Season 1 Episode 1
"Home Is Where The Awesome Is"

The Script.

Rue de l'Université, 7é Arr., Paris, France. Today.

We're completely pinned down. I hunker flush against a white Citroën as a hail of gunfire punishes the walls behind us. More of them keep coming, two-by-two, across the park in front of the Musée du Quai Branly. Nowhere to run. I grip my GLOCK 19 tighter.

Luc Besson: "Putains!"

The 52-year old veteran director storms from cover and runs towards me, spraying bullets from twin pistols at our attackers. He looks straight at me.

LB: "Why aren't you shooting!? You want maple syrup with your labia you goddamned Canadian pussy!?"

Matt Evans: "I'm not a fucking Canadi--"

Before I can finish speaking three things happen almost simultaneously. (If there were any nanoseconds between them, the heat of the moment made them unusually hard for me to discern.)

1. Amid all the noise, the crisp report of a SIG-Sauer. A sound with all the terrible beauty of James Horner's steel drum-infused score to Commando.

2. An impact on Besson's right side, the shock shuddering through his body and sending him spiraling to the ground.

3. A bloody red mist is sprayed forward (by Besson's impressive momentum for a man his age and size) directly towards me, where it coats my face and fills my screaming mouth like a gentle Spring rain.

Luc Besson is down. First thing's first, I do what any up-and-coming writer/actor/director with a passing knowledge of Louisiana Voodoo would do when blood from the G.S.W. of one of his heros splashes into his mouth. I swallow and hope to absorb some of his power.

I'm Matt Evans. Welcome to Paris.

A quiet cafe overlooking the Seine. Two days ago.

Johnny Depp: "Matthew! Glad you called."

I stand up from the table and move to greet him.

Matt Evans: "Deppler Effect!"

Depp approaches, smiling warmly, his right arm outstretched for a fist bump. I raise mine, our fists rebound and then each splay out into a five-fingered explosion. While I'm making the SPLKKKSSH noise through puffed out cheeks, Depp deftly swivels, and before I know what's what he's cupping my ball-sack tenderly with his left hand. I freeze. He freezes. His smile fades. My stathams rest gently in his palm.

JD: "What's wrong Matthew?"

I can't get a word out.

JD: "You gonna leave a guy hanging?"

ME: "I... I'm not sure what that means anymore."

My left statham (the one I've come to call The Transporter) twitches slightly, as it does when I'm confused. Were it not for the dampening effect of my loose khakis, it may have tapped out a panicked message in some variant of Morse known only to testes.

JD: "It's the Splode n' Cup Matthew. I don't understand, you don't know it?"

ME: "I don't know it."

Now Sergeant Jericho Butler (A.K.A. my right one) starts bouncing nervously too, as though he were once again face-to-face with the murderous hordes of Ghosts of Mars.

JD: "Wow man, how long have you been out of L.A.?"

ME: "Too long."

JD: "No kidding. Listen, you can't leave a guy hanging. That's rule one of the Splode n' Cup."

He glances down to the Depps in the Deep. I reach out slowly, talking just to make noise.

ME: "Rule one? So, how many rules are there?"

JD: "Four. But just feel the flow Matthew, you know how to do this. You've always known."

His smile is reassuring... Contact. I feel him relax into my hand. We are two men, at rest.

ME: "This isn't so bad."

JD: "I know, right? It's all about support Matthew."

ME: "I know! - your boys are heavy."

JD: "Grapefruit juice with every meal."

I nod.

JD: "But it's more than physical support Matthew. It's emotional support. Here we are. Two men of the world, giving the other charge of his intimacies. Trust. Understanding. Brotherhood. Balls."

I nod again. In this moment, which seems to last a lifetime, I would follow this man to Hades and back.

ME: "How long do we-?"

JD: "This has already been unusually long."

ME: "So we should...?"

JD: "On three."

We lock eyes, countdown, and release.

Sanctuary is gone. Once again I'm hanging alone in space, swinging without purpose or reason. The room seems colder. The world, darker.

JD: "It's hard coming down the first time."

ME: "No shit."

JD: "Let's sit, and you can tell me why you called."

He turns me to the table with a pat on the back, and we sit.

The Shootout / Besson. Today.

