by Helen Barlow
After screening in 2019 at Slamdance where it won the Audience Award, The Vast of Night was shown in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto Film Festival and picked up for global distribution by Amazon Prime.
Set over the course of a night in 1950s New Mexico, The Vast of Night – written by James Montague and Craig Sanger and based on director Andrew Patterson’s idea – follows a young disc jockey Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick), who become determined to discover the origins of a strange audio frequency. Could it be aliens? Given that the film posits the story as an episode of Paradox Theatre – an obvious reference to the ‘50s series The Twilight Zone – clearly it is.
We spoke with Andrew Patterson to unravel the mystery.
You made a big splash at Slamdance.
We were welcomed by them and were completely surprised by the reception. It was a life-changing week and festival. They were the ones who saw the potential and started shouting from the tops of the mountains, like so many people who watched the movie. So, everything that’s happened since then, the distribution deal, the offers of other movies is due to that. It’s been a crazy year.
How did you devise the story?
It was always going to use the tropes, the known things about New Mexico in the 1950s. Anytime you put that time and location in the same sentence, people automatically think of aliens, of UFOs, of conspiracy cover-ups and of Roswell [a city in south-eastern New Mexico renowned as the site of an alleged 1947 UFO crash]. That is a given in American culture, so what we wanted to do was put our movie in that time and in that place and then develop a human drama inside of that setting and do something completely new. So that meant avoiding things that other movies did. We didn’t want to rely heavily on a romance that is maybe unrealistic. Other movies would rely on things that are going to jump out and scare you and we were not going to do that either.
So that meant we were left with fewer things to work with and had to find ways to keep it new and interesting and fresh. That’s where a lot of the visual style was born. We knew we had a movie where we didn’t have to rely a lot on editing or changing angles. The drama is naturally there in the activities on screen – at least for some. Some people watch the movie and are bored to tears and I encourage them to find a different movie. There are many where you don’t have to watch somebody for ten minutes plug into a switchboard. And that’s fine; we all have different attention spans. Our visual style was always to let the things play out in front of you. The movie only has around 700 shots whereas the average movie in 2020 has 1500 shots.
Where did the film’s title come from?
It’s actually a Shakespearean quote. One of the film’s writers Craig Sanger is obsessed with titles. Earlier on we called the movie Saucer like flying saucer, but he said how about The Vast of Night? It’s from The Tempest and I’ve loved that title ever since he said it.
You never know what’s going to happen in this movie. What were your influences?
Obviously, The Twilight Zone is an easy one to point to, but the visual influence on how the film was lit was from a 2014 film called ‘71 by Yann Demange. If you look at that movie, you can see how we borrowed and utilised how they lit their scenes. That movie is structurally similar to our movie too, in that it takes place in one evening in Northern Ireland. Another influence would be Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise or Before Sunset where there are two characters walking and talking.
I was on the set of Before Sunrise in Vienna.
Were you really? I was in Vienna at the same time. I lived in Vienna in the fall of ‘95 for three months when I was 13-year-old. I still remember the distinctiveness of the city. My dad was working there as a professor teaching for a semester. The last influence was All The President’s Men, which is about people on phones and putting a mystery together. That’s the film that taught me you could pretty much ask somebody on the other end of the phone when you don’t see with characters who are putting together clues leading to something big.
You’re working in a more naïve era.
You can find ways to write interesting drama from the limitations of an era and that always fascinates me, whether it be the limitations of communication or because cars weren’t as fast.
Can you talk about the casting?
We found our lead actor Jake at a New York casting call of men and boys aged between 18 and 30 and his was the first audition tape to come in. Sierra was one of the potential actresses out of Los Angeles and she was almost the last person we cast. She’d already been working in TV and films for 12 years and I got to work with someone who had a lot of experience and felt twice her age. She’s 16 in the film and was actually 18 when we shot it. We didn’t have to cheat a lot. She still looks 16 to this day.
Are you disappointed that the film will only go out on digital?
No. This was such a personal movie. I have my hand in all of it, from the conception of it, to its playing at a festival for the first time. I would have loved to have seen it play in 50 or 100 cities on the big screen and Amazon’s contention was to do that – at least to be in the 50 largest markets in America. Nobody wanted the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. But at the same time, I’m very realistic about what I’ve made. I’m very happy that it’s going to find an audience and am happy that Amazon, at least in the US, decided to put it in drive-ins.
How many?
Around 35, enough that people got to see it on the big screen if they really wanted to, if they were prepared to drive a little bit. That was a move that meant a lot, but I realise that people are watching things on streaming platforms right now, so if we get more of an audience because of that, I’m appreciative of that too. Though I’m hoping that what I’m working on next will fall in a window of time when we’re all back to theatres.
Do you have a new movie idea?
I’ve spent the last year on a screenplay and will finish it this summer. It’s a Resistance espionage thriller set in northern France and Belgium in the last year of the Second World War and takes place in a Nazi-occupied town.
I’m not bound to just one genre. But even this is not a typical war movie like The Vast of Night is not a typical sci-fi movie. We will use the genre of war to do some really creative things.
Like what?
Expand more on how we filmed The Vast of Night, using the camera to roam around more and connect up geography. That hasn’t been something cinema has typically been able to do until recently, but now that cameras are getting smaller and more advanced it’s possible. So, we’re building a script where we’re able to use technological advancements and hopefully in new exciting ways.
Is there any casting?
I wouldn’t even dream of casting until after the script is done. Otherwise your heart gets broken.
You seem to like to make movies set in the past.
I don’t foresee myself avoiding films set in the present. I’d actually really like to do one. You have to start including how much quicker information is available and how people can connect more easily. So that would be something else to factor into the story.
The Vast of Night streams on Prime Video from May 29, 2020
