STORM CLOUDS
Written & Directed by Adrian Delcan
Produced by Henrik Larsen & Adrian Delcan
An identical twin assumes his dead brother’s identity to evade the responsibility involved with his weather-controlling gift; the centerpiece of his family’s business.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Adrian is a writer and director from Southern California. He worked as a writer on Judas, the latest game from BioShock creator Ken Levine. He directed the short film Animal Behavior, which screened at festivals including LA Shorts, NFFTY, and PÖFF in Estonia. He was a YoungArts x Ignite Fellow at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. His debut feature film, Old Man, was released by Gravitas Ventures in January 2025.
READ OUR INTERVIEW WITH ADRIAN
Hi Adrian! Welcome back. Other than making Storm Clouds, what else have you been up to since we featured your previous film Animal Behaviour?
Hi Dustin! It’s a pleasure to be back, thanks for having me. Since we last spoke I’ve moved back and forth between Los Angeles and New York City a few times for work. I’m in New York now. So other than packing and unpacking I’ve been spending my time writing. I’ve actually been working on a feature adaptation of Animal Behavior.
I also completed another short film; that one is titled Early Human Media. It’s a comedic and surrealist take on a guy going up to a girl’s apartment for the first time. It will be premiering at a festival this March.
Your work in general has absurd comedic tones with quite dark sharp edges. It's akin to the work of Aster and Lanthimos, yet unique in its own right. How would you classify your style? What are some of the main influences on your style?
I love the work of Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos, they’re absolutely influences so I’m flattered by the comparison. If I had to point to our shared interest it would probably the be the concern for comedy. I really love going to the movies to laugh, and sometimes the best laughs are the ones that make you second guess if you should’ve at all. I often feel that way watching the movies of Aster and Lanthimos, it may be a performance choice or something deeply disturbing. They’re always heightening the reality in ways I couldn’t have expected but never enough to alienate me, and I think that’s because their stories are anchored in deeply relatable characters. These are things I constantly aim for in my writing and directing.
I would say that I make character-driven comedies, often blending thriller, sci-fi, or crime elements.
Tell us about the genesis of Storm Clouds. Where did the idea come from? How did you develop that idea into the short that's now made its way out into the world?
I’m a big fan of science fiction and have always tip-toed around it in my own work, but it wasn’t until I started reading more Stephen King did I feel like there was a way to do it that was true to me. This project came on the heels of that feeling. Before writing there were a few things I knew I wanted to explore in the next project, like having a larger cast, lots of moving camera, and I wanted to involve images of the sky. The sex of it all was something that came later. It was important to me how the family created clouds. There’s a much simpler version of this movie that removes all of the sex and just has the family meditating to conjure the rain, but I felt that framing the ability as shameful and disturbing created good tension. I also thought it would be cinematically interesting to sequence clouds forming this way.
I can imagine that the concept of this film would be difficult to pitch. How did you get collaborators onboard? Did any of the actors have reservations? How do you build trust with your talent to know that they're in safe hands despite the more absurd and crude elements of the story?
I felt pretty strongly that the script was coming from an earnest place, with a keen interest in exploring the Fontaine family, and that the crude elements weren’t employed as spectacle. So a lot of my job as the director was communicating this vision to my collaborators, and it was through lots of practical discussions did they understand how we’d be treating the subject matter. We also had an intimacy coordinator that helped us breakdown the sex scenes so that it felt like we were just following a cookbook. By the time we got to set it all became very technical: you go there, open the window, put your hand in your pants, and the camera will track with you whenever you’re ready.
Tell us about the journey of getting your film to audiences? Did you experience much festival rejection? If so, how did you overcome that?
We had Storm Clouds screened at Whammy in Los Angeles and at the Laugh After Dark Festival in Las Vegas. However, the 24 minute runtime and heavy subject matter definitely made it a difficult short to program at festivals. As much as I tried, I never had a chance at getting this movie under 20 minutes. There was a 50 minute cut, 18 minute cut, 10 minute cut, but in the end the story decides how long it should be, and for us that was 24 minutes.
What advice or hacks would you give to other short filmmakers?
There’s so much to learn in challenging yourself to make an extremely short cut of your movie, even if you immediately revert back to the original version. The search for the most distilled version of your story reveals who you are as a filmmaker. The elements you can’t bear to lose, the ones that make your stomach turn when they’re not in the movie, is your voice speaking.
What are you working on now?
I have a new short film titled Early Human Media that will have its festival premiere this March 2026!
Any film recommendations that we should add to our watchlist?
I’ve recently come into the movies of American filmmaker Joseph Losey: The Prowler, The Servant, and many other incredible works of his from the 40s and 50s. If you have a blind spot for this era of cinema, please do yourself a favor and start with his movies.
