Like, how does that even?

Yeah.

So I was doing a lot of work with W. Somerset Maugham, who's this writer from the 19, early 20th century, and he went to um so I read his work when I was living in Hong Kong many years ago and it really kind of resonated with me and I thought how can a guy write about people in the 90s who I can recognize now in Hong Kong that still exist like he was very great at looking at people and seeing patterns in them and so I was I was just amazed and I think that then I went down this massive rabbit hole with him for about 12 years where I would go off and talk about him at different institutions and do papers on him because I just found his work really intriguing and trying to figure out and because he wasn't he was incredibly popular he was like Stephen King like incredible but not didn't write like Stephen King but you know bestseller in plays and short stories and in novels.

But he wasn't really well regarded against kind of the, you know, intelligentsia, the literary intelligentsia.

They didn't think that he was this highbrow, which in essence probably isn't.

But I loved his work and I think it really resonated with me.

And so I went to the archives initially in Singapore because I was doing a documentary on him.

And then I'm like, oh, well, no, characters today don't get married after two weeks.