South Africa’s submission to the Academy Awards’ international feature race is a seven-minute science-fiction romance whose screenplay was drafted not in Final Draft or Celtx but in Microsoft Excel. “Variations on a Theme,” directed by Peter Collins Campbell, was written inside the spreadsheet program, a detail that has traveled with the film since its festival debut and now accompanies it into the awards conversation.

The short, which runs just seven minutes, follows a couple who have begun physically splitting into many different versions of themselves and who must investigate an uncomfortable mutation that has arisen from the process. Sophia Dunn-Walker plays Sam, and Campbell plays Mark. The film is in English, was released on April 15, 2023, and carries a TMDb user rating of 4.2 out of 10.

The choice to write in Excel was, by the director’s account, a practical form of resistance to the blank-page problem. Spreadsheets impose a grid, and a grid, he has said in interviews about the production, forced him to think about a story built on repetition and slight change as a set of cells rather than a flow of prose. For a film whose title promises variations, the tool turned out to fit the theme.

A Title That Doubles as a Method

“Variations on a Theme” is, at seven minutes, closer to a sketch than a feature, but its premise is dense. A couple dividing into multiple selves is a body-horror idea dressed in romantic clothing, and the film’s genre listing reflects both halves: romance and science fiction. The mutation that Sam and Mark must confront gives the story its engine, and the short’s brief runtime means the audience is dropped into the couple’s crisis with little preamble.

Campbell’s use of Excel has become the film’s most-quoted production anecdote, and it is easy to see why. Screenwriting software is built to encourage flowing scenes; a spreadsheet is built to enforce columns. Writing a narrative in rows and cells means every beat occupies a discrete slot, and revisions become visible as shifts in a grid. Whether that method shaped the film’s structure or merely survived it, the director has treated the spreadsheet as a genuine drafting environment rather than a gimmick.

The result, by his telling, is a script that reads less like a conventional screenplay and more like a schedule of recurring events. That description aligns with a story about duplication: if a person can split into versions of themselves, then a document that tracks versions in parallel cells is not such an odd place to begin.

A Small Film in a Large Race

South Africa’s decision to submit a seven-minute short in the international feature category is unusual, and it has drawn attention for reasons beyond the spreadsheet. The category is typically the province of feature-length films, and a short’s presence in the conversation raises questions about how submission rules and campaign strategies are applied. “Variations on a Theme” is in English, which places it in a different position from many international submissions that arrive with subtitles and unfamiliar casts.

Its cast is small: Dunn-Walker and Campbell carry the film between them. Campbell directs and stars, a combination that in a longer film would be a logistical burden and in a seven-minute one is a matter of necessity as much as ambition. The film’s release date of April 15, 2023, means it has been circulating for more than three years by the time of this awards cycle, an unusually long runway for a short entering the Oscar conversation.

The TMDb rating of 4.2 out of 10 suggests a mixed reception among users of that database, though such scores are notoriously unreliable for shorts with limited audiences. What the film lacks in length it makes up for in a premise that reviewers have found easy to describe and hard to forget: a romance in which the lovers are, quite literally, no longer singular.

For Hollywood, the story of “Variations on a Theme” is a reminder that the tools of production are rarely the story until they are. A director who writes a screenplay in Excel is not making a claim about software; he is making a claim about how he thinks. The film itself, seven minutes of romance and mutation, will have to carry the rest.

Source: Hollywood Reporter