We all have a voice in our heads, whether it’s a positive one encouraging us to take a leap of faith, or an anxious one holding us back from things that might hurt us. Samona Olanipekun’s short film, “I and I,” unpacks the relationship we have with that voice, showing us a day in the life of a man as he battles with it, befriends it and eventually leaves it behind in the arms of his friends. He tells Joe Zadeh about the making of the film, and about the volatile thoughts of his own that led him to unpack this very subjective, yet very relatable part of life.
It opens with a painfully familiar scene. A man, T (played by Jonathan Ajayi), wakes up in bed to the sound of his phone relentlessly vibrating, as the grey light of day peeks through the curtains. He smiles at the messages, but doesn’t reply, and starts scrolling somewhere else. More messages roll in. He’ll get around to them later, at some point at least, perhaps even tomorrow—and in his mind, he harshly judges himself for not just texting back.
In this smart and inventive short film, “I and I,” from director Samona Olanipekun, we don’t just hear the main character’s inner voice, we see it. Laying next to T in bed, and dressed identically, is the personification of his mind’s eye (played by Samuel Adewunmi). “Leaving mandem on read, yeah?” says T’s inner voice, before springing to its feet and ordering him to get up. “Do you think Muhammad Ali had lie-ins? Let’s go!” Set over the course of a single day, the film’s engrossing 15-minute runtime is a playful yet powerful exploration of the moment-to-moment experience of being a human with a restless mind, and the never-ending cycle of inspiration, irritation, love, shame, anxiety, joy, anger and harmony that it entails.
Olanipekun—who made the film with Steve McQueen’s award-winning production company, Lammas Park—was born in Coventry to Nigerian parents. In 2018, he released “Kindred,” a visually poetic short that took the huge theme of globalization and brought it down to earth in a tender and personal story. It went on to win Best Experimental at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival. “That was the first time I felt like I’d managed to take quite a complex and experimental idea in my head and turn it into a physical film. I didn’t go to film school, but something about images, sound and editing just makes sense to me.”
The concept for “I and I” came about during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “There were moments during that period when I’d find myself in the shower wanting to scream out loud. The voice in my head was just so loud, almost deafening at some points,” he says. “Then, a while later, I had an experience on a train when I was watching people on their daily commute, listening to their headphones, lost in their thoughts, clearly a million miles away from this busy, sweaty carriage. And I started to think about how fascinating these internal experiences we all have are. In my mind, one minute it’s like Carpool Karaoke and the next minute it’s verging on abuse—and that’s just me. Everyone else is doing this, too, and we don’t really talk about it.”
Those conversations with your inner self can be light and throwaway but they can also be really crippling.
He started working on the idea, writing for about two to three hours each morning. “I don’t sit in front of a laptop all day, just slaving away,” he explains. “I go hard for a short amount of time, then I need a bit of distraction. I always find that if I’m wrestling with a problem within a script, I need to let go of it to find a solution. I need to get outside, take a walk, meet people, go to the cinema, or even work on a different project—anything but focusing on the problem. Then, in that relaxed state, my mind usually organizes certain things, and I’ll get these lightbulb moments.” He worked with a co-writer, Daniel Braham, to get it into a shoot-ready script, and then began assembling a team.
It would have been easy for “I and I” to become a heavy and difficult film, because of the themes it’s covering. But Olanipekun’s skill was in showing that our internal voice isn’t only negative, it’s also the very thing that powers us. In fact, one of the most thrilling aspects of it is the way it captures how our moods can so quickly flip flop from one minute to the next, and how a single day spent doing fairly routine tasks can be portrayed as a white-knuckle ride when viewed through the prism of the emotions. A visit to the barbershop becomes a brutal ordeal, whereas walking down the street listening to music is a moment of near ecstatic bliss. “I wanted the film to be a buddy film, a romance, a comedy, but also a violent, intense and heavy drama. I said to the actors: there’s no right or wrong in how you read it, because those conversations with your inner self can be light and throwaway, but they can also be really crippling.”
This volatile tension is encapsulated in the music, which is pure percussion for the most part. Jazz drum sequences veer from rhythmic to chaotic as the inner turmoil grows. Until eventually, in the closing scene of the film, T and his restless mind finally reach a state of peace, the drums fall into a gentle beat, and for the first time we hear other instruments, as the soulful melodies of “Tidal Wave” by Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes rise to the surface. Having spent the whole day inside T’s head, the camera now pulls away, and we watch from a distance as he crosses the street and walks into a bar to meet his friends. The character of his inner voice disappears as he crosses the threshold of the door, and is swallowed up by warm embraces.
“In the script, there was just a single line for that scene: two become one. I wanted it to be subtle. He was now in flow, in real time; not in the back of his head anymore. All day he’d been battling with himself, with shame and inadequacy—in his feelings, essentially. And then in that final scene, I wanted to see that all those worries just fizzle away. And he’s there, and he’s present.”