I am a big fan of Lena Dunham, and her essay on “The Big Chill” and its generation — her parents’ generation — is enormously thoughtful and beautifully written. Her insight and her generosity of spirit are very moving. And it reminds us that film can be, at its best, what Roger Ebert called “an empathy machine.” You can never know your parents as they were when they were your age. But, Dunham says, movies like this can remind us that once they were young and certain they would never become like their own parents.
There is so much you can’t imagine. You can’t imagine your parents on this weekend, dancing around the kitchen to Motown as they cook a big meal, moving their butts jauntily and leading with their shoulders. Many years later, at your bat mitzvah or your cousin Stephanie’s wedding, the way they dance will make you want to kill yourself. But if you could see them over this weekend, all together, if you trained a camera on them and let them dance back and forth, you would understand: they were young once too, and this is how they learned to dance, and now every time they dance that way they feel young again, even if you’re scowling at them from across the room and wishing they would explode.
What if someone found a way to show you? To show you that your father’s friend with the glasses and the nasal voice, someone found him sexy once, held his hand furtively, thought he was the wit of the century. And your mother’s friend with the bouclé jacket who calls a thousand times to ask if you got her email about her son’s wedding invitations? Someone once wanted her badly enough that he chased her into the freezing yard and gnawed on her neck like a lamb shank. And that big lazy drunk who sends money at Christmas, who gets food stuck in his mustache and dates social workers? Well, he did the gnawing. And your aunt who isn’t really technically your aunt, she did want kids of her own. She tried.
Mike Cahill writes and directs singular, provocative stories where science and faith combine — and sometimes clash. In “Another Earth,” Cahill’s college classmate, sometimes co-writer and friend Brit Marling starred as a girl who befriends the man whose family she accidentally killed in a car accident as a planet identical to Earth comes close enough to establish contact. In “I Origins,” Marling plays a scientist who works with her husband in seeking the origins of the development of the eye. Her husband, played by Michael Pitt, is the ultimate man of rationality until developments make him begin to suspect that there may be some things that cannot be explained by reason. He talked to me about science, art, and his own experiences with the supernatural.
Why do you think that science and poetry and art focus so much on people’s eyes?
That’s a great question because eyes are our generation our civilization’s dinosaur footprint, which is to say it is the thing that has some significance but we don’t know what it is. I was once on this Island in Brijuni, and there were these ancient Roman ruins and these dinosaur foot prints right next to them. I realized that the civilization there had risen and fallen while their kids splashed around in puddles of the dinosaur footprints and yet that civilization did not discover dinosaurs. They had mythology, they had stories of dragons, they may have had belief in mythological creatures but they didn’t actually know that two hundred and fifty million years ago, reptilian creatures evolved and then were destroyed by comets or whatever.
The greater significance was never uncovered until recently, in the 1800’s. So the eyes I feel is similar in that sense that we’ve been staring at them, wondering about the mysteries. Creationists call them “irreducibly complex.” They’re fascinating. They never change throughout your lifetime. The cells in your body are flushed every seven years or something like that. But your eyes are the same throughout your entire life, which is insane. And it gives is this magical mystical wonderful thing that we cannot completely wrap our head around but it just captivates us. Our eyes are the window to our soul.
I understand that this film is a prequel to a film that you had already written. Is that right?
Yes that’s right, that is correct. I’m going about it in the weirdest way in the history of Hollywood which is very new to me. I have only made one movie before this. I sold the script for another film to Searchlight and it was called “I.” We were working on that and figuring how to make that. In the meantime, just because I’m a creative person who gets really empty and wants to make something and not sit around, I asked Searchlight, which owned all the rights, if it was possible to make this prequel of this sort of backstory independently and they graciously gave me the freedom to do so and then they ended up buying it. So the next step is to make the sequel now, the original script.
Is that the plan?
In the ideal universe, yes. There is also a life involved.
You have a “stinger,” a surprising little scene after the credits. That’s unusual in a small-budget drama.
That’s my Marvel ending.
You seem really enthralled by the intersection of science and questions that are — at least as far as we know — beyond science?
Right. The metaphysical, the beyond the physical, beyond the testable… I am very fascinated by that, definitely.
And have you had experiences in your own life that you would consider to be kind of supernatural, outside the bounds of scientific explanation?
Yes, many.
And do those inspire some of your stories?
A hundred percent yes. I’ve had experiences in my life particularly with finding things. Once I had a vest that was stolen and I had walked thirty blocks through DC randomly and found it again as if I was getting signals sent to my brain. It was very inexplicable… and I am very rational, scientific minded generally.
I think if you are very rational one rational conclusion is that not everything can be rationally explained.
Yeah, exactly and the key to that for me in this film was when Sofi describes the worm. Ian is taking a living being which has two senses and modifying it to have a third. The light which is unperceivable and inarticulable and unimaginable to worms, that light influences the world of the worm, the world that is perceivable such as they can smell so the light of the sun and the rhythm of the light of the sun influences like and apple rotting for example which a worm finds pleasing. That light is indirectly influencing the perceivable world of the worm and it’s a horribly loaded word, a spiritual realm, the metaphysical realm is actually a more appropriate word, can very much be interacting indirectly with our world. And we can’t trace things to it, we can’t things and things like co-incidences or those magical moments that you don’t have the words to describe.
Did you study scientists in their labs to get the details right?
I put a lot of research in to make the sciences as bulletproof as possible. Ian’s worm experiment is a real experiment. We also studied others like molecular biologists and neuroscientists and we were invited into a laboratory. Then I brought Michael and Britt with me and the scientists were so gracious. They explained how the experiments worked, the lingo as well as the mannerisms and just the sort of lifestyles. And for me, like I know so many scientists in my life and I admire these people and I know they have often been misrepresented in films and sort of clichéd and I find scientists to be the most exhilarating, interesting, passionate, poetic, funny people; and some of them at least, and real extraordinary and yet ordinary people. It was a really exhilarating moment for me because people who are celebrities in my mind are the scientists, the people with curiosity. We know more on Wednesday than we did on Tuesday only because of scientists. And we can take that for granted because there was the middle ages and the dark periods of civilization where we knew less on Wednesday than we did on Tuesday.
And that does not necessarily conflict with the spiritual. The Dalai Lama is very scientific. He loves science; you give him a watch, he will take it apart and try to figure out how the mechanics of it works. And he really says if there is some sort of scientific proof that challenges the tenet of his spiritual belief, he would change his spiritual belief. I put that in the movie. If you are a person of faith, science should not frighten you at all. We are working on two different realms here.
Bob Mondello on the Challenge of Naming Movie Sequels
Posted on August 3, 2014 at 8:01 pm
NPR’s Bob Mondello has a delightful commentary on titles of movie sequels. Somehow he neglected to mention “Sharknado 2: The Second One,” which democratically allowed the fans to pick the title via Twitter votes. That approach could have prevented some of the problems Mondello identifies:
A while back, when producers were abbreviating everything — Mission Impossible 2, for instance, had posters that read M:I-2 — there was a horror flick that wanted to try that: a sequel to Halloween that was supposed to be taking place 20 years after the first one. So the poster had Jamie Lee Curtis staring out from the darkness above great big letters saying H20. It looked like she was selling a really sinister brand of bottled water.
Another title that raised all the wrong questions was for a story about the king from whom we declared our independence in 1776. In Britain, the stage play was called The Madness of George III. But when it was turned into a film, the producers worried that Americans wouldn’t know who George III was, so they added the word “King” — The Madness of King George — while dropping the Roman numeral at the end, for fear that audiences would think they’d missed parts one and two.
