Adam Morse had always dreamed of becoming a film-maker and nothing – not even the sudden loss of his sight – was going to stop him. Now, almost a decade after he was registered blind, his first feature film, with a cast headed by Hollywood actor Billy Zane, is to receive its world premiere at the Edinburgh international film festival.
Lucid explores dreams and reality and reflects Morse’s view that “nothing can stop us from making dreams come true”. Observers say the fact that the 28-year-old has written and directed a film with only peripheral vision – let alone with high-profile actors such as Zane, Sadie Frost and Laurie Calvert in it – is extraordinary.
“I want to inspire people to make their dreams real,” he said of the film, which premieres on 23 June. “I’m not just talking about disabled people. I want everyone to believe in themselves and to realise that almost anything is possible.”
Morse, from Kingston upon Thames, had perfect vision until 2009, when his eyesight suddenly deteriorated while he was in Dubai working as a production assistant on the film City of Life. I started noticing, in the centre of my vision, there were some dots,” he said. “Over that spring-summer of 2009, the dots in the middle of my vision began to get bigger and multiplied. Imagine microscopic dots and they’re flashing. I can see them right now.”
Back home, doctors struggled to diagnose the problem: “My sight was getting worse by the week. My confidence took a big knock. Not just my mobility … but my social interactions. That was a big shock.”
Eventually, doctors diagnosed a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder, Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy. Within weeks, his musician brother, Jake – three years his junior – also began to lose his sight.
Adam resolved “to stop focusing on the limitations and instead concentrate on what I could do”. He cannot read printed text, but screen-reader software has transformed his life: “I could start being able to write again. Every letter on the keyboard that I type out, it reads back to me. I hear what I’m typing.”
He taught himself to write screenplays, listening to online podcasts and videos. Recalling his brother’s initial scepticism when he began work on a short film, The Window, a comedy drama, he said: “He just started laughing, and said ‘how are you going to do that? You can’t see’ … [I thought] ‘I’ve got to show my brother that we haven’t been given a life sentence and that being different is OK – actually better’.”
The Window, with Jake’s guitar soundtrack, won the audience award at the London independent film festival in 2014. Morse then began work on Lucid. It tells the story of Zel, a timid young man played by Calvert, who fears and craves intimacy. He becomes infatuated with a dancer and is caught spying on her by his eccentric neighbour (Zane), who offers to help him woo her Zel embarks on an intense subliminal adventure.
Morse’s film-making is made possible partly through cinematographer Michel Dierickx, who translates his ideas on screen. “We have this great working relationship,” Morse said. “But when it comes to framing a shot, I’m actually able to do that myself … I have enough peripheral vision to get around, but also to appreciate an image on screen.”
Morse has almost finished writing his next feature, a dark comedy called China Blue, which he will shoot next year. He pays particular tribute to his parents and brother – whose guitar-playing is also on Lucid’s soundtrack – saying that their love “has made this possible”.
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