Besson seems to fall in slow motion. I'm unsure if this is due to the emotional impact of seeing the great man being shot, or because of the problems I've had perceiving the passage of time ever since I ate all that paint in Miss Brewhickey's 2nd grade art class. I take in the scene around me as my mind slowly ramps back to normal pace.

It is chaos. Members of the cast and crew throw their bodies desperately from one meagre site of cover to the next. They fire back frantically, but we are outnumbered and outgunned. Two of the lighting guys - Jean and Herbert - are screaming themselves hoarse as they call out to the Best Boy. A young Lyonnais, injured and writhing in the middle of the boulevard, completely exposed. He reaches out to Jean, calling out for help, just as another round from some unseen crack-shot finds it way to his leg. He slams his face into the street, his agonized scream transformed into the sickening gargling of a wounded man blowing bubbles in his own blood. It it weren't real life I would think this was awesome.

The Best Boy looks up, and our eyes meet. A look of intense suffering. Of anguish. Help me, he says, without speaking. This would have been the most pure transmission of emotion from one human mind to another - unrestricted by the frailties of language or the prejudices of a broken world - this would have been the clearest expression of raw Life I had ever seen, had it not been for my having already borne witness to Paul Walker's performance in Into The Blue.

The moment crashes to an end when Besson's body slams into the Citroën right beside me.

Luc Besson: "Your fucking blood is pumping now, hein?"

He laughs.

Matt Evans: "Jerry H. Bruckheimer, Luc! I thought you were dead."

LB: "This?"

His hand disappears into a hole in his shoulder and returns with some loose arm meat that he tosses aside.

LB: "A flesh wound."

ME: "You're in shock."

LB: "Pfft. Américains with your psycho-babble. Maybe I need a timeout, non? Ha!"

He spits up a little blood on my shirt as he laughs at the joke. I resist the urge to palm it into my mouth, having already had three inspired ideas for Parkour-based action movies since my last taste.

ME: "You need to end this Luc. You can end it any time."

The laugh dies in his throat and his eyes become steel.

LB: "End this? You mean submit to those fascists?"

He gestures towards our attackers with one of his pistols, firing off a couple rounds without looking.

LB: "Mon Dieu, save us from Américains! You all talk about how you love guns but when I give you a piece and some fascists to shoot at you act like a fucking Canadian!"

ME: "What fascists!? You're shooting at the police!"

The Cafe / Depp. Two days ago.

Matt Evans: "Christ."

I mutter as I leaf through the menu.

ME: "These Parisian menus are a pain the ass. Home-made, home-made... home-made. Everything home-made. If I wanted home-made I wouldn't be eating out."

Depp smiles but doesn't respond. I guess he's used to this shit by now. I wave to the waiter and when he arrives I show him a dog-eared polaroid.

ME: "Bring me a coffee that looks like this. And don't do anything... French with it."

He nods and turns to Don Jeppy.

Johnny Depp: "I'd like your chef to take a moment of quiet contemplation, however long feels right to him, and then prepare whatever brings his heart the most joy. I'd consider it a great pleasure, and an honor, to taste that."

The waiter smiles enthusiastically and turns.

JD: "One more thing-"

The waiter pauses. Depp reaches out and gently touches his hand.

JD: "Emélie understands you better than you think. You can tell her about Ricard."

The waiter, frozen, sheds a single tear. Then he smiles as though the weight of Eddie Murphy's fee for Beverly Hills Cop 3 was lifted off his shoulders, and leaves for the kitchen.

ME: "You know that guy?"

JD: "We're all humans Matthew."

This may be hard to get, if you've never met The Book Deppository, but when he says things like that you just understand them perfectly. It's like in school, if you have a hot teacher for algebra, and she leans over your desk to tell you about the x's and y's, and you can totally see down her top, and you think, "Yeah. Algebra's alright."

JD: "What's troubling you Matthew?"

