by Dov Kornits
“I was writing all the time, working 10 jobs…” says Brian Duffield when we speak over Zoom. “I was working at a warehouse for jeans at the time when I sold my first thing when I was 24. And then I really struggled with the whiplash of being a 10-job person to a professional screenwriter. It took me a good four or five years to settle into adulthood. Through that time, I was having film experiences, getting to know my way around. It was like a bizarro film school, all leading up to directing.”
Brian Duffield has impressive writing credentials: Insurgent, Jane Got a Gun, The Babysitter, Underwater, the upcoming Love and Monsters. And now he makes his directing debut with Spontaneous, which he also wrote, adapting Aaron Starmer’s novel.
“I got sent the book before it was published. You hear what it’s about and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s wild’,” he says about Spontaneous, a heightened, angtsy high school drama in which teens spontaneously combust, blood and guts splattered on walls. “I had 24 hours to read it and pitch on it if I wanted to get the rights for it. I’ve never done that before; I need time to know if I want to spend years of my life on something. I finished it and was just like, ‘Of course I want to spend years of my life on this, it feels like I wrote it’.”
Spontaneous stars Australian actor Katherine Langford (13 Reasons Why, Love, Simon, Knives Out) as a senior whose classmates are exploding one by one, right at the time that she meets the potential love of her life, Dylan (Charlie Plummer).
“I got lucky with Katherine,” admits Brian. “I had cast her in a movie that never got made, so I knew her a little bit. And then this movie came along. She didn’t audition, but the movie lives and dies with that performance. And it was so great having her as a creative partner, where I could trust her with more than 50% of the movie. Her and my casting director were both like ‘Charlie Plummer is the guy’. I never met Charlie until he was on set. Katherine took the meeting because I was prepping the movie and Katherine was in Los Angeles. So she met with Charlie and was like, ‘I really think he’s the guy’. And I was like, ‘You’re my partner in this, I trust you’. She should have been a producer on the movie because she essentially was in it with me every step of the way.
“I talked to her a couple of days ago and was like ‘oh, you are completely different from this girl’,” he says about the difference between the character Mara and the real Katherine Langford. “It’s a testament to how strong an actress she is. Charlie is probably the most like he is in real life, I feel like I’m talking to Dylan all the time when I’m talking to Charlie. And then Katherine is so different from Mara. I love them both equally, but there’s a part of me that always thinks, ‘Oh yeah, you’re not blonde and you speak in a different accent. Everything about you is different’. She’s very quiet and thoughtful. And Mara is very loud. She’s just the best actress, I just adore her to bits.”
When we ask Brian about the explosions and what they actually mean, he pauses before explaining that it’s a MacGuffin. “What they call that doohickey that Tom Cruise is always trying to chase down in the Mission: Impossible movies. For us, audiences can just project whatever they need it to be. Whether it’s a loss in their life, or grief they’re going through, they can get something out of it. If you’re going through something hard, the combustions are like a big catch-all for what that thing you’re going through is.”
Not surprisingly, audiences have noticed the parallels with COVID. “I’ve been getting a bunch of messages from people… A character in the movie has a line when she’s breaking down and says, ‘people have been dying for seven months’. And we’ve been in COVID for seven months. Everyone is going through the exact same insane experience right now. The combustions encapsulate COVID and the grief process.”
Brian Duffield says that Jurassic Park was the movie that inspired him to pursue filmmaking. “I grew up very conservative and when The Lost World came out, my parents didn’t want to go. My dad sent me in to see Jurassic Park but didn’t think Lost World would be appropriate. I became like, ‘how can I not see this movie?’ I’m getting glimpses of TV spots and I literally started writing fan fiction for The Lost World. I think that’s essentially what screenwriting is – you see glimpses of a movie in your head and you’re like, ‘I’ve got to see this movie’. And you eventually put it down on the page and then you make it.
“It was this bizarre path. I bet now, my parents wished they had just let me see the stupid movie, and then I probably would be a doctor or something.”
Instead, Brian Duffield is a fully fledged writer/director; what sort of films does he see himself making in the future? “I feel like your voice changes all the time,” he ponders. “Even with Spontaneous, we made it at the start of 2018 and then it got delayed because of studio mergers. There’s pride in the movie, but it’s pride in a younger self. Where I’m like, ‘Oh, good job, little Brian’. My life has changed so much in the last three years, now I’m a dad… When I watched the movie again, I’m like, ‘how did I give Rob [Huebel] and Piper [Perabo] so few scenes [they play Mara’s parents, see below]?’ I’m so much more Rob now than I was then.
“I don’t know if I read the book now if I would still think, ‘this is entirely my voice’. I’d be surprised if the next thing I did was a high school thing. My hunch is that I’m going to be progressing into more adult territory and darker. I feel like I’ve done my teen comedy, and I say that knowing full well that I’m probably going to get the best script I’ve ever read set in high school as soon as I hang up.
“One of the things I’ve been working on a lot is a dialogue free movie; that’s been the thing, ‘how do I keep pushing myself as a filmmaker?’ Ambitious stuff excites me the most as a viewer. I remember when Quentin Tarantino went off to make Kill Bill, he was really open about it being a potential disaster. Before that he hadn’t directed any action. That’s always stuck with me, where Quentin was the king, coming off Pulp Fiction, and he just couldn’t keep doing this one thing. I really want to challenge myself.”
Spontaneous is available to buy Oct 28 and rent Nov 11 on Digital.
