Is time travel real?
Is time travel real? Certainly it is in the movies. And what better experts of contemporary movie time travel could you have than Rian Johnson (Looper), Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko), and Bob Orci (screenwriter for Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness among many others)? Last Saturday at the 20th Austin Film Festival the panel A Screenwriter’s Guide to Time Travel held court.
Time travel at its most primitive revolves around erasing mistakes from the past or changing the past in order to transform the future. Whatever is going on is fascinating. Kelly comments: “Time travel constitutes a divine break. It’s basically impossible.” Wish fulfillment plays a part in any scenario, and as Johnson says: “We spend our days thinking about the past and planning for the future.”
The talk moves to the origins of time travel literature, like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1819) or Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court (published in 1889, made into at least two movies respectively starring the Bingle and Will Rogers). “The guy just falls asleep and wakes up in the past.” The talk veers to abstractions of the genre like Brainstorm (1983) and eXistenZ (1999).
The movie should make narrative sense and should also be a storytelling lesson. The go-to movie for reference, at least for the current generation is Back To The Future (1985). Perhaps if today were the middle of the last century that allusion would be H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (published in 1895).
BTTF features a time travel unit operating under the guidelines of 1.21-gigawatts being activated by the unit, a DeLorean, traveling 88 miles-per-hour. You also have an ever-disappearing Polaroid that gives urgency to scenario. “If the degree of logic doesn’t convince the viewer they are watching something that could actually happen then you’ve lost your audience,” says Johnson. Look at the ways that Groundhog Day (1993) and Time After Time (1979) or Timecrimes (2007) use the form.
There’s a subtle sci-fi trope to the time travel genre, it’s an embryonic metaphor for our own time, the panel members agree. An extension of that idea can be seen in body-switching movies like Big or Freaky Friday. Perhaps dual identities have inspired some of the greatest sci-fi of the 20th century. Philip K. Dick had a twin sister who died a few months after birth. (Allow me to digress. Elvis Presley had a twin brother who died at birth and they are both buried at Graceland, suggesting great minds think alike.)
Elvis, time travel, pop culture and quantum mechanics can all exist in the same time-space continuum. Orci, whose credits include producer on Ender’s Game and writer on shows like Fringe and Sleepy Hollow reminds the audience that it’s certainly easy to obtain rights from classic literature that’s in the public domain.
Another benchmark of time travel movie scripts is 12 Monkeys (1995), itself inspired by Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée (1962), both films grounded in the remembrance of things past. Orci mentions that the time travel motif from the rebooted Star Trek (2009) establishes a parallel reality or universe that already existed in the previous Roddenberry versions. “We used the rules of Star Trek to free Star Trek from Star Trek,” says Orci. And if you think that that’s impossible “check out the writings of one of the originator’s of superstring theory Michio Kaku.”
But maybe we’re getting in over our heads. As Kelly says, “At the end of the day the 4th dimension will collapse upon itself.” Kelly has the distinction of the members of the panel of having achieved time travel fame without a proper studio budget. Looper and Star Trek had budgets appropriate to their ambitions but Donnie Darko was almost never made.
Kelly landed an agent on the basis of his DD script but wouldn’t sell it unless he could direct. “I waited until the ink was dry on the contract to tell them about me directing,” says Kelly. Drew Barrymore (who plays a role as a high school teacher in DD) came aboard and found financing through her production company. At first Jason Schwartzman was attached but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts, then Jake Gyllenhaal came aboard, and the rest is cinematic history right down to its Sparkle Vision dance sequence and the luminescent tubes emerging from people’s chests.
Many of the Austin Film Festival panels are recorded and later broadcast on select PBS stations and also available as videos or podcasts on the website www.onstory.tv
Before the panel wraps they discuss another two influential time travel films: Primer (2004) and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Johnson remarks, rightfully so, that Primer is so complicated because of the realistic jargon. There’s a technical focus on the mechanics of time loops, so much so that to non-scientific minds “the dialogue becomes white noise.”
Peggy Sue Got Married elicits raves from the speakers for its story and its production value. Orci notes how the object of Kathleen Turner’s journey into the past is to discover the reason she fell in love with her husband so many years ago. Kelly notes how the type of gown teen Peggy Sue wears to a dance influenced him. “We used the same kind of fabric for the Sparkle Vision scenes in Donnie Darko.”
— Michael Bergeron
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