It could feel like every day on “Terrestrial,” director Steve Pink was trying to achieve a delicate balance for the genre-bending thriller, but one day in particular he found himself having to do so practically for a striking shot in which a wine glass has to glide down an air hockey table as mayhem unfolds in the background with nary a drop of pinot noir spilled on the surface.
“It was an invention that came as a result of a limitation,” recalls Pink, who had to consider beyond the delicate execution of the shot itself, the people that were fighting in the back of the room. “It couldn’t be like a knock down, drag out fight [because the characters are] both writers, so the struggle itself wouldn’t be that extreme and [we thought] how do we create a tension that’s abstracted from the fight itself? There was an air hockey table there [in the room], and we just started thinking about it and I probably stole it from Spielberg, [who’s] probably one of the most famous directors for focusing on an object that suddenly is a stand-in for a whole bit of action that’s taking place either off screen or out of focus, but it was just a really, really fun way in which we could express that physical conflict between them without it being so literal.”
That kind of thinking was required throughout Pink’s latest picture and while he’s generous in giving credit to others, it’s his delicate touch that seems uniquely suited to tackle screenwriters Connor Diedrich and Samuel Johnson’s twisty tale of Allen (Jermaine Fowler), a sci-fi writer who welcomes his college friends Ryan (James Morosini), Maddie (Pauline Chalamet) and Vic (Edy Modica) to his new home in the Hollywood Hills, which can come as a surprise to all when last they saw him, he was working in a diner. The filmmaker, who deftly balanced a variety of tones and genres from his first credit as a screenwriter on “Grosse Pointe Blank” where a hitman thriller crossed with a romcom and his breakout as a director “Hot Tub Time Machine” gently invoked quantum physics amidst broad comedy, is asked to handle a whole lot more here when it becomes clear that Allen is hiding something from his friends, who not only become suspicious of his newfound wealth, but all the items in his new house devoted to “The Neptune Cycle,” a sci-fi series similar to “Star Trek” penned by a reclusive author S.J. Purcell (Brendan Hunt).
While they’ve known Allen to have been prone to flights of fancy creatively, Ryan, Maddie and Vic have to wonder if he’s completely drifted off the deep end with his erratic behavior, unsure if they can chalk it up to just being rich or losing track of where his writing about intergalactic travel ends and reality begins. As torturous as it may be for them to find out the truth over the course of an overnight stay, Pink, Diedrich and Johnson have loads of fun with a central character whose name seems purposefully only one letter removed from “alien” and whose situation unfolds with the kind of slick camerawork more typically associated with a space opera or action flick, working on multiple levels as it tells the all-too-earthly story of people who feel they’re always on the outside looking in and thrown for a loop when ushered into the world they’ve only observed from afar.
On the eve of the film’s premiere at Fantasia Fest in Montreal, Pink generously spoke about the versatility required of himself as well as his talented ensemble to pull off the chameleonic narrative, essentially filming a second movie in parallel with the inclusion of scenes from the fictional “Neptune’s Cycle” cinematic adventure and figuring out the right place to set the action.
What got you interested in this?
The producers who I did this romantic drama [“The Wheel”] with a few years back brought me the script and it was just absolutely batshit crazy. I love psychological thrillers, and of course, to the extent to which this is a horror movie, a horror movies. The script was so good and there was just something about this rabbit hole that this character goes down because he feels rejected by the world. He’s trying to kind of navigate how to gain acceptance, even if it’s not from entities on this planet and it was just a remarkable journey into darkness of a certain kind that I couldn’t resist. I said, “Please, for the love of God, option this film.” And I just love these producers. They keep giving me opportunities, and I try not to fuck them up, basically.
You can rest easy on that count. And even on “The Wheel,” you were able to make something that felt stylistically as if it belonged to a number of different genres. Was that an exciting opportunity here?
Yeah, I learned a ton, watching films I admired and seeing how they move the camera in a particular way to create a certain tension in the film that heightened the terror of any given moment. That alone was a challenge, but I also had amazing actors. They all are so pivotal in creating the feeling of the movie and what turns out to be the inevitable, cataclysmic set of events. [The actors] all play such a crucial role in who they are and I almost feel like they’re like astronauts on a space mission because they’re thrown together in a particular way, even though, of course, the pretense is they’re old friends. They’re all so different, and they end up having this extraordinary dynamic. That’s all just the actors.
I suspect you deserve some credit too — the group dynamics in your films such as “Hot Tub Time Machine” and “About Last Night” are generally strong. What was it like getting the right ensemble for this?
