In each mind active, thoughts travel in labyrinthine patterning, conducting daily discourses of emotion versus action, juxtaposing reality against daydream, writing and re-writing storylines of a life that is until the moment of actualization merely a mystery. What these emotions and dreams are, how they derive and the whereabouts of their hiding places in moments of absence are to logic secrets carefully stored in places of only subconscious recognition. It’s in this exact place that Justin Hilliard found himself sheltered while crafting the feature Wednesday.

An intensely personal film for Hilliard and one completed in a creative safe space with University of Texas at Arlington classmate alum and the film’s cinematographer and co-producer Ryan Hartsell, Wednesday drew directly from Hilliard’s own trials and tribulations. The production sprang from a break-up with Hilliard’s fiancé and ended in a meeting with his future wife, actress Arianne Martin. Its production and post traversed throughout the United States, England and Spain. It is on the one hand a film emotionally epic and yet its moments explore the minute. As Hilliard would have it, it was a challenge not only to make but is also one to watch play out.

“I’m a filmmaker, but I prefer to think of myself as an artist,” he says. “Artists have always been throughout societies the innovators, the ones that push the envelope, push thinking. They’re the ones that are laughed at immediately whenever they come up with ideas, but then years down the road, it’s what has shaped the norm. So, they are constantly pushing, changing and bringing up new ideas, being the innovators.

“That goes into the sense of artists needing to create poetry. Vladimir Mayakovsky said something like, “There’s a part of the mind that can only be changed by poetry and that poetry always has to be changing.” I think of that connection with film, how there are some parts of the mind, whether someone likes your film or doesn’t like your film, that will be effected. Some parts can only be touched by something that’s changing, something that’s new, something that they don’t feel comfortable with. That’s how I approached especially Wednesday but how I approach film in general though. There always has to be a sense of change whether it works or not. That’s an important thing.”

This sense of change as imparted by Wednesday is one that works on an entirely emotional level. In terms of its narrative the film delves into the ever-agitated and heartbroken mind of artist and filmmaker Julian as he seeks to complete his own film project. While simply stated here this binding narrative thread, referred to as the “Narcissus Flower” segment of the film, wraps itself around three intersecting stories of love and loss. These three sections, all which represent storylines that Julian creates and sometimes abandons throughout the macro-framework of the film, speak on a micro-scale to the three layers of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. In other words, Hilliard’s shaped three worlds within one overarching world, that of an artist’s mind, and through these three worlds, he allows Julian to study hell, purgatory and paradise.

“It basically just started with the idea that everyone’s the same. Everyone goes through the same things. There’s very little that’s new. It’s just about how we deal with the emotions of love and loss, how we get over them or how we don’t get over them that separates us. The basic idea was just having these three different main stories from different points of society, different points of age, different cultures and just show how people deal with the same issues but in different ways,” he explains.

By far the most naturalistic segment, “Luke & Lucy” takes full advantage of digital grittiness and aesthetic, using these to enhance the acute depression and anger that cries through each of the segment’s frames. The lovers battle between frustration and understanding, Luke continually preoccupied with his perception of fatalism regarding the question of what it is to be a man and his confusion about his father’s death and Lucy meanwhile struggling to break through his omnipresent hopelessness. It’s a harrowing section of shouts and silences. “It’s not supposed to be pleasant. It’s supposed to be raw and kind of unnerving and not just settled and relaxing,” Hilliard confirms.

“It’s tough. Luke is completely selfish. He’s in hell, and he’s not afraid to scream out the emotions about where he is coming from. He’s probably the most polarizing figure in the film as far as people either loving him or hating him…Some people cannot even relate to him. They don’t think that person even exists. They think he’s bipolar, over-the-top and that no one would react with those exaggerated emotions.

“Then you have someone like my mom who sees it and goes, ‘Wow, that reminds me of you,’” Hilliard says, breaking into a laugh. “Not in a bad sense, but whenever her and my sister watch the trailer and see his arms flying up, they’re like, “Wow, that was you as a teen.

“That’s been one of the greatest things [about sharing the film.] Some people completely and utterly hate Luke, and then somebody else watches it, and they’re like, “Yeah, I enjoyed it. The acting was great, and man, I really connected to Luke.” Or you can get a sense that someone watches this, and especially if I know them too personally and know what they’re like and know that they have that same raw emotion, it’s not fun to see something like that, that you kind of connect to, even if it’s on a subconscious level, so you kind of despise that character.

“[The audience members] forget that there’s a wall there, that it is an actor portraying a character and it is just a character. You see something in yourself that’s not necessarily a good characteristic on film, or you see some bad qualities, whether you’re a good person or not, and you’re not going to react very well to it. So, it’s been fun from a sociological standpoint, just studying how people react to it.”

Although Luke (Ryan Hurst) does rant and rave, lashing out against invisible barriers and filling this part of the story with emotional heaviness, it’s the quiet moments of reaction from Lucy (Arianne Martin) that sell the sadness. When asked to explain how with so few lines and so few real moments of her own Lucy should do this, Hilliard admits, not at all shyly, that it’s his female characters that he most often connects with. The questions about masculinity that Luke rages against are still very much points of confusion for Hilliard himself, and so somehow, his empathy goes out to these quiet and seemingly wiser characters, the characters who he crafts with a definite vulnerability but the underlying strength of understanding.

