Even though Joy already had the basic idea for her next movie locked in her head, she still didn't have a dime of financing. And in Hollywood, if you want money, you'd better have a killer script first.
The script is the golden ticket. It's what lures investors and gets actors to say yes before you even talk paychecks. When the writing is that good, A-listers will practically beg to be in your little indie because they know these movies let them flex acting muscles the big studio blockbusters never will.
Of course, while she was hammering out pages, she was also building a budget spreadsheet—two versions, the way every smart indie director does.
Version one: the real budget. This is the bare-bones, "one dollar less and we literally can't shoot" number. You finish it, print it, then shove it in a drawer and pretend it doesn't exist unless the world is ending.
Version two: the investor budget. You pad it just enough so that when the money guys take out their red pens and start slashing like they're Edward Scissorhands, you still land somewhere above rock-bottom.
So her to-do list was simple: write the script, build the budgets, find the money.
And the script? She already had the title.
Source Code.
Not the 2011 Duncan Jones movie (though yeah, she was absolutely ripping a page from that playbook). She just loved the name, and the concept felt close enough.
Thanks to her second shot at life, she knew exactly where sci-fi was headed in the next few years. The hottest sci-fi hits coming up all circled one magic idea: infinite loops. Time loops, memory loops, death-and-reset loops—whatever you wanted to call it.
That stuff had been around forever—Groundhog Day, 12 Monkeys, 50 First Dates, Run Lola Run, Triangle—but nobody had quite cracked how to make it feel like hardcore sci-fi until Nolan dropped Inception in 2010 and blew everyone's minds. After that, Source Code in 2011 and Edge of Tomorrow in 2014 proved the concept printed money when you wrapped it in sci-fi packaging.
Audiences were already hungry for it—they just didn't know it until Nolan showed them. So why wait? She was going to kick that door open five years early.
Yep—her Source Code was going to be a slick, mind-bending, infinite-loop sci-fi thriller.
While she was deep in the writing trench, she also finally landed a legit agent. Joy had always wanted real representation, but before Juno nobody above a bottom-tier hustle would touch her baggage. Now the phones were ringing off the hook. She interviewed a bunch and signed with Catherine—a heavyweight at UTA who repped Anne Hathaway (the new "it" girl) and Bruce Willis (still a total badass). Catherine took 15% off the top, but having her Rolodex was worth it.
One afternoon Catherine called, sounding like she'd mainlined three espressos.
"Joy, tell me the script's done. And the budget. And the pitch deck."
Joy stretched—she'd been glued to her desk all day and had just typed "FADE OUT" ten minutes earlier. "Pretty much. Needs one more polish pass and I've gotta double-check the numbers."
"You've got one week," Catherine said, no room for negotiation. "Next Monday everything better be in my inbox. The script is non-negotiable. The rest can slide a little."
"Yes, ma'am," Joy laughed. "I forgot you turn into a drill sergeant when you're excited."
"Sweetheart," Catherine said, suddenly dead serious, "I've got a whale on the line for you. A real one. But if you're not ready by Monday, it's all smoke. And keep the budget under $25 million—anything higher and indie investors run screaming."
"It's hard sci-fi, not a drama," Joy protested. "I can't shoot this for couch change."
"Then only shoot the shots that are 100% essential to the story," Catherine fired back. "That's how you control costs without looking cheap."
Joy just smiled into the phone. She was already doing exactly that—she just didn't want it to feel cheap.
She hung up and dove back in. A potential investor was waiting. She wasn't about to blow it.
The next seven days were a blackout blur. She basically lived in her apartment, surviving on pizza deliveries, power naps on the keyboard, and pure spite. Whenever she hit a wall, she'd remember all the years people called her a hack, a has-been, a cautionary tale. That lit the fire all over again.
She was never going back to that version of herself. Ever.
The following Monday morning she zipped everything up—script, two budgets, lookbook—and hit send.
She tried to fish for the investor's name so she could Google-stalk them. Catherine shut that down fast: "Very big fish. That's all you get until it's real."
Fine. Hollywood had rules. Joy could play by them—for now.
But things are never that easy.
A week later Catherine called back with the update: the investor loved the script but was still spooked by Joy's old scandals. He wanted proof she still had the magic. His ask? A short proof-of-concept film—roughly $100k budget. If he liked it, he'd reimburse her and write the check for the full $20 million.
Translation: this dude was loaded, super cautious, and this was a test.
Joy said yes before Catherine finished the sentence.
She immediately started prepping the short. She picked the big ballroom sequence from the script—figured it would show off tone, visuals, and emotion all at once.
The $100k she didn't actually have. She scraped together what was left after paying off debts and borrowed another $50k from Renee (who was thrilled to be involved anyway).
She built the set herself in a rented warehouse. No money for pro art department—every light, every piece of set dressing, she did by hand. She cast Renee as the female lead and dragged in a few of Renee's theater buddies as extras so she didn't have to pay SAG day rates.
For the look, she stole a trick she remembered from La La Land years later: wild, kaleidoscopic color shifts synced to the music, turning the dance number into this hypnotic, ever-shifting dream.
Two weeks of pure hustle later, the short was done.
Catherine couriered the drive to the mystery investor the same day.
Now they just had to wait and see if Joy had done enough to make a very rich, very nervous man believe in her again.