I wish I'd stayed.

Colin West is an award-winning writer & director from a cul-de-sac in Ohio now based in Los Angeles & NYC.

His feature film credits include LINOLEUM starring Jim Gaffigan & Rhea Seehorn, which world premiered at SXSW Film Festival in 2022, and DOUBLE WALKER co-written by and starring Sylvie Mix, which was released in 2021.

His films have been screened internationally at festivals including SXSW, BFI London Film Festival, Fantasia, San Francisco International Film Festival, among many others. He was awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Science in Cinema prize at SFIFF in 2022 and was an Annenberg Foundation MFA Fellow at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

You can see the trailer for LINOLEUM by tapping the banner above.

There are countless clips from Charlie Kauffman films that could have made it into this list of films that inspired Linoleum, but this scene, in particular, inspired the kind of meta-physical breaking that happens towards the end of Linoleum.

Upon seeing Eternal Sunshine as a high schooler, I was given permission.

What I mean by that is — it broke the rules, did it effectively, and made me realize there are no rules in the first place.

This isn’t the first film to have done so in film history, but it’s the first one I saw doing it.

And man it made an impression.

This scene in particular — the blending of grounded human emotion with surreal subjective voice was astounding to my 16-year-old brain.

I still think of it often. And the lighting. That kind of handheld, hand-lit, DIY look certainly found its way into Linoleum via my incredible cinematographer, Ed Wu.