ME: "In a word. France. I don't know how the hell you do it. When Besson read Rising and told me he wanted to do it, I thought 'Yeah, ok let's roll like Gary Cole'. Paris to me was Jet Li saving hookers, Liam Neeson electrocuting Albanians and Adrian Paul living on a houseboat on the Seine. Well let me tell you J, there isn't a single hooker in Paris that couldn't take The Jet Engine inside two rounds (no holds barred), Neeson is too damned tall to fit in any of these frikkin' goddamned low-roof-piss-in-a-hole toilets, and the only people who live in houseboats on the Seine are Company and Mossad trying to look inconspicuous... which I'll admit is awesome, but they're still not The Highlander."

JD: "Same clan-"

ME: "-different vintage."

Depp inhales for the longest time. It seems he's taking all the worries of the world into his lungs and transfiguring them into Love.

JD: "It can be difficult to make your home in a new place Matthew."

ME: "You make it look easy."

JD: "Well I'm different Matthew. I'm as beautiful on the inside as I am on the outside. I'm a being of pure benevolence."

The waiter arrives with my coffee. It looks pretty much like a regular American coffee. I guess.

Waiter: "Monsieur Depp, I'm sorry but your food will be delayed slightly. The chef has decided to call his estranged son, after seven years without a word."

JD: "He can take as long as he wants."

I sip the warm beverage. It tastes European. Like it's just back from a night at the opera or some shit. This is a coffee that writes poetry and then burns it when it can't afford to pay the heating bill. This is a coffee that watches movies where Jodie Foster doesn't speak English, and chicks get naked but not for sex. This is a coffee that would get offended if you tried to dip your bacon in it to work in a little grease.

Lord, I miss Denny's.

ME: "So how did it work for you? You met Vanessa, you moved over here, everything was sweet from day one?"

JD: "Hardly."

A gentle lilting laugh escapes his mouth, lifting my soul from thoughts of coffee brewed by communists.

JD: "It was a shock, I wont lie to you. I went almost two days without a sense of utter peace with The Ten Thousand Things. It was difficult for what, at that time, was a human consciousness locked in Samsara."

ME: "Right."

JD: "But Vanessa was a rock. You're familiar with the music video for Joe Le Taxi?"

ME: "Of course."

JD: "In those dark days, it seemed like Vanessa's oversized peach sweatshirt was wrapped around us both, insulating me from the culture shock of France and the loss of everything that was familiar. Without her, I'm not sure that I would have even achieved Ascension during this incarnation."

ME: "Yeah, Van's pretty hot alright."

JD: "You don't get the same support from Océane?"

I don't reply right away.

The Evans' Residence, 14é Arr. Three days ago.

I step into the elevator. Before I go on, have you been to Paris? Just so we're clear, what they call an elevator we'd call a box with a fucking rope on top. If a Frenchman saw an American elevator it would be like that scene in that shitty 60's sci-fi B-movie where the monkeys go nuts for the black slab.

Our neighbor, Madame Defarge enters the small lobby and makes her way towards me. Crap. It would be a heel move to close the elevator door - reach out and slide it closed, mind, no subtle button pushing to do the job here - and leave without her. I consider it, but I'm just too much of a gentleman. Even to old chicks.

I take three deep breaths. Fact is the slow journey to the fourth floor lasts longer than I can hold my breath, even after these weeks of training. I'll cave and be forced to inhale her toxic perfume. A perfume that seems to have grown more putrid every time it penetrates my defenses. The woman must have a team of alchemists working round the clock, intoning over strange cauldrons, creating miasmas no naturally-occurring elements could produce. Miasmas? Christ. Shit smells so bad it makes me spontaneously know S.A.T. words.

I take three deep breaths. Not to hold the last, but to hold its memory. To remember what pure air tastes like, before I am sealed in this container where clawing talons of scent will latch onto my face and force spindly digits up my nostrils and deep into my brain.

I take three deep breaths.

She looks at me as she enters but there is no hint of acknowledgment. She is a walking fur coat. A little of her face is visible - though it is caked with layers of makeup, just below her huge opaque sunglasses. Another face watches me from her giant handbag. That of Zhu Zhu, her Chihuahua. Little bug-eyed freak looks like something that crawled out of a pod expecting to be Jeff Goldblum.

I smile as she joins me. She makes no response. Always the same. We never speak. Zhu Zhu glares at me. I press the button for the fourth floor, and our slow rattling journey begins.

Always there, just beneath the surface, is The Unspoken Knowledge. I don't expect you to understand this, but I hope you'll believe it. Because it's true. Nothing has ever been more true.

