Two twenty-something strangers ditch work one morning, wondering where exactly a winter's day together might take them.

Boy places ad. Girl responds. During a phone conversation they make a headlong and somewhat mysterious decision to meet one another. This occurs on a Tuesday morning, with both strangers consciously abandoning their respective nine-to-five jobs for the whole day—sudden, temporary autonomy. A single day made free and unpredictable.

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drift
—noun
• the course along which something moves; tendency; aim.
• a driving movement or force; impulse; impetus; pressure.
• Linguistics. gradual change in the structure of a language.
• a heap of any matter driven together.
• a meaning; intent; purport: the drift of a statement.

—verb
• to be carried along by currents of water or air, or by the force of circumstances.
• to wander aimlessly
• to be driven into heaps, as by the wind
• to deviate or vary from a set course or adjustment.

I started to write a film about a chance encounter between two individuals. It quickly became a story about two strangers: one of whom places an online ad, to which the other responds. I tried to imagine the awkwardness and ineloquence of their first meeting—how they would interact and communicate, how it might unfold and evolve over a relatively brief period.

I shared an extended, ongoing dialogue about these ideas with my non-professional actors (and material collaborators) Annie Siffermann and Dan Boldon, who also happen to be real life newlyweds (and who also perform together in their own four-piece power pop band, Sleepovers). Annie and Dan's general, shared pool of actual early experiences with one another helped shape much of their performances during the partially improvised scenes that occur.

Regarding the film's title, I was surprised to find that the word "drift" carried so many different meanings, and that many of them described the film's plot and themes so well. Frequently it describes some change of course—either active or passive—with references to both the regular (perhaps monotonous) course from which an object or being deviates, and the unknown destination towards which it (perhaps inexplicably) moves.

I created the film, a bit more thematically than literally, from a personal space. I imagine and hope that its depiction of modern, youthful human experience, neuroses, and (both real and imagined) truths are broadly relatable.