in some demented sci-fi universe. Those were all things that were on my mind and that I was interested in, and felt very intuitive to me, [laughs] even though it's sort of strange flavors to go together.

And I've always been looking for a story to tell through music. And so, this was the film I was going to write. And then I talked to my really close friend, who's a producer, and he just said, 'This idea is insane. Maybe one day you'll be able to, but this is so ambitious you have to create your own world. Come up with something else.' And that's when I eventually went and wrote Patti Cakes, which was my first film, which is about New Jersey, where I'm from. It was a lot more like write what you know kind of thing and just go to a small town and shoot it.

But I had been haunted by this character and this world and the aesthetic and look and sound of it for years and years, and so it just became a combination of all the things that I love, that I have undying passion for, which is sci-fi films and folk music and psychedelic rock and world-building and weird ass characters and surreal situations. I wanted to make something operatic with those elements.

Sadie: During your writing process and all these stages that you went through with the creative process, was there a thematic anchor for you to stay the course for her journey, specifically in fulfilling her destiny, while also folding in that beautiful love story between her and Euri?

Geremy: It was a tricky dance. The screenwriting process took years. I think it took five years to write it. Many different drafts, many different versions. There were versions where it was much more just a love story and very tragic at the end. And then there were others where it was much more of a hero's adventure. And by doing all those different versions, myself and the producers, kind of picked out what was really working and what wasn't. And it ended up becoming some sort of hybrid, and it was a very difficult hybrid. And I don't know how successful it is, but you want to feel like the love story is motivating her - fulfilling her destiny. It took kind of late in the process to figure that out, but those two things should be interwoven.

Sadie: In terms of creating the visual language in this very specific world that you’ve created, I’d love to talk about the creative collaboration between your production designer, costume designer, and your DP and in fulfilling that vision, and how your own background as a music video director may have influenced those choices?

Geremy: I got really, really lucky that the department heads that came onto this film really believed in the world that we were creating. You have to have this shared dream that you're all [laughs] hallucinating all the time, and you're trying to see it all the same way. And the fact that it's a very unique and different place that has its own kind of rules, and the fact that the four of us, especially four or five of us, really were able to work together and rub off on each other and find it feels somehow somewhat coherent.

I'm very grateful for Odile [Dicks-Mireaux] and Anna [Munro] and Scott [Dougan] and Rina [Yang], everybody brought something different to the to the world building here. And it looks and feels like what I was hoping it would. It looks like what I was imagining while writing it, but better and bigger and more epic. That makes me feel like at least that part of it worked.

I grew up on music videos, and then I ended up making some. And there's a particular way of storytelling in a three-minute pop song that you can do in a video that's obviously accelerated, it's usually way more abstract, and it's usually focused on the face of the singer and the emotion of the singer. And I think having done that for so many years, you get very sensitive to when those moments are feeling right and when they're not, and that's what we're trying to get at with O'Dessa. How can you get something that feels really intimate and real and then go bigger and more expressive and almost operatic, and otherworldly with the visuals, and then come back and find the human heart again? That part is slightly different from doing music videos. But yeah, it's all influenced, and the way that you collaborate with costume and production design and building characters and all that stuff is in there too.

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Sadie: The utilization of the secondary characters in this film is pretty great. They all have a purpose, a drive and add propulsion to O’Dessa’s journey.

Geremy: I think the fact that we spent so much time developing the world and writing the script, I mean, I was writing it for five years, each character just started to get sharper and sharper and sharper and had their own backstory and had their own world view and an attitude, and even had their own musical style and had their own strong aesthetic. Earlier versions had so many more characters. There was a whole universe there. There was like a guy that was completely painted silver, that was O'Dessa's best friend that would freeze like a statue for money. There were so many characters, I had to start whittling it down and just getting to the bare essentials, because it's O'Dessa's story. Each of those little worlds that you go into, we put a lot of love and detail into them. So, I'm glad that landed with you.

Sadie: Now, the guitar, there's something very symbolic about it. The design of it, and the relevance of it to her story. It reminds me of the legend and tale of Robert Johnson.

Geremy: One of the initial inspirations for the film was The Orpheus story. The myth of Orpheus is, he's got the lyre and it's it almost has like supernatural power. Orpheus is the ultimate singer and poet that can kind of cut through the bullshit of life and just tie you to something transcendent and kind of spiritual, or just something larger than our material world. And so that was really interesting to me for O'Dessa.

And then having in a world of plastic in the O'Dessa universe, her having something that came from the earth, something that came from nature and carved specifically from this tree. And it takes on this mythological…it's almost like her Excalibur or something. It's like her special weapon, but it's not a weapon of violence, it's a weapon of the human spirit. It just became this mythic symbol.

I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. And I love guitars, and it seems like you do too, seeing in your background, and they're special instruments. You're not gonna have a magic piano that you scoot around [laughs] or even a magic snare drum - there's just something about a guitar that feels alive and has its own character and depth and has a long tradition and has long tradition in American folklore.

And so being able to tie that with something that felt mythic and kind of as a weapon and a hero's journey kind of tied together nicely. And there's something about the dystopian world of O'Dessa that's very processed and polluted and gross, and then she's got this piece of wood, a piece of the natural world, in her hands, that she's able to kind of transcend all that.

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Sadie: Is there a direct overlap for you when it came to writing the script, the lyrics and composing the music for the film? Or was one influencing the other?

Geremy: They definitely influence each other. And I was very grateful to have the outlet to be able to go into the studio. It was different than, I think, the way that a lot of musicals are written. You have someone writing the screenplay, and then you have another department over here that's going to write the songs, and hopefully, they overlap. And this was a much more organic process, because they're all coming out of the same source.

I would write the screenplay for a couple of months, and then I would hit a wall, 'This is not working anymore.' Writing is very, very frustrating. It's very lonely. You think you're going crazy. There's a lot of crisis there. And then I would go to my safe space, which is Jason [Binnick], my music partner's studio in Queens. We would just tuck down in the studio, and then we'd work on these songs. And I was writing the songs as a way for me to deal with how hard writing the screenplay was. And so that was almost like a little vacation, a little holiday. And making the music that I could see the film as we were doing these songs, and then that would color the next process of writing. So, I was really happy to be able to write some lyrics in the screenplay, and then I would bring them into the studio, or vice versa.

They were constantly rubbing off on each other until the very end. I mean, we were still demoing and writing songs on weekends while we were shooting. So it was up to the last minute, and they were changing, and I was changing lyrics or a plot point would change, and things would just morph. But I think if I was just writing the whole time, I would have lost my mind.

Sadie: When you're in the middle of that process, are you picking a specific character's voice or maybe they're channeling through you in some way?  

Geremy: Yes, that's why I was excited to make this, because it's not straight-up opera, but I wanted to do a lot of the storytelling, a lot of the history of the world, a lot of this specific world, a lot of the internal feelings of the characters through the song. So, the lyrics and the precision of the lyrics in the storytelling was very, very important. Because sometimes people would read the script and be like, 'I can't understand any of this.' And then they would hear the song version of like, 'Oh, OK, now I get it.’ There was a lot of information that was being hidden in songs, or vice versa. So those storytelling elements were almost more important than anything else in the film.

O'Dessa is now available exclusively on Hulu.