I don't pretend to know how the world works. But I know now that sometimes it doesn't work as it should. There's some kind of cross-wiring in fate, or foresight, or something. And when it happens people somehow know things that they couldn't, or shouldn't.

This is what has happened with the three of us. We share knowledge, with utter certainty, that we should not know. The three of us. I, Defarge and Zhu Zhu.

There will come a day when Defarge will die, Zhu Zhu will eat her, and I will find him at his work. As sure as day turns to night we three know that this will come to pass, and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.

No ping when we reach our floor. I compress the trellis grill and Defarge steps out without so much as a 'Merci'. Zhu Zhu watches me all the while.

Zhu Zhu: {You disgust me.}

He thinks.

Matt Evans: {We're all in this together.}

My unspoken reply.

Goddammit! I'm even thinking like one of them. I squeeze my eyes closed against the dismal spiral of French Thoughts. I think of Michael Bay. I think of Michael Bay and I think of big things blowing up. Blowing up hard. I think of Michael Bay, I think of big things blowing up, and I think of titties. Bay. Blowing up. Titties. The mantra calms me. I feel grounded again.

On to better things. I walk down the hallway to our apartment where Océane, my wife, is waiting for me.

Interlude: Océane Neige-Evans

Océane is the pinnacle of hotness. A real poster girl. She'd have to be to tame the wild heart and wilder loins of yours truly. When you know a little of her life story, and to be perfectly honest, I think a little is all that any of us could hope to know about her, you wont have any trouble seeing why I love her. Did Matt Evans just use the L word (and not the hot L word)? You better believe he did. And between you and me I think she's dabbled in the hot L word a little too.

Sure there have been others. Lots of others. All of them smokin'. And Océane is actually my third wife - my most recent previous wife, Anitchka, needed a green card so she could stay in the U.S. to shoot a zombie horroromedy I'd written that was set to star Bill Duke. Zombie on Campus. The Duke would've played a genius college professor whose experiment goes wrong and releases a zombie on campus. Nitty was his beautiful (though with glasses and hair worn up, at first) assistant who has just arrived in America and never learned how to party in whatever country she's from. They have two weeks to defeat the zombie and learn how to party before the big lacrosse game against the rival school. Duke is also the lacrosse coach.

Great script, great cast and with a feel good twist in the end that would've seen the zombie joining the lacrosse team at the last minute, and scoring the winning whatever-the-hell-they-have-in-that-sport (in the original draft instead of lacrosse there was a fight club). It would've been a big hit if it hadn't been for an effects mix-up. Long story short, we had a real outbreak of zombieism on set. There were casualties. The army arrived in time to quarantine the town and stop the infection spreading. (I'm not allowed to name the town and it's not actually on any maps anymore, but it was a real shame. There was a place that did the best omelets just off the main street.)

Anitchka was one of the first casualties - we actually lost control of things during the scene where she first makes out with the zombie. Great girl. A real shame what happened. Needless to say, that even though our marriage was primarily one of convenience, it was fully consummated. At least she had known that pleasure, before the end.

But Océane? Océane is the real deal. You better get Statham to track her down across the parallel universes she's leaving a trail of destruction through, cos this girl is The One. I know the old Hollywood saying is that you never find true love until you remarry your second wife after your fourth divorce and second annulment, but that's not how it'll be for Matty. For a start my second wife was vaporized by a M.O.A.B. somewhere in Ohio after a crop duster spraying serum X-17 failed to give her True Death, and secondly, Océane and I are in this for the long haul...

Océane was born on an uninhabited islet in the Med, daughter to the stranded mistress of a Japanese pachinko oligarch. The yacht she'd been on was taken by Egyptian cultist pirates, trying to raise money for the various incenses and what have you that are needed for their rituals. As soon as Océane's mother reached the mainland, she left her newborn baby to the care of her half-brother Josef.

Josef's a pretty interesting guy in his own right; he tried to stab me once in a subway station (they call it the Metro here). He's an insane Carthusian monk who was excommunicated from the Church for organizing a séance/illegal street race between James Dean and Steve McQueen. I shouldn't need to come right out and say it, but the confused young Moroccan that Josef had convinced to be possessed by McQueen won hands down.

