By Travis Johnson
In Pulse, Daniel Monks plays a gay disabled teenager, Olly, who jumps at the chance to avoid the degenerative disease ravaging his body by having his mind transferred into the body of an attractive young woman. A coming of age parable with a sci-fi twist, what sets it apart from most body-swap scenarios is that it is, in part, autobiographical. Of course Monks, who penned the screenplay, has never had his consciousness transplanted into another body – but he is gay, disabled and, like us all, was once a teenager.
At the age of 11, surgery to remove a tumour on his spine left Monks paralysed. “Up until that point I wasn’t disabled at all,” he recalls. “And then I went back to school in a wheelchair.” Around the same time the onset of puberty began, and Monks began to come to terms with the fact that he was gay.
“There was a boy in my class who I had a crush on and he was dating the pretty blonde girl,” he tells us. “And I remember thinking, ‘If I looked like her, then he would look at me that way and he would treat me that way. He would want to kiss me.'”
From that adolescent fantasy eventually grew the feature film currently doing the festival circuit, first coming to life as a short film that Monks made with his filmmaking partner and best friend, Stevie Cruz-Martin.
“We met in workshop here in Perth,” Cruz-Martin remembers. “A PAC Screen workshop for writer/director/actors. Dan and I were both in as directors but I sort of shot on the side and Dan needed a DOP, so we worked together on that project, and it just kept expanding. And even when Dan went to AFTRS I’d fly over and shoot his projects for school. We kept making short films after that, and this feature was being explored by him through those years. Dan and I actually live together as well – we’re like family. It’s really fortunate to be able to wake up every morning and discuss a feature. So it’s been really nice actually, just to see it come together.”
“I think the best decision made in the entire process of making this film has been having Stevie on as director,” Monks says. “Because not only is she incredibly talented and the perfect person to tell the story, but from my point of view of writing such a deeply personal story, it was so good to have that objective point of view, to help communicate that to an audience, to make it more accessible and more universal to people.”
As a film, Pulse is not the body-swap comedy the elevator pitch premise may have you picturing. It explores sexuality and identity in a remarkably frank and uncompromising manner, with Olly (now Olivia) exploring his/her desires (the character’s core gender identity is never completely nailed down) and capabilities, sometimes with disastrous, uncomfortable results. At times it’s incredibly confronting, which meant that traditional funding avenues were probably not going to be much help bringing Monks’ and Cruz-Martin’s vision to life.
“It was mainly crowdfunding and private investing,” Cruz-Martin explains. “And then Daniel putting his own money into his baby. Crowdfunding was incredible with Pozible; we got incredibly lucky with that and got so much support.” Having given themselves 40 days to hit a target of $15,000, the pair were amazed when they passed that milestone within 40 hours. “I think that’s a testament to the story, because it is a universal question; we’ve all thought, ‘if I looked this way, or if I had this different body, or if I was a different sex, how would my life be different and would it be easier?’ It really got people thinking.”
For all that, it is still very much Monks’ story, rooted in his individual experiences. “I felt such a disconnect from my body, it didn’t feel like my own. I have always been interested in how our bodies shape who we are and how the way people respond to us because of how we look shapes us.
“I never saw a film that really reflected my own experience, especially being a young person with a disability, and explored it frankly and not in a way that homogenises it or dilutes it to make it more palatable. It was really important to us to tell the story boldly, and that was a big part of the reason why we decided to go the independent route.”
Given that the film deals with such hot-button issues, you might think that the pair would experience push-back from certain quarters, with some taking issue at the way Monks’ character is portrayed, even keeping in mind the actor/writer’s own status as a disabled gay man. “We were expecting that a little bit,” Cruz-Martin admits.
Happily, the response has been pretty much universally positive. As Monks says. “These are such minorities that stories aren’t told about them, and I know what it’s like to be a minority and to want the stories that are told to really reflect your experience. We were expecting a bit of push back in that way, but the response has been very encouraging.”
“And people also saying, ‘thank you for being so honest, for being so real.'” Cruz-Martin adds. “That’s been very rewarding for us as filmmakers whenever we’ve had Q&As – people from those minority communities saying how much it’s really spoken to them.”
And what message is it communicating? Monks has the last word. “For me personally, it’s to accept the differences in ourselves; to accept and embrace and be proud of what makes us different.”
Pulse is available now on Digital.