Begging works great. [laughs] So if you’ve ever had doubt in the concept of begging, be doubtful no more. Putting together that particular group and getting them to say “yes” was just astonishing to me, because [for instance] Brendan Hunt, playing this kind of over-the-hill, cynical, formerly famous science-fiction juggernaut author, just stepped into that role and played it so brilliantly. And of course, Jermaine Fowler’s practically in a fugue state [as Allen], having to deal with all these things the audience has to know he’s feeling but that he can’t reveal, so he was able to express things that we knew he was thinking and feeling, but the other characters in the scene don’t and sometimes there’s not even context, but we still know Jermaine is preoccupied by something massive, even though we don’t know what it is at certain times, it was a brilliant thing. Then Edy Modica’s comedy was brilliant and James Morosini being our point of view character, pointing out the truth all the time when nobody seems to be really listening, and Pauline’s the heart of the matter, in terms of her expression of someone who is just honest and wants the right thing for everybody, they all brought so much that it made my job obviously much easier.
The other big character in the film was the house perched atop a hill. What was it like to find?
It’s like a French chateau in Alhambra and once we found it, it was so interesting because it’s this throwback. It was actually built in the ‘20s, so it’s very antiquated visually, but it went with [the idea] if you were a sci-fi writer, that kind of architecture would appeal to you — it isn’t a Gothic mansion exactly, but this grand old place. Because we could have said, “Okay, let’s just find a modern Beverly Hills mansion for a rich guy.” But this had so much character, it helped the idea that perhaps it wasn’t a literal space in a way because it didn’t feel like a space that existed in the present.
You actually get to create your own universe in one other sense – how much of the author’s “Neptune Cycle” is actually fleshed out? Between what can be seen from the bits of the movie that are shown throughout the film and the props around the house, it seems like you could actually launch it as a franchise tomorrow with all the details you’ve got locked down.
I mean, when we were making the movie within the movie, I felt like I missed my calling, like, “Why haven’t I spent my entire career shooting like ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or ‘Star Trek’?”It was so much fun and we talked about it a lot because it turned out to be a whole narrative in terms of a hero’s journey. You can it track pretty well, even in the little pieces you see in our movie, and we actually are probably going to cut a whole version of what we shot as a continuous film and release it at some point. But it’s really interesting to see the group dynamics [of the space crew in “The Neptune Cycle”], given that genre and how all that turns out, versus what happens in the reality of our film. There’s a divergence at a certain point because Jermaine’s character is projecting himself onto the protagonist of the movie within the movie, so he’s emulating behavior at a certain point because he wants the results that the character inside that movie is also going to have. Mirroring that was so much fun, and because we had to mirror that, we had to know a lot about what happened inside that movie and all the very important beats, and then matching those inflection points in our movie.
Did you know going into the edit how all these scenes and story threads could reflect one another? You’ve balanced a lot of tones before, but it seems like this took more arithmetic than usual.
This is probably the hardest editorial ever because there were so many layers of reality I had to deal with. Even when we were shooting, I would [say], “what level of reality is this in this moment?” Sometimes I felt like I got it right, and sometimes I got it wrong, but then in the edit, it was the same question, and it took a long time to figure out, okay, I know that this is the external reality, what’s actually happening — reality number one. Then there’s reality layer number two of what’s happening in Jermaine’s mind? And then reality number three, what’s happening in Jermaine’s mind in terms of what he thinks is happening in our [shared] reality? And keep going. [laughs] What is this the layer where Jermaine’s sense of reality departs completely from the reality of the movie in the external world? So now it’s his reality in the internal world, or he’s projecting a reality that doesn’t exist at all. And we see that in the various things that are merged and we don’t know if those things are real or not real. Those become the ambiguous fourth layer of reality.
I know anyone who’s listening to this would be like, “Okay, I get it. It’s many layers,” but trying to figure out which one of those things we were dealing with and where they collide, where they merge, and where they break apart was just– even explaining that, I’m a wreck.
You articulated it well, as you do in the film. It seems like the score really holds this together when it’s got a little sci-fi feel, a little thriller. What was it like to put music on this?
The composers are so great and when we were trying to create the sound, we started with [the idea], what if the mansion was a spaceship? What if the entire film was an allegory, and this were an interplanetary mission? What would the music be? Let’s start there. That was a joy because then I could embrace all of the sonic layers that would happen if you were in space, even though you’re in a mansion. In terms of the score and then how we laid in the sound design, it was just so much fun because it was just another creative influence on the movie that shaped the narrative without ever being explicit, like “Oh, it’s an allegory for being on a space mission.”
“Terrestrial” does not yet have U.S. distribution.