Good Girl: My Feature Film and Largest Artistic Undertaking Ever
Good Girl: My Feature Film and Largest Artistic Undertaking Ever
A novel, screenplay, film, and soundtrack—and the most ambitious creative undertaking of Axley Jade Blaze's career
There are projects you make, and there are projects that seem to demand that you become something larger than the artist you were when you began them.
Good Girl is the latter.
My January project is, by far, the largest singular undertaking of my artistic career.
I've been creating for most of my life. I wrote my first poems when I was six years old. I was published by twelve. In 2011, I released my first chapbook. In 2016, I wrote my first piece of literary fiction.
Since then, the body of work has continued to grow: eight chapbooks, two full-length novels, two EPs, and an enormous interconnected artistic universe I call The Axis.
But Good Girl asks me to bring almost all of those disciplines together in one place.
One story. Almost every medium I've worked in.
Good Girl began as a story, but it has evolved into something much larger.
The screenplay is being developed as a psychological thriller and psychodrama, while the larger project encompasses film, literature, music, and visual storytelling.
My intention is to take on an unusually expansive role in its creation: executive producer, co-producer, director/co-director, leading actress, screenwriter, soundtrack songwriter and score composer, and co-editor.
And after the film, I intend to write the novel.
In other words, this isn't simply a film I am acting in.
It is a world I am building from multiple creative angles.
That is both exhilarating and terrifying.
Vivienne
The most difficult part may ultimately be the role I have to play myself.
I've never acted in a feature film before.
That makes Vivienne one of the biggest creative challenges I've ever given myself.
And yet, I also feel that I was born to play her.
I know her intimately.
Vivienne is complicated, fragile, intelligent, damaged, romantic, destructive, and capable of existing in contradictions that don't resolve neatly. She is not someone I can approach from the outside and simply imitate.
I have to understand her.
And I do.
That doesn't make playing her easy.
If anything, it makes it more demanding.
The goal isn't to play a character who happens to resemble me. It's to disappear far enough into Vivienne that the audience believes she exists independently of the person who created her.
And then there is Zeke.
Zeke is just as complicated.
He is flawed, difficult, and capable of making profoundly questionable choices. But I don't see him as a simple villain standing opposite Vivienne.
I feel for him.
That matters.
The story becomes much more interesting when neither character can be reduced to a convenient label.
Depending on how the final structure develops, Zeke can be understood as the male co-protagonist or deuteragonist rather than simply an antagonist. The conflict between these two people isn't interesting to me because one is “good” and one is “bad.”
It's interesting because two complicated human beings can love each other, damage each other, need each other, and become entangled in something neither of them fully understands until it is too late.
That's the kind of story I want Good Girl to tell.
The soundtrack
And then there is the music.
I don't want Good Girl to have a soundtrack that merely accompanies the movie.
I want the soundtrack to become another character in the story.
I am planning to write, compose, produce, and perform many of the tracks myself, creating a soundtrack that can stand on its own while also functioning as part of the film's emotional architecture.
Several songs are already beginning to define that world.
“Before the Chamber Cries.”
“Three Bears in the Woods.”
“Velvet Undertow (Dear Niagara Falls Remix).”
And there is more to come.
Some of these songs will exist outside the film. Some will be transformed by their place within it. Some may function as score, some as songs, and some somewhere in between.
That distinction is important to me because music has always been one of the ways I tell stories.
The largest thing I've ever attempted
I've spent decades building toward this without necessarily knowing that I was building toward it.
The little girl writing poems at six.
The twelve-year-old getting published.
The chapbooks.
The novels.
The years of writing.
The visual experiments.
The music.
The EPs.
The Axis.
All of those things have given me pieces of the vocabulary I need for Good Girl.
Now I'm trying to put them together.
That doesn't mean I think it will be easy.
It won't be.
I've never undertaken a feature film at this scale. I've never carried the responsibility of simultaneously being the person writing the story, helping shape the film, playing its central character, creating its music, and ultimately bringing all of those pieces into the same artistic language.
But perhaps that's precisely why I have to do it.
Good Girl isn't simply another project on the calendar.
It is the next great experiment in what I can build.
And if I do it the way I see it in my head, it won't just be a film.
It will be a world.
— Axley Jade Blaze
Good Girl — January 2027.
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