These Days
There are a million things I love about Gareth Edward's 2010 movie Monsters, but the thing I love the most is how it teeters on the verge of being a piece of Meta Fiction. There are only two actors in the movie, everyone else is just playing themselves, except that they live in a world where giant octopus aliens have infested the US-Mexico border region. Most of these extras didn't even know what the movie was when they were being filmed, and yet, they are effectively transported to an alternate reality via movie magic.
I can't help but feel like all these alternates of the real people truly exist, and that this world Gareth created is just as real as our own, but our only point of entry is through his movie. That idea is what inspired the series These Days, where I take real-world locations and twist them into versions of themselves that exist within the world of Monsters, along with showing the disparity in the quality of life between people on the Mexican, and American side of the wall.
