what you wish for
Nicholas Tomnay writer, director, editor & producer
Nicholas' films have been shown at festivals around the world, including the Sundance Film Festival, Tribeca Film festival, Fantastic Fest, Fantasia, Frightfest and Sitges.
In 2011 Nicholas' first feature film, THE PERFECT HOST starring David Hyde Pierce was released by Magnolia Pictures.
Nicholas' sophomore feature WHAT YOU WISH FOR, starring Nick Stahl will be released theatrically and on VOD by Magnet Releasing in May 2024.
Director's statement
I wrote the script for What You Wish For at the end of 2018. Soon after this another film I was deep into pre-production with fell through - the third one for me in about five years.
In the summer of 2019 I decided to stop asking permission from other people and produce What You Wish For myself. With my wife’s help we began the process of raising money, and a couple of years later we had a modest budget.
I found an excellent production services team in Bogota, enlisted a couple of other producers to help, and in the fall of 2021 during the pandemic we began production.
The film’s location is never mentioned in the story, I wanted ambiguity in where it is actually happening, but the production was shot over 23 days in a Colombian town three hours south of Bogota. One of our principal cast dropped out days before production, there was no hot water in our lodgings and Nick Stahl had a 2-foot iguana as a roommate.
Some of my favorite films are the ones that feel like a spell. You enter them and become immersed in their bubble. I really felt this story needed to be told in that same way. And so the cinematographer and I limited our focal lengths, the production designer and I designed a color chart, where each color has a meaning, and the composers and I found a way to use the same musical theme with variation.
I’ve always felt that a genre film is the best Trojan horse to express philosophical or societal ideas. What You Wish For is a noir thriller and also a morality tale. It has a point to make about greed, but hopefully not didactically, rather simply through the story we have told.