Isosceles begins with nineteen-year-old Sean McIntyre finding his longtime best friend Trey Goodsby dead in the bathroom either intentionally or accidentally by his own hand. On the back of the toilet, a cell phone display reads, Missed Call From Madeline Edwards. Before determining the immediate circumstances that would bring the three of them to this scene, the pertinent question became where did they meet? I floated a few ideas around, but none of them seemed natural. One concrete thing was it needed to be a place where on the outset they could be equals. Ironically, the answer came to me as the first day of school. When many of us think of our school days, we think of struggling to fit in, to climb our way up the social ladder. Then I posited, that whatever lasting impressions these three had on each other should be seeded in this environment.
On a sunny autumn day, Sean walks into the classroom with a sea of children before him as an ironic homage to a scene in one of my favorite films, “Goodfellas”. There’s a famous tracking shot where the camera follows Ray Liotta’s character Henry Hill taking his girlfriend Karen played by Lorraine Bracco to the Copacabana through the back entrance. You see all the various people doing their thing, and Hill walks through like he belongs, almost like he’s royalty. However though Hill felt all that confidence, I wanted Sean to feel small and insignificant.
After that moment, I knew the next place to go was to introduce Madeline into his world in a surreal way. It had to contrast with the faces of his classmates whom he cannot put a name to, yet I knew it had to keep with the notion of his insecurity. When he sees Madeline in the sunlight and is completely transfixed, it was important to state she has an ethereal glow. This served a dual purpose, not just his attraction, but to establish her as someone whom Sean sees as above him.