As soon as she could stand, Josef had Océane dancing on the streets of Marseille to make enough money to keep his beloved poodle Rico in constant attendance at the seedier of the Côte d'Azur's canine brothels. In those days everything revolved around Rico and his debauched pleasures. Océane was sent out at all hours, in all weathers, to dance for the people. Snippets of Swan Lake on the steps of l'Opéra Municipal, traditional French folk dances for the tourists, popping and locking for the soldiers arriving home from U.N. peace-keeping missions. The young Océane was a natural. But she was terribly unhappy.

At age eight, after killing Rico with a plastic fork in a crowded Quick (Quick is a restaurant chain, just about the only place you can get some decent food in this country), she ran away from home and joined a traveling circus/law firm. At that time smaller villages in France still received much of their entertainment and legal advice from such troupes.

She took quickly to trapeze and high-wire acts, was a natural animal handler, and had a particular talent for property law.

When she moved on again it was to travel the world. She toured many of the lame countries that got stuck with French as their real language after being invaded or whatever. She worked variously as a salvage diver, a reporter for a Vietnamese newspaper, a forensic lab technician, a tuk-tuk taxi driver... The list goes on. Now, she's an artist, experimenting with all creative forms, her express goal being "to make all culture to date completely redundant, so that humanity can fade into extinction in silence."

She's nineteen years old. We've been happily married for three weeks, and she's got a slammin' rack.

The Evans' Residence. Three days ago.

In the door and I'm straight to the refrigerator to find something to wash away the taste of Defarge's perfume. I don't see Océane. I call out:

Matt Evans: "Hey Oce! We got any grapefruit juice?"

No reply. Though I hear something coming from the bedroom. I grab a "litre" of milk and start chugging as I head in to see her.

What I see in the bedroom shocks me to my very stathams. Before my mind can fully process the images, I experience the most violent spit-take that may have ever occurred. Milk jets powerfully out of my mouth and nose, whipping my head back with enough force to carry me off my feet. Whatever minor differences of contour there are between my left and right nasal passages, the resulting imbalance in expulsion force is enough to throw me into a spin as I fall backwards. The room motion-blurs around me and three ribbons of white fluid spiral their way through my descent. I land face first on the plain wood floor.

You know how in movies, when directors cut away from some kick-ass violence or grade A sex to show you some filler junk when you really wanna see the action? Well if Matt Evans' life was a movie made by some lame director you'd see the remainder of the milk carton topple to the floor right about now, and start pouring out in slow motion, a puddle spreading out. Fade to black.

Unfade from black because what you wanna see if this: when I walked in, Océane Neige-Evans, my super-hot wife, was having sex with a huge poster of Gérard Depardieu. And in case you're wondering - reverse cowgirl.

ME: "What the fuck!?"

Océane gets up calmly and pads to the dresser to grab a cigarette. If there's one thing French people like, it's smoking nude. (Remind me not to tell you the rest of the story about her uncle trying to stab me in a subway station.)

She takes a deep draw, exhales, looks at me, and shrugs.

ME: "Oce!.. What the fuck!?"

Océane Neige-Evans: "This?"

She gestures casually towards the huge smiling face of Depardieu spread out on our bed. I get a proper look at it for the first time. It's not even a real poster! It's sheets of printer paper taped together.

ME: "Did you make this?"

A noise escapes me that would be less out of place coming from a dying rodent.

ME: "What the fuck!?"

ONE: "Welcome to France."

ME: "Welcome to France? What the fuck!?"

She takes another draw.

ONE: "Matthieu. Be true. Do you really think any woman is satisfied sharing her bed with another, when she knows Depardieu is somewhere on this very soil?"

To drive the point home she holds up a handful of soil.

ME: "Where did that come from?.. You're naked."

ONE: "This. This is France. You couldn't understand."

ME: "What I understand, is that apparently my wife would rather do a freaking printout of an overweight-"

ONE: "He is more man than you could ever be!"

She throws the soil at me, I juke out of the way, and the bulk of it goes through a hole in the wall made when she threw the toaster at me in the kitchen last week.

