part two
Sam: And that's the thing that used to always drive me crazy about Lars Von Trier's Dogme 95 - that there was ‘No Genre' as part of the built in restrictions of it, and science fiction stories are things that can really grow and… you can do some wonderful things with no budget. That's what I think I really like the most about this….
Kevin: Just having some pieces that work with people's imagination about what can be done. And that's really the level that this story is working on. You're kind of getting into these guys' thought processes about what they can do with this new invention that they don't immediately realize as time travel.
Shane: Right.
Sam: So how did you get steeped in the whole world of time travel? Did you have to do any research to figure out how you wanted the physics to work?
Shane: Umm, yeah, I did a lot of research. You know ‘cause it didn't start off as a… as me wanting to make a science fiction film. I was interested in a story with basically these two guys, or this friendship. That at the beginning they have the ability to trust, for whatever that's worth. And because of the introduction of this overwhelming power, that this is the thing that has such a big impact on their relationship. And I got the setting basically from reading a lot about innovation and discoveries and stuff, and I was really kind of taken with that world. And so I knew that that's what these guys were gonna be doing and then it really was a matter of… okay, it's a device that they're gonna be creating and that's the catalyst. That's gonna satisfy the theme. And I don't know exactly how I came up… well, not came up with but landed on the idea that they would be effecting time in some way. But when I did get there it seemed like not only does it really satisfy this need I have for this device to be powerful, but I also thought there's a lot of interesting things to do with a time machine. There's almost a weird common sense logic, the way it should work.
Kevin: Like when (the character) Abe first discovers… one of the first things he strikes upon is to go up, set up the machine, walk away and do nothing for a day. And try to remove yourself as much from any kind of causality effects.
Sam: That was a great idea, to create that blank canvas of time for you to go back and… just take yourself out of the process.
Shane: Yeah.
Kevin: But then come back with the prescience of about what was happening on the stock market for instance on that day.
Shane: Yeah, the whole idea is that we've all seen Back to the Future. We've all seen Bill & Ted's. We've all seen these stories. So let's just say (that they did too), and what would they do? How would they avoid all these causalities and paradoxes?
Sam: That was the one thing I loved about the Bill and Ted ones that kind of worked into here, that whole (concept where) if you think about it, you can do it immediately - with the intent of going back (in the past) and doing it. ‘Cause I love that bit where they're just outside looking at that building and they're like “Hey, you know what we could do?”, but then all of a sudden you see Abe - another Abe walking around by the building and it's like… Yeah, you already did it.
Shane: Also, the thing that kind of bothered me with other time travel stories was this idea that you could pick up at one point in time and immediately move to the ‘50s. It just seemed like “Okay, if I moved back a day, I'd find myself in empty space because of the distance the Earth has moved since then. So whenever you're talking about time, or moving through it, you have to address moving through space…
Sam: As well…
Shane: Yeah, so this idea that they're actually having to move through each moment into the past, not only does it kind of satisfy… You know I wanted them to have to pay some kind of a price for this. And that's one of the many things that they end up having to pay for, is the fact that if they wanna go back six hours they've gotta spend six hours in this little box.
Sam: Yeah, that's great. I liked how it follows its own rules too. That was the problem with Back to The Future II – it created a time travel (rule) that was like fragmented time lines, and then people were able to go (into the past), change time and then return to the original pre-changed timeline. And it just didn't work. So I like anything with time travel that follows its own rules, which is great.
Kevin: The theories of time travel in your
movie also remind me of stuff that was published, at least in a local
paper, and I wish I could remember… There was somebody at Uconn or Wesleyan
up our way and they might have been repeating a popular theory but they
had mentioned that yes, you can - time travel is possible theoretically,
but there was something about setting up a certain particle. I think the
theory sounded to me like they were making a marker in time. But the theory
was you couldn't go back before that marker was created.(The "somebody"
was Dr.
Ronald L. Mallett Ph.D., Professor of Physics, Particle and Field
Theory Research Group at University of Connecticut, and his later published
book is "Time Traveler: A Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time
Travel a Reality"(Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006))-ed.
Shane: Wow.
Kevin: Yeah, you'd have to… You could go back to it (and) you could go anywhere in between, but because you had that marker - that reference point that the machine would theoretically be able to follow, you'd be able to track this particle's movement in time and kind of figure it out from there. And because of that only, you could go through time. But you couldn't go back to the prehistoric era or the 1950s or anything like that. So, I don't know. I didn't know (if) you'd read that or not?
Shane: No, no, I hadn't read anything like that. It's weird, the only research that I've ever done about the ability to affect time in some way had to do with basically wormholes or hyperspace. But those always lead to the weirdest outcomes and they require you to have spaceships to go to lightspeed.
Sam: Yeah, I've got this book by this Irish writer (called) “The Theory of Time Travel' or something [Time Travel: A Guide for Beginners by J.H. Brennan – ed.] and it just gets really dodgy and interesting after a while. Hard to wrap your head around.
Kevin: And I gotta say something else took me a couple times through to notice. There's this whole idea about constant use of the time travelling machine having something to do with your ability to… That you'd lose your ability to write. You'd be writing with your left hand all the time or not the hand you use. You wouldn't be able to form words on a page like that.
Sam: Yeah, I liked that a lot.
Kevin: And I was thinking that had something to do with left brained/right brained concepts and the global versus the other kind of thinking. Do you know what I mean? Well, you must, ‘cause you wrote it!
Shane: Yeah, I mean my outlook was just to talk about the wear and tear of this machine. I mean by the end of it these guys are copies of copies of copies almost.
Sam: That's what I was thinking too, like it was replicative fade or something, yeah.
Shane: Right, and it's… That was one of those things. The ability to write is something that always sorta fascinated me, ‘cause I know what the letters should look like and with my right hand it's okay - but with my left I'm pretty much useless. And I know there's a way to talk about it. They can explain it with muscle memory or whatever the prevailing theory is, but it still doesn't solve the fact that here's something that in my head I know, and I can't manifest it physically. And it just seems like that's, whatever space that is was the part I wanted these guys to be affected with.