Director Paul Dalio On ‘Touched With Fire,’ Katie Holmes & Luke Kirby, Suffering From Bipolar [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO]

Paul Dalio wrote and directed Touched with Fire, a film that is loosely based on his personal experience living with bipolar disorder.

Paul Dalio On Touched With Fire

Knowing what it’s like to be bipolar, while also knowing what it’s like to be your average movie viewer, informed Dalio about how to approach making Touched with Fire. To set the stage and welcome the audience into the lives of bipolar poets Carla and Marco, Dalio decided to root their stories in what would seem to be everyday experiences.

“So [the audience] could first have an orientation, you know, before they went manic,” Dalio explained to uInterview in an exclusive interview. “And to put [Carla and Marco] in very universal human situations – like… a daughter wanting to go to her mother to find out what she was like – but then to progressively take [the audience] on the journey.”

Showing mental illness on screen, according to Dalio, can be a challenge, particularly when it comes to exploring its more solitary and internal manifestations.

“The depression for instance was the hardest, because all you do in a depression is, you want to sleep and just escape reality,” Dalio revealed. “Some people say, ‘Hey, why don’t you just go for a run,’ you know. If we could afford the brain chemicals to actually stir up a run and have the run stir up the chemicals then we would do it, but you know that’s when you really need to add some of the cinematic elements of sound and to really get in the skin of them.”

Playing Carla and Marco in Touched with Fire are Katie Holmes and Luke Kirby, who Dalio thinks did an “extraordinary” job of portraying what it’s like to be bipolar.

“I thought they embodied it so naturally, and so real, and so vividly,” said Dalio. They were so good, in fact, that Dalio showed the film to his own doctor, who in turn was amazed at the realness of their performances. “He was like, ‘Whoa, be careful. You don’t want to trigger anything in Luke or Katie,'” said Dalio. “It was so real to him, and it was.”

It’s not hard for Dalio to conceive of how Holmes and Kirby channeled what it is to be bipolar. While the filmmaker admits that the actors are blessed with a wide range of emotions, an intensity about their work and vivid imaginations, he believes its something simpler about being bipolar that facilitated their performances.

“These states [mania and depression] are not inhuman,” said Dalio. “These states are very human; it’s just the extremes of humanity.”

Touched with Fire is currently in select theaters.