Interview: Mike Cahill, Director of Another Earth

Mike Cahill is having a pretty good year. Last January, his theatrical directorial debut Another Earth bowed at the 27^th Annual Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews, winning the Alfred P. Sloan Award for its focus on scientific pursuits. Picked up by Fox Searchlight and currently in limited release, Another Earth opened wide to the public on August 5^th, 2011.

A gripping science fiction / fantasy, the film tells a wide-sweeping story on an intimate scale, asking the viewer what would happen if you woke up to discover there was a mirror Earth — one that might be home to a better version of yourself. The picture was co-written by Cahill and his lead actress (and fellow Georgetown alum) Brit Marling. With their thoughtful approach to science fiction, the two are quickly proving themselves as talents to watch, making substantial impacts on the indie scene and filmmaking at large.

We recently had the opportunity to sit in on a roundtable and ask the up-and-coming 32-year-old director some questions. Cahill was extremely thoughtful, forthcoming and genuinely stoked to be talking about his new film. Never at a loss for words, here’s what we found out from this indie artist on the verge:

GUY: I felt like the film had this almost Outer Limits or Twilight Zone vibe to it. I’m wondering if that was intentional or kind of a happy accident?

Mike Cahill: I definitely dug the Twilight Zone. I watched a lot of Twilight Zone and I like the idea of minimalist sci-fi, or the sci-fi that’s about the ideas. With our sort of modest budget we couldn’t do crazy space ships exploding or nuclear weapons or anything like that. I wanted to modernize it and do a story that felt realistic to now; but even choices like the saw (referring to a scene in the film where William Mapother uses one as a musical instrument) was a hat tip to old school sci-fi like the theremin. And it had that sort of old school sci-fi vibe to it but again, modernizing it and making it fresh for now.

Q: So you kind of play the role of editor, writer, cinematographer, director, all that stuff. In future projects are you going to have a hard time letting go of some of those titles?

MC: You know I keep thinking about that, ’cause I’m working on a… I’ve written another project that I’m going to be making and it’s a bigger scale. I definitely want to be highly involved in all those things, and I think most directors are very involved in them; but they have amazing experts in each field doing it. For a project like this that was so small, it was almost out of necessity that I had to do those things and being in this day and age where cameras are ubiquitous and editing machines are really easy to get your hands on, you can learn all those different crafts in a way where in the past it required such specialization. Whereas now, because the barrier to entry is not too expensive, you can get your hands on all of it. So out of necessity I kind of had to do those things. And in the future I would definitely love to work with amazing collaborators. Instead l’m like fighting with myself about how to shoot it. [laughs] It’d be nice to fight with somebody else.

“I watched a lot of Twilight Zone and I like the idea of minimalist sci-fi, or the sci-fi that’s about the ideas.”

Q: So are you more excited to have somebody else come on board or hesitant?

MC: I don’t know… I think it’s going to be a balance. It’ll have to be the right chemistry and right sort of vibe. Also, I’m very hands on. In a movie like this there’s a lot of spontaneity where I was curious about capturing something that happens, sort of unfolds live. There’s just a freedom, and the elimination of articulating that to somebody else is nice. Like, I can just “Alight. Roll.” ‘Cause I come from a documentary background where you’re just capturing a lot of stuff on the fly. We could be driving… we were driving somewhere and we saw that pier from the street and I was like “Let’s shoot this,” and we hopped out of a car. It was literally Brit and myself and we shot that big, iconic shot where she goes down the pier in slow motion and the other Earth is [inaudible].

Q: That’s awesome. Can’t pull stuff like that off with union camera crews.

MC: Yeah, you know it would have taken so long to set up and we would have to hope the clouds look all nice and everything.

Q: You mentioned you’re working on another project. Beyond that do you have any aspirations of doing anything with a franchise or is there anything you’d really like to do? Like James Bond?

MC: In the short term, at least for right now I’m concentrating on my own stories. I’ve written a few scripts. What I really… I seem to… there are things I want to say I guess. And I gravitate towards these stories that are reality with a twist and that ends up being fantasy or science fiction it seems to me. Reality with something that’s off and then a human drama embedded in that. So, for example, the next project’s about reincarnation. Reincarnation proven true and the implications of that, and then a human drama embedded in that sort of twist.

“In a movie like this there’s a lot of spontaneity where I was curious about capturing something that happens, sort of unfolds live.”

I wrote another one that takes place at the bottom of the ocean. It’s about a fashion designer who lives in a city at the bottom of the sea. And everything about it is real-life, normal. Everything is very much reality but it’s underwater. The only difference is that the hair moves like this [motions wavily] and instead of birds there’s fish outside. And in some ways, if you see where they go… [pauses] I’m very interested in trying to get the big questions in life out in some ways.