ONE: "No man could ever hope to be as he is! Virile and powerful. Only last month he impregnated a waitress in Toulouse by farting as he left her cafe. What could you hope to do with your awkward elbowy Américain sex?"

ME: "Hey! Don't drag the good name of the Matt Evans' Sexperience through-"

ONE: "Aie! Always with this sexperience. Do you know how ridiculous you sound?"

ME: "No I absolutely do not. The M.E.S. has been perfected through years of iterative reworking and audience testing. It's the Meet the Fockers of sex."

ONE: "Mon Dieu Matthieu, what kind of woman would fill in that fucking form?"

Extract from the Matt Evans' Sexperience Participant Feedback Questionaire, version 6.1

Matt Evans: "A lot of chicks filled in that form. Some of 'em couldn't even wait til we finished before starting on it."

Océane Neige-Evans: "Well forgive me if I'm not like these Américain girls, and forgive me for wanting Depardieu - like any other French woman with a pulse. But this,"

She gestures again at Depardieu's beaming face... who seems to be smiling more now.

ONE: "This is every French marriage. Why do you think I must make my own poster? Cinemas cannot replace them fast enough. Women come crazed with each new release to tear them from the walls and be taken by him right there on the floor!"

ME: "And what the hell am I supposed to do when you're grinding on Greencard!?"

ONE: "Play boules! Learn the accordion! Sit in a cafe with other husbands, nursing your weak coffees and hiding from the knowledge that there is - and only ever will be - one in this nation worthy of the title of Man."

Fuck.

Océane leaves the room. I stand in silence. Depardieu grins up at me, pretty thoroughly crinkled, and... moist. But still grinning.

Maybe it's the stress of the moment, maybe I hit my head after my somersault spit-take, or maybe it's an after-effect of that time I glued my mouth and nose closed and passed out for 10 minutes in Miss Brewhickey's 2nd grade art class - Goddammit why didn't that woman ever lock the damn cabinets!? - but I swear that Depardieu breaks his grin, licks his lips, and speaks clear as day:

Gérard Depardieu: "Welcome to France, Matthieu."

As he speaks, through the bedroom-kitchen-toaster hole, I hear a small moan escape from Océane.

ME: "What the hell am I doing here?"

The Cafe / Depp. Two days ago.

Matt Evans: "Océane is..."

Depp raises his eyebrows expectantly.

ME: "...she's great. Really. Great."

Johnny Depp: "I'm glad you have her Matt. Vanessa's the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm telling you, I could be with her night and day. All day every day. But uh... you know, we need time apart too. She really encourages me with my accordion lessons."

I stir my coffee a little.

ME: "You ever... play boules?"

JD: "Yeah! With the guys. You should come. Every Tuesday and Thursday. And if that doesn't suit Van just found me another group that plays on Wednesdays."

ME: "John. Do you know about this..."

He blinks.

ME: "This, Depard-"

JD: "You don't!--"

He stops himself. His boyish face sags before my eyes into that of a man nearing fifty.

JD: "You don't have to say his name."

ME: "Yeah."

I hear a clock ticking loudly that I hadn't noticed before. At another table, the sound of a spoon tapping lightly against a coffee cup seems deafening. For the first time I look around the cafe and notice that we are all men. I see our faces and know that we are all men, defeated.

Life storms into Depp again as he smiles at me excitedly.

JD: "Hey, you know what Matt. I bet you're just a little homesick. How about a trip back to L.A.? Boost your spirits."

ME: "I can't."

JD: "Oh come on. Just a few days. I know your picture's shooting, but she'll be in good hands with Besson til you get back."

ME: "I really can't."

He smiles.

JD: "Come on Matt. L.A.'s your home. You can always go back home."

U.S. Embassy, 2 avenue Gabriel, 8é Arr. One month ago

U.S. Ambassador: "Mr. Evans, you can never go back home."

Johnny Depp: "Oh... Wait. What?"

Matt Evans: "It's a long story Johnny. I got my lawyer - Cassius Montclare DuBois - working on it, but so far all he has is a loophole that I can be shipped back as livestock, on condition that I be butchered within 48 hours. At this point I'm considering it.

"Last time Dennis Quaid called me he told me about this new cheese thing back home."

Depp nods sympathetically.

JD: "Bath cheese."

