SYNCHRONIC
TIME IS A LIE… REALITYBENDING THRILLER IS HERE TO EXPAND YOUR MIND. OR MAYBE JUST BLOW IT…
It’s good stuff, man. Bends time like a banana. No discounts.
QUANTUM THEORY IS A hell of a drug. In the case of Synchronic, the latest from directorial tag-team Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, it’s embodied in a little white pill with the power to unlock time itself.
Drop one and the true nature of the universe is visible – and you don’t even have to hug a stranger on a sweat-drenched dance floor. The ultimate in designer pharmaceuticals, it’s proof that Einstein – no slouch when it came to the secrets of reality – was bang on the money when he said “the difference between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Synchronic – the titular drug – shatters that illusion. But at what cost?
“Those ideas are so interesting,” says Benson, who also wrote the screenplay. “Telling science fiction stories essentially using the block state universe idea, that time isn’t really a flowing river, it’s more of a frozen river, where everything’s happening simultaneously… We’re obviously not the first ones to do it. But yeah, there was definitely a fascination with that. It was rooted in reading a lot of Alan Moore, undergrad physics classes, Wikipedia dives…”
“Stephen Hawking’s books are written for stupid people like myself!” laughs Moorhead, sharing the Zoom call with his creative partner. The pair met as interns for Ridley Scott’s commercial production company, bonding over a shared love of genre.
Named by Variety as among the 10 directors to watch in 2015, they’re known for inventive, category-defying fare, from 2014’s romantic body horror Spring to 2017’s time-looping tale The Endless.
Synchronic’s protagonists are Steve and Dennis, a pair of New Orleans paramedics played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan. They first encounter the drug’s devastating effects at an emergency scene and quickly realise this is no ordinary junkie fatality.
“The characters came pretty quickly after the concept,” Moorhead tells SFX, “because the way that designer drugs worked, somebody would have to be the first responders on the scene. The initial idea, of course, would be police officers, but it was almost immediately, instinctually, not going to be police officers, because it would empower our characters too much – they already know how to investigate things, they can yell at people, they can kick down doors, they can get the answers they need and the movie ends too soon. They’re just too powerful to be characters that can have setbacks.
“And on top of that, no matter how we handled it, the poster of the movie would have been two guys with guns. And we’re like, ‘It’s just never going to be that movie!’ So we thought, okay, paramedics are a version of that. They have to go to these scenes. They’re not obliged to figure out what’s happening, like a detective would be, but when one of their daughters disappears then of course they would be obliged to figure it out…”
While Mackie and Dornan ground the movie emotionally, Synchronic unshackles itself from the everyday with reality-melting effects sequences: strange vegetation sprouts inside apartment buildings. An unknown desert waits beyond a door. A man is trapped in a wall, frozen like an art installation. As Steve himself takes Synchronic in a bid to find Dennis’s
daughter, lost in time, he experiences the drug’s visionary properties first-hand.
“Something that was really important to us was that it wouldn’t feel deliberately psychedelic,” says Moorhead. “Of course it would have to bend your mind in some way, but glowing colours, flashing lights, those kind of things are very often associated with drug trips in movies. And we just wanted it to feel like it wasn’t a hallucination. It’s more terrifying if it’s happening right in front of you. It feels real. You touch it and it stays. And so that was a lot of development and a lot of discussion with our visual effects companies and with our production designers and between ourselves.”
“It was essentially going for the feeling of a perception shift in the actual world,” adds Benson. “It wasn’t based on or trying to replicate a drug experience that’s in existence.”
Did Benson write the script aware of the movie’s budget – or did he allow himself to be as ambitious as he wanted on the page?
“This is going to sound really cynical – and I don’t mean to be cynical – but I think in 2015 I was still under the impression that you could do an indie film with a pretty substantial budget somehow. That’s misguided. I shouldn’t have thought that. So there are earlier drafts of the script that actually have even more scaled-up sequences than are in the final movie. Most of the time-travel sequences were written with the budget in mind, but there are one or two early drafts that were way more ambitious – we never would have gotten that kind of budget to do it. There was literally a dinosaur chase.”
“What’s in there is actually better than a dinosaur chase, even if we’d done it right,” says Moorhead. “Also, can you imagine… You do a dinosaur chase in an indie film and everyone’s like ‘That’s really cool, but you know there’s a whole movie about that? There’s a whole series of movies!’ And they do it even better, no matter how well we did it. So it would be self-defeating. And very expensive.” There is, at least, a solitary woolly mammoth. “It’s interesting at the script stage, when you’re thinking about having a woolly mammoth in your movie,” shares Benson. “It’s way off in the distance, because you’re imagining if it gets close-up it’s going to be very expensive. It’s like the closer the mammoth gets, the more the effects bid goes up! So, 100 feet, or 150 feet?”
“Actually, before we even did the effects bidding, it was that shot,” clarifies Moorhead. “We even pre-vized it before we bid out the thing. We wanted it to be in the distance as kind of miraculous, almost a mirage on the horizon, a wish-fulfillment sort of thing – that they can see with their own eyes a woolly mammoth. We didn’t want a whole sequence where he was almost crushed by one or something.” Or the tusks coming out in 3D, assumes SFX.
“That’s actually a deleted scene,” laughs Moorhead. “Anthony’s riding around on the back of it. Him and the caveman are having a great time together!”
A SLICE OF RICE
Mackie brings more than Mcu-level star power to the movie. “It was really early on where we were like, ‘Man, you’d be incredible.’ Right now he’s known for his very boisterous, fun roles, especially as an Avenger and all that, but there’s also this piece of him – especially in Kathryn Bigelow movies, like The Hurt Locker – where he’s just absolutely soulful. We wanted to put the two together.
“There’s this guy who on the surface is living this swinging, crazy life, but deep down he’s boiling – and literally dying. So for us Anthony was perfect. He’d never done a role exactly like this, but he’d done a whole bunch of roles that had facets of Steve’s personality. Hopefully we’d be able to put them all together for the first time.”
New Orleans, the film’s backdrop, is a familiar location for genre fans, forever associated with the Southern Gothic of Anne Rice. What did Benson and Moorhead want to capture about the city in Synchronic? “We wanted to bring exactly that – the spooky Anne
New Orleans feels like neither America nor Europe, but it’s all of them
Rice vibe,” says Benson. “But only in that we actually shot outside of Anne Rice’s house. There’s a scene where they’re walking and talking and then they sit down right in front of her house. We fought for that location. If you Google old covers of The Vampire Lestat or The Witching Hour, it’s the same house.
“I’m not the kind of person who talks about energies or things like that but I will say, when you get off the plane in New Orleans… the best way to describe it is that the line between life and death is a little more blurred. It feels like it’s a little bit out of space and time. It feels like neither America nor Europe, but all of them.”
“And that’s one of the reasons we chose it,” says Moorhead. “It feels like this place that’s been painted over 25 times, with thick oil paints, and a different painting every time. It’s got Spanish and French and British colonialism and jazz and Hurricane Katrina and racial tensions and the 1930s… There’s just so much there. Every other city has this pretty linear path, from small homesteads to skyscrapers, whereas New Orleans feels like this complete and total revision, and for a movie about diving through the layers of time, that’s perfect.”
Synchronic is available on premium digital platforms from 29 January.