Beneath the Waves is an original, feature-length screenplay. It is a fairy tale set in Ireland, where a woman dives to the bottom of the ocean to reclaim her husband, who had been taken by mermaids. She succeeds in rescuing her husband, and in doing so discovers that mermaids are not the beautiful women of legend, but rather man-eating deep-sea creatures. I wrote the short story Brigid and the Mermaids in my junior year in order to get the basic storyline down in an understandable form. In writing the screenplay I used the free screenwriting program Celtx, which formats easily to standard script style.
In writing a story somewhere between fantasy and magical realism, I was heavily influenced by the work of John Sayles, Neil Gaiman and William Goldman. The setting and mythology of The Secret of Roan Inish (Sayles 1994), the magical realism of Stardust (Gaiman 1997) and the cynical storytelling of The Princess Bride (Goldman 1873) all make appearances in Beneath the Waves. Although revised at least five times, this screenplay is by no means finished, and I intend to continue working on it with the intention of it one day being made into a movie
