Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are the directorial duo of genre-bending movies Resolution, Spring, and The Endless. After seeing their latest offering Synchronic at FrightFest Glasgow, we caught up with the pair at to talk about its genesis.
STARBURST: How did the idea for Synchronic develop from its inception to the final film?
Aaron Moorhead: I remember one day we were having lunch and you said you had this really cool idea but wasn’t quite sure what was yet, and it ended up being this idea for taking a pill to perceive time all at once. We then discussed how to investigate that kind of designer drug. We didn’t want the characters to be cops investigating people dying, because having guns and authority and kicking down people’s doors to ask questions is the easy way to do it. We decided they should be public servants of some kind, and would be dealing with death and people dying all the time. We also realised that one of them should be dying as well, and the other one needs a similar problem, which is his missing daughter. Then we thought that since we’re making this thing about friendship, we started talking about themes that were running through our own lives, and decided that one of them has to make a giant sacrifice for the other. The story was pieced together in that direction.
Jason Benson: I’ve realised in retrospect that the movie was unconsciously inspired by Doctor Manhattan. We both know Watchmen, everybody’s read that chapter and now everyone’s seen that episode of the TV show. That really helped giving our movie a basic comprehension. From Beyond, as well, with its pineal gland stimulation. I came across a gif for it and thought ‘What an interesting idea, I had no idea this existed.’
AM: We had a lot of imagery in the movie that mostly got pared out, but the pineal gland is where a lot of mystics see the third eye or the seat of the soul, and taking Synchronic can be viewed in some way as opening your third eye. There was a lot of pseudo-mystical imagery around the pineal gland being the third eye, and Steve, the guy who has cancer on it, is slowly dying and killing his third eye.
Appropriately for a time travel movie, Synchronic has a highly historical setting in New Orleans. How did the city’s history play into the story?
JB: There aren’t many cities in America where you can tell a time travel story. If it was in Los Angeles, every time you’d go back it would be a dirt lot. You might see some Native Americans.
AM: You’d go back in time and see the same person you just had a meeting with!
JB: This pill allows you to see the frozen river of time where everything happens simultaneously and go into the layers of that. New Orleans is the one city in America where there’s all kinds of interesting stuff. Yes, you still have things like the Ice Age, there’s also French colonialism, Spanish colonialism, and the fact that there are structures on property that literally was a swamp. It gives us some more interesting places to go to.
Your films have a great deal of emotional content that genre movies often lack. Is that an important aspect of your filmmaking?
JB: Absolutely. I think it’s a shame when people don’t. There are lot of reasons why you’d want to make a story more character-based or more emotional and getting to know characters beyond the archetype they represent. You can make movies where you just drop in an archetype and don’t know anything about them because as a viewer you’ve seen that character in so many different movies. The idea is that if we can get people really caring about the character as a real person, then all the genre stuff will hopefully work so much better, because people feel like it’s a real person being put through this rollercoaster ride.
AM: Doing that, for us at least, takes time. You have to sit with them for a while and listen to them talk and see them make decisions. This ties into your last question, because it can feel like it’s slowing down your movie to take that time to get to know someone before the stakes matter, so you start trimming it back, but then you start losing the person. The genre stuff is cool, but who’s it happening to? You kind of know them, but not well enough. That’s one of the reasons we went back into the edit, to find small, interesting details and flesh them out to make them more human and bring their performances to the surface.
JB: We’ve realised over the course of four movies is that we want our characters to be flawed, but it’s really tricky because when you get feedback there’s a weird line. Audiences want them to be flawed, but not too flawed.
AM: I have a theory on this and I’ve been solidifying it over the last few weeks. I think likeability, when it comes to scriptwriting, is complete and total bullshit, and that likeability comes from casting. If you cast somebody who has a pathos to them they can do a lot of awful stuff and everyone still hopes they make it out okay, but if you cast someone who’s boring or super-charming they don’t like them and think they’re a douchebag. You can make someone likeable in a script, but if you make someone unlikable in a script you don’t actually know if they’re unlikeable in the movie until you cast them. I think as long as I want them to succeed, they’re likeable enough to me until I cast whoever it’s going to be. If you cast someone with a soulful face who gives a meaningful performance you’re going to get something great.
SYNCHRONIC will be released soon. You can read our review here.
