Project Description
Our heroine, Girl (or Iris, or any of her various incarnations throughout) is the dreamer. A chameleon with the ability to completely transform into whatever persona is being projected onto her. Thus, she is never seen for who she really is. Until she meets a man who opens the floodgates to her heart that goes by the name…
…Tom, a small, hapless man with a disproportionally big heart and a meticulous mind, who is struggling with severe emasculation. Managing his psychological regression of his physical exception, Tom is stuck in the grotesque grips of both questionable men’s group therapy as well as his categorically insane home life.
When Iris’s car breaks down and Tom picks her up off the side of the road, he is the first and only person to break through her illusions. Their exposed battle scars and quirky chemistry begin to loosen the trap doors of their tortured minds and clear the way to freedom. Unaware there is love at play between them, night after night Iris asks Tom to drive her to her various “appointments”: a sadistic poetry professor, an ancient music producer with an anachronistic sexual appetite, and a sinister beef industry magnate with little respect for money and even less for rules… who also happen to be members of Tom’s therapy group.
Tom is not allowed to ask questions during these platonic nocturnal encounters with Iris, and he doesn’t have to. She is the incarnation of something different, something true, for whom he drives, enraptured and willfully ignorant… until one night when the truth erupts and their need to know more takes over. Iris allows Tom to ask her one question, the only question that matters: “What do you want more than anything in the world?”
The answer to this question will change their lives forever.
Written by Sarah Carter & Brian Doherty
Girl (a self-appointed sex therapist who shape-shifts into her clients’ most vulnerable fantasies) gets picked up by Tom (an unusually small man from an over-the-top mens’ therapy group) and together they flee their dysfunctional lives, erupting in a phantasmagoria of violence, disillusionment, and a lovers-on-the-run search for home.
Project Status
Girl Who Needed a Ride has a budget of $3m.
Margaret Qualley is currently considering the lead.
Reference Imagery
Director’s Statement
Girl Who Needed a Ride is a bizarre love story set in the subconscious between a small man in a primal men’s therapy group and a spurious call girl. It’s a terrifying journey toward self-actualization through a sort of self-annihilation. As if in a Jungian dreamscape, every character is a projection of the dreamer.
“A DREAM YOU DREAM IS ONLY A DREAM. A DREAM WE DREAM TOGETHER IS REALITY.” - YOKO ONO
Girl, who is primarily played by our lead, Iris, takes on different projections of her clients’ fantasies. She becomes entirely different characters played by supporting cast: Petal, Candace, Baby Doll, and Jemma.
Tom, an unconditionally loving soul who can’t help but know people better than they know themselves, is a very real threat to a charming survivor such as our Girl, Iris.
These two deeply genuine but tragically flawed individuals can’t help but join forces to escape a suffocating system of circumstances and relationships that threaten their very sanity, all upon the backdrop of the free-wheeling and at times psychosexual dream that is their lives.
Girl Who Needed a Ride has a comedic tone and a dream-like beauty that still manages to touch on profound human simplicity.
You’ve never seen a film quite like this.
This script takes the audience on a ride through toxic portals of one woman’s survival structure, spinning into chaos, death, destruction, and lies before landing at home at peace with her soul.
What begins with butterflies and white lies becomes a horror show of undeniable delusion, revenge, and finally self-acceptance. From there maybe romance is possible, but the ways this unlikely partnership is faced with their respective realities, finds justice, and leaves the madness behind in a wake of heart-wrenching clarity is sexier than any kiss.
There is a 70s aesthetic taking us back to the beginning of experimental primal therapy, dream analysis, psychedelics, and the questioning of our limited consciousness.
It is a timeless and placeless wild ride beyond reality into a surreality that is recognizably closer to truth.
Collaborators
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Brian Doherty
Brian Doherty is a journalist and screenwriter based in California's Coachella Valley. He is the author of five books, which have explored various often misunderstood or derided, yet vital to modern American culture, subcultures such as Burning Man, libertarianism, and underground comix. As a senior editor at Reason Magazine and a longtime Journalist and comic book critic, his most recent book, Dirty Pictures is the first complete narrative history of the weird and wonderful world of Underground Comix — ”a welcome addition to an under-analyzed legacy of the free-spirited 1960s”. His previous books include Radicals for Capitalism: A History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement and Gun Control on Trial. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, among other publications. He has also been a commentator on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including The O’Reilly Factor and Glenn Beck Show.
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Sarah Carter
Sarah Carter is a writer, director, actor, filmmaker, musician and CEO of Cheshire Moon Productions. Her success as an actor inspired a quiet pursuit of the director's chair. Working with and shadowing directors like Spike Lee, Judd Apatow, and Steven Spielberg, she discovered her own passion her filmmaking, and the social impact of original storytelling.
Beyond her work as a writer, director, and actor, Sarah Carter has been behind the scenes as the CEO of Cheshire Moon Productions for over two decades. Originally a framework to facilitate her own creative projects, Sarah’s joy and pure intention as a producer is magnetic. The company has expanded to collaborate with similarly free-spirited producers and artists with several projects in development for 2024, including her first animated short in collaboration with Thinking Seed Studios and Brazilian artist Juka. Her first feature-length producorial effect, “A Pity”, is making the rounds internationally at film festivals now. Her debut feature, “In Her Name”, premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in June 2022, winning an Audience Award. The film is available to stream now on Apple TV+, Prime Video, Kanopy, Google Play, and Fandango, with a Limited Edition Blu-Ray featuring a BTS documentary available exclusively on Amazon.
However quirky, her art is executed precisely and with technical proficiency. Grounded in composition, she sets the stage to capture a whimsical sense of aliveness that transports both the players and viewers into a realm beyond logic and closer to truth.