‘In the Vice’ is my first film project. It’s a short film that I wrote and produced. My friend Stavroula Toska directed. We wrapped up a one day shoot yesterday in Madison Square Park.

The main character is a female bond trader who comes out of an office tower to do some personal business – an illicit transaction – in the park. During the exchange with the little girl, who is a counterparty of that transaction, the woman, for a very brief moment, begins to doubt her life choices. But that moment of clarity doesn’t last as she soon reverts back to her business mode. Thus, she’s stuck or, in other words, ‘in the vice’, from which she can’t get out.

I am particularly excited with the depiction of her ‘moment of clarity’. That moment comes in a form of a homeless man. Naturally, as a big Led Zeppelin fan, I had to find a way to use a subtle (or not so subtle) reference to the band and to its mythology. If I can’t use their music, I can use their imagery. An allusion to an old man – an iconic image on the album IV cover – did the trick.

Everyone will interpret this vision of a bum in many ways and this is fine; there’s no wrong way to think about it, even if one doesn’t get the LZ reference. Some may think this is just a juxtaposition of power and money vs poverty. Others may think that she’s afraid to end up like that guy and thus is forced to get back to her racket. My personal interpretation is that the old man represents our internal true self that we work hard to hide from the world, an innocence that we lost when we jumped on the corporate treadmill.

It will take about a month in post-production and editing. Then off to festivals.