GUY: I’d pay to see that movie.

MC: I’ve done all these tests, it’s wild! You can see Brit, I took it down now, but there are these tests where Brit is, she’s like chatting and smoking a cigarette. But she’s completely underwater and it’s all ADR (automated dialogue replacement, or dubbing) and she’s like “so, you know,” this and that. And it works so brilliantly!

Q: I want to know what you’d say to yourself…

MC: …If I met myself?

Q: Yeah.

MC: I don’t know. Probably… “Dude, you’re so annoying.” [laughs] No no no, I’d observe for awhile. I’d watch and start to form my opinion about that person.

Q: He’s probably doing the same thing about you.

MC: Yeah. And then I would ask him if he’s making anything.  If he’s an artist or musician, painter, architect. Hopefully he’s creating something and I’d want to see what it is. Like if he made movies, I’d want to see what kind of movies he makes.

Q: What do you think you would be if you weren’t a filmmaker?

MC: Probably an architect. I like architecture for some reason.

GUY: One of the things I was curious about was the creative process with Brit. What was it like being on set, directing your co-writer essentially?

MC: It was cool. We’re such close friends. We went to school at Georgetown together and we collaborated since we were doing… [pauses]

GUY: Short films?

MC: Short films and all that stuff. And it was cool, as we were writing we were both wearing the writers’ hats, so it was this very organic, creative vibe of telling each-other the story and trying to entertain one another and keep the other person on the edge of their seat. So we’d literally pitch the story and be like “What happens next?” After we finished the script we basically took off our writing hats and I put on the directing hat and she put on the acting hat. What was great was that she just spent six months working out with this character. Doing the homework on this character. So she was incredibly prepared. You could ask Brit what (her character) Rhoda did when she was six years old on her birthday and she could tell you. That’s how much homework she’s done.

“After we finished the script we basically took off our writing hats and I put on the directing hat and she put on the acting hat.”

So I guess when we’re on set there are different concerns. As a director you have to be very aware of the big picture and where we’re falling into it and how is something reading as authentic or not, and the choices to reflect the interior world and all these different things. And she has to deal with very singularly her character, and making her character not have self-pity and read as authentic and the vapor of performance. So it’s very much like you just take off the hat and put on the next hat. Because of our close friendship it’s very easy. Our communication is like a river flowing.

Q: This was a wonderfully metaphor-rich film. One of them that I really liked was the use of mirrors or seeing characters indirectly. Through a window or a dirty screen or something like that.

MC: Right.

Q: How’d you come up with that idea and integrate that in?

MC: Playing with reflections, there is a tradition in cinema to do playing with reflections. It’s dangerous because it can be too overdone. There’s this great movie, The Double Life of Veronique, by Krzystof Kieslowski. It’s genius, one of my hugest inspirations. It plays with reflections because the whole time we’re building up to the idea that there’s another Rhoda, that there’s another all of us.

So, for example, when she first goes into John’s (played by William Mapother) house under false pretenses, she’s in the kitchen, she’s like “Well maybe I should get out of here, it’s dangerous, it’s not right.” She surreptitiously tries to get over to the side door and catches a reflection of herself in the window. And the idea is that if she goes out the door she has to confront that person. If she turns around maybe she can just ignore that person and try and make this man’s life better. So in a way I wanted it to be there, but I didn’t want it to be too hardcore. But yeah, it meditates on the idea of the confrontation of the self.

Q: Great ending by the way.

MC: Thank you, appreciate it!

Q: There’s people talking about the science of it, and how the Earths would…

MC: Right, with the colliding…

Q: What would you like to say to those people that get hung up on that?

MC: Well you know, I can actually explain why they don’t collide. And I had that in the script. There are these duel ellipses, like our Earth is on an ellipse… elliptical orbit? And the other Earth was directly behind the sun, so that’s why we never saw each-other. Because the gravitational pole, their ellipse shifted so that their ellipse and our ellipse are crossed but they’re not going to collide. And I had this in the film! I’m kind of a science geek and math nerd and I’m into that.

“…it meditates on the idea of the confrontation of the self.”

Emotionality for me is more important than exposition. Ultimately, all that scientific explanation of how it’s working and whatnot, had no emotional heartbeat to it. It felt like science class a bit. It’ll be on the DVD extras. That’s what I’d say to them: “It’s on the DVD extras!” [everyone laughs] And then the gravitational pole thing, that was in the script and we [busts out laughing] just couldn’t afford to shoot the ocean getting sucked out. So it takes a bit of a leap of faith and hopefully we earn that in the movie and people will trust that as metaphor.

