TESTING

 My creative inspiration for the film stemmed from Edgar Degas' painting Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879).  ©The National Gallery, London NG4121

 

When I first encountered the artwork, I couldn't immediately discern that the subject was performing - her suspended position rather suggested someone hanging, nearly dead or injured. Yet regardless of interpretation, I perceived the situation as self-inflicted.

 

This connected profoundly with a reality television show I'd recently watched, featuring a wife who employed increasingly extreme methods to test her husband's love. Her logic followed that if he endured her unreasonable behaviour - from pointless arguments to manufactured crises - it would confirm his devotion. However, each successful "test" only compelled her to escalate the challenges further, until ultimately her husband filed for divorce.

 

This destructive testing mentality resonated with me as a surprisingly common human behaviour pattern. In my own life, I've obsessively tested a bowing table's structural limits by adding weight, paradoxically accelerating the collapse I feared. This became the core concept for TESTING: a character who, upon noticing his new apartment's warped table, compulsively tests its durability by adding objects until achieving the very destruction he sought to disprove.