ME: "Bath cheese. He said it's shaped like a little boat, with a wind-up propellor and everything, and you can slump down in the bath and have it sail right into your mouth."

JD: "There's a Pirates tie-in. Has my face on the packet. Curse of the Black Port-Salut. And a whole range of other flavors. U.S.S. Monterey Jack, Exxmoor Blue Valdez... though that one's a little messier than the others."

ME: "Can you-"

I well up a little.

ME: "Can you eat the propellor? I asked D-Quad but he wouldn't tell me."

Depp puts a hand on mine, and pats gently.

JD: "I'm sorry Matt. You can eat the propellor."

I hold back the tears, but Depp knows as well as I do that Bath Cheese may never make it outside of the U.S., and certainly not to France. I tremble a little.

JD: "Matthew. Listen to me. Right now you're lost, and you think that the only hope you have of finding your path, is to go back the way you came. But sometimes, all you need is a new pair of shoes. And every once in awhile, all you need is to look where the shoes came from."

ME: "What? What the hell are you talking about?"

JD: "Where the shoes, came from."

ME: "What does that mean?"

JD: "Well where do shoes come from?"

ME: "A shoe store."

JD: "And what are they kept in, in the shoe store?"

ME: "Boxes?"

JD: "Exactly."

ME: "I don't get it."

JD: "I'm telling you to look inside of a shoe box."

I think about it.

ME: "Is this like that scene in Mortal Kombat where Kitana tells Liu Kang to use the element which brings life to win his next fight and then he kills Sub Zero with a-"

JD: "Christ Matt! Spoiler alert much!? I haven't seen it. But yes, it sounds like that."

ME: "Sorry man. I figured if you know about some mystical shoe box from the future you may know something about the plot of a movie from 1995."

JD: "Sarcasm doesn't become you Matthew...

"Dammit Matt, when I walked in here today I was totally at peace. The orth-remit of my negaconsciousness was communing with the Dreamhosts of the Astral Wakespring. Now you have me crashing."

ME: "Yeah. Fuckin' France."

He shakes his head dismissively. He removes his $60,000 hat and runs a hand through thinning, greying hair - a few strands come loose. He looks at them, then at me, and reconsiders...

JD: "Fuckin' France."

The Shootout / Besson. Today.

Luc Besson: "Reloading!"

Besson, back to our shared cover, looks to me expectantly as he pats himself down looking for another clip. I finally cave.

Matt Evans: "Oh alright."

I stand and spin to face the cops, put three in a cop car before the fourth hits the gas tank and blasts me, and everyone else, to the ground.

LB: "Allez Matthieu! You didn't lose your balls in Vancouver after all!"

He laughs a glorious booming laugh that makes me love him even through the fog of my rage.

ME: "Yeah Luc, I've got a ball or two and I know how to use 'em, but I also know when I'm fighting a losing battle."

I glance out from cover for an instant to see the police already regrouping.

LB: "What other kind of battle is there, hmm? What is life but a sorrowful pause before death?"

ME: "Damn your country and your goddamned fatalist bullshit! I don't wanna get people killed over a 90 Euro filming permit!"

LB: "And I don't want to pay FASCISTS to film in my OWN. GODDAMNED. CITY. FILS DES PUTES!"

He stands up in plain view and reigns down another volley. I smack the back of my head against the car in frustration.

Every location the same outrage. The same firefight. The same call to the agency to find a new Best Boy. In an hour Luc would have calmed. In two, he'll be in a Montreuil brothel with the chief of police. Tomorrow we might actually get to shoot some of the scene. I ask myself the simple question that's been burning a hole in my brain for weeks:

What the hell am I doing here?

The Evans' Residence. Two hours later.

As I step through the door Océane launches herself at me, wrapping her limbs around my body like a facehugger from Alien. But, you know, sexier than that.

Océane Neige-Evans: "Make love to me Matthieu, like you did in Montmartre."

We kiss, and I almost don't break away to say-

Matt Evans: "We've never been to Montmartre together."

She considers that, as I slightly adjust my stance to support her weight.

ONE: "Non?... Ah! C'est vrai! It was Alexandre. Fine, I'll tell you how he made love to me in Montmartre and you can try, d'accord? But, he is much taller than you... I'll get something for you to stand on."

