Over the course of five years, David has made a remarkable journey toward self-acceptance, but something traumatic, like being kidnapped or having his older brother die just sort of undoes all that and takes him right back to square one.

I wanted to play it in the prep room, because in dream language, when you're in the basement, you're really in the body, the core, the roots of your psyche.

I wanted to get into the sequence through his father, because his father was also a man who had secrets. He had this secret room, this secret life that he kept hidden from everybody else.

We purposely chose not to answer the question of what this room was all about. So many of life's mysteries remain unanswered. My own father had some big secret wound, and I will never know what it is, because he died before I had a chance to talk to him about it.

In Joseph Campbell, mythic terms, his father is the messenger. His father unleashes the beast, and the beast is dangerous.

We cut the G.I. Joe in the shooting. It sort of felt like one thing too many.

Once a character is dead, they're never speaking as that character, they're speaking as a fragment of the person they're speaking to. It's David thinking, 'I am a fucking freak. I'm disgusting.'

He really wanted this man's love and acceptance. He doesn't feel he ever got it, but it's his own fault, because he never was honest about who he was. So he never really gave his father a chance to love and accept him, but his father was very similar.

After the incredibly dark tunnel of grieving for Nate, I felt a great pull toward showing some glimmers of light. That you do survive, that you do come out of grief. You're scarred, but you do connect with life and hope. At the same time, I didn't want to tie everything up with a neat little bow.