By Travis Johnson
In the sci-fi thriller OtherLife, the second feature from Wasted on the Young director Ben C. Lucas, Jessica de Gouw (Arrow, Underground) stars as Ren Amari, co-founder of a biotech start-up which is developing a form of biological virtual reality. While Ren sees the tech as potentially therapeutic, her partner (TJ Power) has more avaricious goals in mind, and Ren soon finds herself battling for control of her invention, which could save the life of her comatose brother.
It’s been about seven years since your first feature, Wasted on the Young. What’s been happening in the interim?
Put it this way, when you’re in movie making you learn to love development, especially as a director if you decide not to pursue a commercial career or if you only want to pursue long form drama, you’re definitely making it hard for yourself, because it is a long time between drinks. I’d say about 95 percent of what you do is not actually making films, it’s just developing them. So I probably had about 25 to 30 movies in the pipeline in that time where I’ve been working as a screenwriter or I have been attached as director and we were either casting, developing the script, working through options on properties – it is a very full time job developing projects to a point where they can be financed and where they can actually be made into movies. I’d say that half of them are still viable and the other half just dropped off by the wayside for various reasons.
What was it that made OtherLife catch?
This one actually started its life way back in the day in the States. It was a novel – still is a novel – called Solitaire written by Kelley Eskridge. It got optioned by Warner Brothers and it was going to be this massive action thriller with a very different sort of far future concept. I think it got torpedoed by a lot of other very competitive things that came out at the same time – one of them was Inception. So it went into turn around and a local producer, Jamie Hilton (Backtrack, Breath, 1%) picked it up and set it on his slate. We’d wanted to make something together and we’d struggled to find the right thing. He just said, “Ben, do you honestly think this could be done as a low budget Australian film?” It took me a while to think about it. There was quite a bit of adaptation to be done to make that work authentically and not just feel like we’re imitating an American film, to make it Australian and have a good reason for that.
The reason it really stuck with me was this concept of an optimistic view of Perth. The broader picture is the mining boom: where did all that money go? People talk about innovation as being the next way to invest, so imagine if Perth became the next Silicon Valley and this hub of start-ups and new technology. That was the contemporary science fiction premise that made me think we could actually do this, we could set this film in Perth and then instead of it being this mega company of OtherLife – which is what was in the original script – what if it was a start-up and they’re just struggling to get this thing made?
The film’s had a very long development process and there are five credited writers – what kind of shape was it in when you came on board?
It was one draft away from where it is now and that was the draft that I did. Kelley adapted her own novel, and then it got handed to Gregory Widen (Highlander) and then back to her again. And that was a long development history – if you cut back through the rings of the tree that predates me by a long way. I’ve only been involved with it for three and a half years, I’d say.
What I saw on the page was basically your classic three act genre action film. And interestingly enough, when I formed a relationship with the novelist – and we’re still really good friends now – I learnt very quickly that it was not what she wanted. It wasn’t the adaptation of her novel that she had in mind – it sort of got up and it ran away from her. Let’s be clear that one of the big privileges of low budget filmmaking is you get to do your own thing. You have less people looking over your shoulder and you have less pressure to deliver to a certain formula; you get to be an artist a little bit more freely. So she and I had a very easy conversation about what she wanted it to be and what she was trying to say and what the spirit of her novel was meant to be.
Tell us about your casting process.
Well it’s all about Jess de Gouw. She was one of the first choices before I knew anything about her. I did a little bit of homework on the character and looking for people who I thought sort of embodied what I had in mind. Casting is a bit like being a detective – you have this sort of suspect sketch which is the mental image of what you’re after both physically and emotively and then you’re kind of flicking through suspects and so you find someone who matches what you’re looking for. She was easily on the leaderboard right from the start. I was really happy to get her.
Everyone else, it was that low budget thing I mentioned before. You get to make your own choices you don’t have a studio breathing down your neck going, “We have to have this person otherwise we don’t get funding.”
How did you go shooting in Perth? It’s not the first city that comes to mind for a sci-fi location.
We were very specific about wanting to make Perth look good, to show a different side of Perth. I think quite often WA gets picked for its natural beauty, and rightly so, but the city itself often gets kind of overlooked or if we do shoot there we stick to the suburbs and that’s really generic – they could be from any part of the world. But the city has a character – it certainly does now – and we just wanted to try and capture what that was a little bit. First of all, the street art scene is incredible. There’s a lot of really interesting buildings and there’s a lot of public facing artwork that we thought it would be good to put on camera. It was actually fun. I don’t think we spent more time on anything than we did on scouting. I went there four weeks ahead of pre-production just by myself to travel, and I just drove all day taking photos of places that we could shoot. That was just a way to get money on screen, basically.
This is a science fiction film, obviously, but its main concern is dealing with themes of loss and grief, which is unusual for, at least, the more mainstream examples of the genre.
The original novel was – I’m trying to articulate this in a way that doesn’t give away the plot – the internal journey of the novel is much more metaphorical – she meets spirits and creatures that represent different aspects of her path. It’s a much more far-fetched idea and much more in the sort of Neuromancer vibe where reality and virtual reality clash quite a bit. That wasn’t for our film for a variety of reasons. We needed a single emotional thread that tied it together and that was a family and the thematic concept of, if the technology existed that enabled you to edit parts of yourself, could you be happy if you can take all the pain away? And I would argue that you should not – facing your pain is a much more healthy approach than trying to overlook or delete it. I do think that we have a lot of things in place already that aneasthetise us slightly to pain and reality, not to get too heavy handed about it, and I think if nothing else it’s a nice little reminder to sometimes face your past.
OtherLife is streaming on Netflix now.
