The Devil’s Matchmaker - Short (Trailer)
Synopsis
Alexander is a professional matchmaker. While he has a fun, desirable job, he is a loner who prefers creating relationships for other people rather than focusing on his own life. He has a daily routine that many would find monotonous, has few friends with whom to speak about his job, and has just one great joy in life, which is setting up matches for people with awkward last names. While his primary job is just an ordinary matchmaker, his hobby is to arrange dates between people whose last names form awkward combinations, like Furr-Muncher, Peters-Rising, and Small-Johnson, for instance. He knows he cannot force love, but he plays the odds that some of his dates will click with each other and eventually marry. The resulting wedding announcements are his trophies.
Alexander reasons that he is doing no harm, because after all he cannot force people to love each other, and ultimately everyone wins with his hobby. The couples are happy together, he gets his trophy, and the public has a laugh when they see the wedding announcements. Until now, you thought those wedding announcements were the result of funny coincidences and random chance, but now you know they are the result of careful planning by The Devil’s Matchmaker!
Director’s Statement
I had the idea for Devil’s Matchmaker after a good friend of mine at the time sent me a link to a news article showing about nineteen awkward last name pairings in wedding announcements in local newspapers. I had seen such clippings before on Jay Leno and other sources, but the sheer number of them collected in the article made me shake my head in disbelief, wondering how they could all be simple coincidence and accidents. I started thinking, “What if someone had secretly arranged these marriages, by pulling the strings behind the scenes and putting these people together, unbeknownst to the world?” The initial concept was a bit more creepy and a bit less funny, so I settled on Alexander being a harmless matchmaker who just happens to have a side hobby that he enjoys from time to time.
The character of Alexander really came together after a lot of discussions with my friend about who he is, what his motivations are, what he does in life, and the details of his personality. I felt that having him be a fairly ordinary guy would underscore the importance of his naughty matchmaking, because it becomes the one aspect of his persona that really separates him from the rest of the world. Without it, he is boring, ordinary, mundane, but with it, he feels somehow powerful, influential, and important. He knows he is a bit devious, a bit in a moral gray area, but he doesn’t feel overly guilty about it. His lack of guilt, though, is not a lack of concern; he wonders how others would react to what he does, and whether he would be seen as twisted and evil, but whatever friends he may have, he doesn’t want to jeopardize his career telling them about his hobby, so he visits a psychiatrist.