ME: "What!? No! Who the hell is Alexandre?"

ONE: "Aie, you Américain prude. Not to stand on a step for your wife."

She unwraps herself, dropping each foot to the floor in turn, and steps aside. For the first time I see a circular hole - five foot across - which has been sawn into our living room floor. In the apartment below ours I see a bald man with a combover. He glares at me while trying to re-light his pipe.

ME: "What the hell did you do to our floor?"

ONE: "Pfft. A floor is a barrier to life."

ME: "Christ Oce - is this an art thing? You can't sell a hole in the floor! And who the hell is that guy?"

Combover nods to me and taps the mouthpiece of his pipe to his forehead in a salute. Océane stands in front of me again, her eyes piercing me.

ONE: "You Américain."

ME: "You say that like it's an insult."

ONE: "It is!"

ME: "Dammit Oce you can't talk like that. When we get to America-"

ONE: "Ha! America is an illiterate masturbating chimpanzee. I will never set foot there... Canada maybe."

ME: "Canada!? They've never even had a real war! Océane, America is my home and when-"

ONE: "America was your home. Or have you forgotten? Now you are the seagull. Without a passport, on the wind, shitting on the world."

Combover: "Ha!"

I twist down to face the grinning imbecile.

ME: "Don't make me come down there!"

Combover: "Viens! Je suis prêt!"

ONE: "I'm going out."

ME: "Put some clothes on!"

ONE: "The world is naked Matthieu. Why should I be any different?"

She smiles magnetically and leaves. From the hall outside she calls back.

ONE: "I left the mail in my room!"

ME: "Our room!"

The door behind her drifts closed and then - click. Right then and there I decide to leave France. Leave Besson and his putain police. Leave Océane and her laser-printed-love-mat. Leave a country that values haute cuisine and grape varieties more than revolutionary cheese delivery mechanisms.

Leave Storm Warning Rising. My movie. Leave it to Besson and whoever the hell else wants a piece. It's theirs now.

The decision made my mind shifts into gear - how to get back to the U.S. without a passport and with my name and face plastered all over immigration watchlists. As I storm around the apartment throwing things into a bag to augment my already impressive E.D.C., a plan forms of it's own accord. As great plans always do.

1. Acquire a fat suit.

If the rumors are true, one of the surviving Big Momma's House 2 suits is in the possession of an independent collector based in Monte Carlo.

2. Seduce Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

I'm stopped in my tracks.

There on the bed is an old Nike box, discolored and worn at the corners, sealed tightly with tape. On top, my address here in Paris and a plastering of postage stamps. I can't help but speak aloud...

ME: "Use the element which brings life..."

Instantly I have my balisong in hand - this knife is one of my treasured possessions. I won it in a drinking contest with Tony Jaa. Not an alcohol drinking contest. More of a who-can-have-the-most-Mountain-Dew-before-peeing-contest. Jaa Rule's a helluva guy but when it comes to the bladder stakes, he's packing nothing like Mattimus Prime.

I slice the tape on either side of the box and slip off the lid. Placed on top of assorted items is an envelope with the single word "Matthew", in the handwriting of my younger sister, John Evans.

I open it and take out the single sheet inside. The script is neat, each letter carefully positioned and separate from the next. The old man always said cursive was the first step to heathen living.

After reading, I fold the letter along her careful creases, replace it in the envelope and set it to one side. Then I look in the box.

There's a baseball that a kid in a station wagon dropped out of his window as he passed by.

The faded-almost-to-white wrapper of a Hershey's bar.

Three broken toy soldiers.

My first Bible - with every action scene underlined in an excited unsteady childish hand, and later, dog-eared page corners marking every sex scene. I flick straight to the final pages, left blank by the printer. There, scribbled down in a dark theatre during screenings that were on no schedule, is every line that Han Solo ever said.

Lastly, my yellow man. A broad-shouldered flat silhouette made of three post-it notes. In very light pencil at the bottom: "Best Picture: Matthew Isaac Evans".

I place everything carefully back inside the Nike box, the envelope last of all, and slide the lid back on.

I unpack my bag and look for something to cover the hole in the living room floor.

Tomorrow I've got a movie to make.

Epilogue.