MADNESS OF LOVE
Can two brothers who access the world and their place in it with seemingly opposite approaches find common ground? This animated hip-hop feature, originally commissioned as a stage play by the Getty Villa and written by award winning playwrights the Q Brothers, explores themes of madness, the soul, love, and the art of discourse itself.
ANIMATION INSPO
MUSIC / STORY
In the way the film My Dinner With Andre is a single dialogue between two philosophers, and Waking Life follows the existential conversations of a young man wandering through a succession of dreamlike realities, Madness of Love features two rapping brothers battling it out as they traverse through memory, fantasy and the process of cutting an album.
Here are some audio clips from the staged reading at The Getty Villa.
This first one shows how the eldest brother GQ, vowed never to love again after a heartbreak that nearly crushed him,
His brother JQ, in contrast, finds commitment comforting and thrilling and talks about how a life alone would break him, in this improvised song…
The brothers analyze how hip-hop has changed from its focus on using lyrics to shine a light on the truth (rap) to the art of production (trap).
JQ believes that everything is random, you only have one life and then you die. GQ believes that nothing is random, that death is an illusion. Both believe that the answers lie within, not in the heavens above - that herein lies the madness of Love.
THE PLAYWRIGHTS
GQ and JQ (The Q Brothers) are are Pakistani-American rapper/ writers based in Chicago. JQ is the composer for the hit FX show The Bear. And GQ is an actor featured in Drumline (Disney), Rescue Dawn (MGM) and Chicago P.D. (NBC).
Together they wrote and starred in MTV’s Scratch & Burn and have created rap-adaptations of historical texts including The Bombitty Of Errors (West End, Jury Prize ‘Best Show’ 2001 Aspen Comedy Festival), Othello: The Remix, produced Off-Broadway by Jon Leguizamo, Funk it Up About Nothin' commissioned by Chicago Shakespeare Theater (Jeff Award for Best Ensemble, Dress Circle Award for best musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival). They have received commissions from Steppenwolf, The Globe Theater, The World Shakespeare Festival, Long Way Home (a musical version of The Odyssey) for Chicago Children's Choir, and Q Gents (a 2-man Two Gentlemen of Verona) for Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
The Brothers conduct hip-hop workshops for children of all ages at Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits and have worked with inmates in Cook County Jail and in state prisons in Missouri. Albums include: Smashing for the Grommits, Foul Mouth Poet, Sober Truth Tiger and The Feel Good Album of the Year, a mix of jazz, heavy metal, R&B, and electronica.
THE DIRECTOR
The staged version of Madness of Love was adapted for screen with writer/director Mēsha Kussman who began her career as a choreographer (The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon, Glee on Fox, The Offer on Paramount+, and music videos for Justin Bieber, Lizzo and more…). In 2013 The New York Times called her aquatic dance company Aqualillies ‘Poetry In Motion’ and in 2016 she began shooting dance-inspired music videos and short films including: This One Is For You, Alive in 2020, The New World, Vital, In The Ring, and By Myself. Her lyrical sensibility and stream of consciousness visual storytelling style enabled her to see pictures that weren’t on the page in the staged version of the show, and bring them to life for the film through animation. That matched with her innate understanding of musicality make her the perfect director for Madness Of Love.
“Mesha was invaluable … I’ll be very interested in what she creates as she transfers her talents to her own film projects” - Robert Graf, producer (Coen Bros)
“An unlikely Busby Berkeley. Poetry in Motion!” - The New York Times (about Mesha’s work)
VISION FOR THE FILM
INSPIRED by Plato's Phaedrus, Madness Of Love debates life's big questions delivered over BIG beats, in the form of a hip-hop mixtape. We meet two brothers who access the world and their place in it with seemingly opposite approaches: heart vs. logic. Their struggle to bridge musical styles and see eye-to-eye becomes an allegory for finding unity in a climate obsessed with picking sides.
THE STYLE of our film sets a single conversation (My Dinner With Andre) to a stream-of-consciousness visual narrative. We bounce wildly back and forth across the span of the brothers’ lives like a dream (Amelie). Madness of Love is a playful jaunt through flashback, fantasy and reality, laced with edgy music video sequences and grand dance numbers (LaLa Land) that celebrate Chicago and hip hop culture.
OUR STORY travels back in time as we relive both G’s wild love life and J’s stable existence. We watch J tuck his kids in at night while G pursues romantic adventures. We hang with them in the recording studio, onstage at Lincoln Hall, on the basketball court, and at home with the family… Stylistically these best friends and brothers have one continuous conversation throughout the film, as they both try to understand the power of love.
THE MESSAGE of the film goes back to the ancient wisdom of Plato: In a divided world where everyone wants to be right, Plato would say “no one but the gods can be right”. We all have someone, a brother, a sister, a friend, a lover who we’re in dialogue with most of our lives. Our divine purpose as mortals is simply to question, and stay in dialogue, searching to understand that which connects us all, “the madness of love.”
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