EVERYBODY YOU MEET HAS THE POTENTIAL TO ALTER THE TRAJECTORY OF YOUR LIFE

du Soleil. “The way to tell the story was in the first person. But that’s not a movie: that’s a book. I wrote the book to be a book. I mean, it’s a very bookish book.”

Mastai is currently writing the All Our Wrong Todays screenplay – as you’d hope, really – but I see what he’s getting at there: it is a very bookish book. And Mastai, life-long lit buff with a soft spot for sci-fi, is the reason why. Screen might be his CV stalwart, but the written word is Mastai’s playground, and as an author he trapezes language expertly. In the book, he out-tricks any silver screen with subtle, unpretentious analogy and passive slips of poignant truths – you couldn’t put a piece of tiramisu on your movie set and casually call it a family as Mastai does in prose, or have nonverbal reactions play out in a metaphorical mosaic of emotion in a wordsmith’s 2D, but on the pages of All Our Wrong Todays, suppose, to account for the various alternate past/future versions of themselves) main characters, but it banks on the luck of roughly 7 billion. He’s fascinated by the way people – in any age, real imagined – are broken, molded and made almost exclusively by the coincidence of finding one another.

“Everybody you meet has the potential to alter the trajectory of your life. That’s the story of my family, that’s the story of all of our stories.”

It’s certainly true for Mastai: Mom lived in London, England, then Chicago, but met Dad (Morocco, mostly) in a Jerusalem café after World War II drove the paternal lineage out of Marrakesh. One shared word of English but both fine enough in French, the two made off to Vancouver in time to get their brood – Elan and his two sisters – started there.

“Growing up I was hyper aware that everybody sitting around my