Twin co-writers/co-directors Peter and Michael Spierig recently spoke to me about Predestination, their filming of Robert Heinlein’s 1958 short story All You Zombies, and the many problems involved in bringing such a paradox-rife time-travel tale to life.
It’s a little difficult to know where to start with any discussion of Predestination, as so much of it is, or at least should be, a secret…
PS: Yes! You know, we’ve spent the last week or so doing press and interviews, and it becomes a very tricky thing for us to try and explain the film without ruining it. I guess what we can all accept and talk about is the fact that Sarah Snook plays a male and a female, but we can’t go into the many other circumstances around that.
It’s based on a story by the much-esteemed Robert Heinlein, so how hard was it to get the rights? And how close is it to the source?
MS: It’s very close. Very accurate… You know, Heinlein hasn’t actually had a lot of his stuff turned into film, and I suppose the main ones have been Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters. He has this massive catalogue of stuff that hasn’t been adapted into films, and that’s pretty exciting.
Given the many mind-boggling tricks, twists and paradoxes of the story, were you two maybe concerned about how difficult bringing it to the screen was going to be?
PS: We wanted to stay true to the short story, and so we really used it as our template… It gave a really solid framework, and from there we expanded the characters further and worked on the thriller aspect of the story. That wasn’t quite there in the original story… It is daunting, and you don’t want to be known as the guys who ruined it!
MS: Heinlein’s short story is so well-constructed, and his blueprint of the plot is so perfect… He wrote that short story in the late 1950s, and it’s amazing that it’s so topical and so original today. I mean, we had to have charts on the walls, and we had to explain the whole story to the crew members. It was a very extensive process, and we went over it and over it again and again to make sure that it all connected and that it all made sense. People in the future will go over this film with a fine-tooth comb – I’m sure they will! – but they’re going to find that it’s tight. Yes, there is a lot of time-travel trickery in the film, but it’s still very much a story about identity, and hopefully the character side of it really grounds it and really connects with an audience… We really hope that the emotional side of the story works. I mean, we love genre, we love action and horror, but this is our first film really with that side.
It’s been four years since your film Daybreakers, so has Predestination taken that long to get made and out there?
PS: It took about two years. After Daybreakers there were a number of projects that we worked on, but for various reasons they didn’t come together. And that tends to be the story of every filmmaker that’s working! After we worked on the projects that didn’t happen, this really became, for us, a passion project that we were going to make or die trying!
And let’s work out who worked on what here: you both directed and adapted the screenplay, but only one of you worked on the music?
PS: Yes, that’s true, and it was me that worked on the music. Michael didn’t work on the music, although he is musically inclined. We co-wrote, we co-directed, and we are both part of the producing team, and Michael did a lot of the visual effects. I did a few, but he did many more than me.
Ethan Hawke was in Daybreakers, so did he agree to be in Predestination as he enjoys working with you guys?
PS: We sent him the material pretty early on and he responded almost straight away, and he basically said, ‘Just tell me where and when!’, as he just loved the material. And we did have a good relationship with him after Daybreakers, and we had talked about working with him again, and so when this project came up we were all super-excited about him doing it. We have a friendship with him and we also know the sort of genre sensibilities that he has, and so it all just panned out really well.
And then there’s Sarah Snook, who’s been in many films (Not Suitable For Children, These Final Hours) and TV series (The Moodys, Redfern Now) previously – but nothing like this…
PS: We auditioned a lot of young actresses for the role, and it did take us a while to find someone who could play both male and female. We went back and forth on it for quite a while, and then when Sarah and some other girls came in and we got them into man make-up at the audition, we just thought that Sarah was amazing. We were working with Steven Boyle, who’s done make-up for us since our first film Undead, and he’s just so talented, but he was telling us that it was the hardest thing that he’d ever had to do. It was a process, too, of reducing and reducing and reducing the make-up to see how little we could get away with, and Sarah just really transformed. There’s actually not much rubber or make-up: it’s just her transformation. Ethan was also blown away by her right from the first audition.
Was the fact that Sarah isn’t quite a star yet important? If it had been someone big, like Toni Collette, it might still have worked, but it wouldn’t have been the same as we would have all recognised her as Toni Collette immediately…
MS: That was a conscious choice on our part. We did decide to cast in the realms of relative unknowns, and were creating a character that wasn’t immediately identifiable. If it had been someone like Toni Collette then it would have been Toni Collette just hiding behind some rubber, and she might have been wonderful, sure. But it was a conscious choice on our part to find someone who was a relative unknown.
You mentioned before about how Predestination is a more emotional and human story after the horror and action of Undead and Daybreakers, so will you be continuing that into whatever you two do next?
MS: Yes, I hope so. We have several projects that we’re working on, and one of them is about Sarah Winchester, who was the heir to the Winchester Rifle Company. She lost her husband and her child at a young age and then inherited the Winchester fortune, and she believed that the ghosts of the people who had been killed by Winchester Rifles were after her. And so she built this house in San Jose over a period of more than 40 years, and it was a vessel to contain the ghosts that she thought were after her. It’s a true story and it’s a real house, ‘The Winchester Mystery House’, a big tourist attraction, and it’s really exciting, as we’re making a really creepy haunted house movie – but one with that emotional aspect… Unless something goes wrong, and then we won’t be doing it!
I Wake Up Screening 