Interviewer: Do you think the planets will actually smash into each-other at one point?

MC: No it won’t actually! I can draw how it works…

At this point Mr. Cahill grabs my notebook and pencil and goes to work. Going into great detail explaining orbits, gravity, planetary alignment and the general science of his film. Like he states above, we really don’t get to see any of it explained in the film but it was at least refreshing to see how much thought was put into rationalizing such an out-there concept. Plus, he left me with this really cool souvenir:

Q: When did science become something you were interested in? And filmmaking?

MC: Since I was a kid. Yeah, since I was six. I got one of those Fisher Price… have you ever seen those Fisher Price Pixel Vision cameras? You record on cassette tape. I had one of those as a kid, which was so badass! So I was obsessed but it was always just my hobby. I didn’t think I could actually do it for a living but I was doing it all the time. When I was a little bit older I bought a Hi-8 camera for a hundred bucks at a pawn shop.

But I studied economics. I was planning to have a real job and, you know, make my short films. Then when I graduated I got lucky enough, I got an internship at National Geographic which then turned into a job pretty quickly, started making a lot of documentaries over the course of the last seven years or something like that. So it was great, I was working in the world of film.

Then after working for about seven or eight years in documentaries I was like “Whoa, maybe I can do a fiction film like old school short films that we were doing. Fictional stories that come from the heart. Things that you can… control the ideas. Brit and I talked about it and decided to do this project.

Q: What’s it like working with [Brit Marling]?

MC: It’s amazing. She works so hard. She’ll spend hours and hours just meditating and it’s genius. If she had to imagine that there was an orange in her hand, this is how good of an actress she is… without miming, she could believe that there’s an orange in her hand.

So much of the movie plays out just on her face, without any dialogue. I swear there are very few actors that could carry twenty minutes of a film without saying a word. And yet you’re so compelled and drawn into them and seeing the emotional beats unfold… she’s just wicked talented.

“I swear there are very few actors that could carry twenty minutes of a film without saying a word.”

I think she wanted to do acting because she studied economics and was killing it and got a huge job offer from Goldman Sachs for tons of money and the whole plan was that way. She did studio art, we directed things together. [pauses] She’s tried a bunch of different things and she was so good at each one of them. I think acting was probably the most challenging in her eyes. I think to act well is one of the greatest things in the world and one of the most difficult things. I think she was attracted to that challenge because all these other things were coming sort of… “Okay, I can do that. I can do that. Let me try something that sort of makes me a little bit scared.” And she’s great.

Q: You could really tell that she would do kind of anything just in this movie. I mean, there’s a scene where… I’m assuming that was actual winter when she stripped off all her clothes?

MC: It was! She’s hardcore. She’s down for anything, which is amazing.

Q: I like the scene too where she’s sitting on her mattress and you see the sun from the window just move across the room. How did you do that shot?

MC: She had to sit there for about an hour, yeah. An hour and a half or something like that. It was a time lapse. She was like “Yeah, I’ll do it.” I turned on the camera and went and [laughing] smoked a couple cigarettes and came back and she’s still sitting there!

GUY: You mentioned confrontation of self. I was hoping you could touch on the ending. I don’t want to spoil it obviously. It feels really ambiguous, but at the same time, thinking about the movie more and more, it feels like the only way…

MC: …That it could have ended? Yeah! What’s interesting about the ending is, we didn’t conceive of the ending from the beginning. It would seem like we had come up with the ending and then we’re like “Alright, let’s write a movie around that ending.” That’s not how it happened at all. We came up with the big concept of another earth. We came up with the characters, who they were, their story, how they came together. Then it was very much in sequence. We were like “What’s going to happen next?”

The ending actually, it could have gone a couple of different ways. Not to spoil it or give too much away… When we were trying to figure it out, we were wrestling with the idea of needs and wants. The characters want things, right? A protagonist wants something really badly. She wants to go [to Earth 2]. Sometimes there’s something, what you need is more important. Dispose of what you want. If you can give away what you want, you may get what you need. When we clicked in on that, her making that gesture to him, it felt obvious.  It felt like “Oh my gosh, this is it! This is what’s going to happen!”

“If you can give away what you want, you may get what you need.”

It was exhilarating. In the writing process that’s the moment when writers, they talk of the moment where they crack the story. That was the moment where we cracked the story. It feels like you’re taming this wild horse and then all the sudden it’s mine.