Cutting into “Purgatory,” the story flows on a lyrical and experimental thread with Harold (Philip Goldacre) contending with the dissociation from his former wife Linda (Adrienne Marks). The older couple, separated for reasons unexplained in the film, dance a battle of blame and failed compromise. The enigmatic Virgil (Erich Redman) traces his lonely songs in and out of scenes, attempting to teach Harold, who we come to find is at fault for the separation, about love. There’s a classic feel and distinct surrealistic stylism to the segment. It’s almost as if it’s a hybrid of allegory and photo album realism.

“When it came to “Purgatory,” I would describe it as the most Hollywood segment, even though it’s not, but it’s supposed to be the most soothing. It’s supposed to be the most likeable, and not surprisingly, it’s the one most people relate to the most, or like the most,” Hilliard says.

Shot throughout England, and particularly throughout London, “Purgatory” presented a very tangible hurdle for an independent film in terms of financing, yet Hilliard saw so clearly Harold and Linda’s emotional landscapes defined by the location that he settled definitely on shooting there. “For some reason, for whatever influence that came as a young kid from literature and film, it was always going to be London, and I’d never even been there,” he says. “It’s just cold, stark and had this feeling that there’s warmth that’s got to be between these two characters, even though they’ve been separated for so long.”

Specifically significant in terms of location was the use of West Wycombe’s Hellfire Caves to represent Harold’s maze of emotion. “There’s all this history and folklore when it comes to the Hellfire Caves. It’s a man-made tunnel with all these secret rooms and caverns, and these guys used to go there to do awful things,” he says. “There’s talk that they sacrificed virgins, and there were these statutes scattered throughout the land around the caves so that these gentlemen in the secret societies could just go around, and if they got bored, they could relate physically to a statue.”

“It’s exactly what I was looking for visually when I wrote it, but then there’s this history to it to, which made it a lot of fun to shoot at.”

While conversation about the relationship between “Luke & Lucy” and “Purgatory” is ample, the final segment of Julian’s trilogy “Lyrics of a Lowly Life” is a bit odd man out. “Whenever I talk about these segments, I really talk about it like a separate film. I never wanted “Lyrics” to fit in with the others,” Hilliard says. “From the beginning, that’s supposed to be the one that I am the least connected to from a filmmaker’s standpoint, or Julian that he’s connected to from a filmmaker’s standpoint.”

The segment follows Norma, who when informed of her former husband’s death, rallies her children for a road trip cross-country. It’s the section least connected to personal experience and the one thereby most open-ended. “You have these two other segments that are based on direct events. Something would happen in my personal life, or I’d write it say on the page, and then it would happen in real life. It was so personally connected whereas for “Lyrics,” it’s a segment that’s supposed to be separate from the film. It’s never supposed to be completed. It’s not my heart. It’s not Julian’s heart.”

All this begs the question: Why include the segment then? “It all leads up to this struggle of an artist to complete this film, and in the film, he doesn’t necessarily finish,” Hilliard answers. “You’ve just watched Luke leading into this hell, and Harold stuck in purgatory floating along, looking for answers but not quite there. So, here’s going to be hope. There’s got to be hope, but the hope doesn’t necessarily lie in that segment. By the end of the film you realize the hope is just continuing as an artist.”

And, it’s on this note that Hilliard offers his hand out to the audience to welcome them back to the primary storyline, that of artist Julian (Frank Mosley, voice-over Hilliard) searching for the film he’s going to make. Although Julian’s conceived all the stories we’ve just read about, he’s too bewildered, too lost and too lovesick to follow through with any of them. His story, very simply, deals with losing Maggie (Erin Wilcox, voice-over Nicole Gray).

“The focus of “Narcissus,” is going to be more on the Julian character because most of the previous characters are a reflection of Maggie. There’s a lot of Julian and Maggie throughout all the other segments, so you get a sense of where Maggie’s coming from early on even though that may not connect to her directly at the end,” Hilliard reveals.

So, that all of the sadness, confusion and need for forgiveness in Luke, Harold and Norma are merely reflections of Julian’s own consciousness as regards his separation from Maggie. It’s a glimpse into a mind, and like all of these should rightly be, it leaves quite a bit unsolved.

“That’s one of the words I’ve used to describe Wednesday several times. It’s nebulous. There’s so much to it that I wanted to leave so open-ended. There are so many story lines and the backgrounds to the characters that you really don’t know: what happened to them, why they’re reacting this certain way, why they haven’t been able to get over their issues, and I like that. It lets the viewer completely connect to one segment more than the others and fill-in-the-blanks their own way, completely hate one segment but love another and question why that other one is there,” he says. “Then with “Narcissus,” you have this one character that it’s all thrown on, and you realize it’s all connected to this artist and what he’s gone through.”

As Hilliard preps for three upcoming films with Striped Socks Productions, the company both he and Hartsell founded, he’s honest about his artistic intentions and the evolutions of his work. “Wednesday is not a film that I always want to make forever, and an artist always is changing. So with what I’ve said as far as the personal connections and links, and creating change that way or effecting someone’s mind or heart that way, that’s just Wednesday.”

For more information visit www.striped-socks.com/.

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