ANOTHER EARTH director/co-writer/editor/cinematographer/producer Mike Cahill met his co-writer Brit Marling (who also stars in the film) at Georgetown University, and although the two didn't study film, their mutual interest in making short movies inspired them to never give up their love of film even when life took them into the corporate world when employment needed to happen. The two made the 2004 documentary BOXERS AND BALLERINAS, which I have not seen, but ANOTHER EARTH was their first feature.
But since the beginning of the year Cahill, Marling, and their creative partner Zal Batmanglij (who directed and co-wrote Marling's other recent film SOUND OF MY VOICE) have been the talk of the indie circuit, creating these two science-fiction films that emphasize character and using your brain. ANOTHER EARTH's backdrop of an identical earth suddenly appearing in the sky isn't nearly as important to the film as the small, two-person drama going on in the foreground.
The night before I interviewed both Cahill and Marling separately, we did what might be one of my favorite Q&As after a screening of ANOTHER EARTH. The crowd was primed and ready to actually think about the concepts set forth in this story, and Cahill and Marling were more than ready to talk about the creation of the film and the Big Ideas that went into it. With my talk with Marling coming soon, please enjoy Mike Cahill…
Capone: I don't want to call them ringers in the audience, but I gave away about a 100 seats to last night's screening. And in order to get win, I asked the readers, “If you did meet yourself from another earth, what would be the first thing you would say to or ask that person?” So they were already primed to think about such concepts going in.
Mike Cahill: And people came up with answers?
Capone: Some of them were trying to be funny, but some of them were like “Well I would ask them if they had any better luck dealing with my father than I did" or "Did you let that person get away when you know they wanted to stay?” Some pretty heavy-duty stuff.
MC: Wow. You struck a nerve.
Capone: Brit almost started crying when I told her that just now. So we had about 100 people who actually thought about it and came up with really good answers in that crowd last night.
MC: You're a genius. You set it up beautifully. So you primed them all. It was like opening that aspect of their minds, which is amazing.
Capone: Yeah, just letting them know…
MC: What they are about to get into, yeah. That’s all right, that’s totally cool.
Capone: Of course, I don’t know what my answer to that question would be, because any time I ever meet someone that reminds me of me in some way, I always hate them.
MC: “Only one of me,” right? Yeah.
Capone: So how did you decide to externalize that internal voice?
MC: It came from two angles, there was the emotional angle, which Brit and I felt was really tapping into something that in our subconscious was very much pulling at us and then it also came from a practical point of view completely, which was like--I could composite an earth up in the sky and do the visual effects. These sort of things, this ambitious sort of idea we can do practically without any money, and so from that angle we were like, “Okay, this is something we can do and this is something that we are emotionally connected to; let’s develop this.” We wanted to make a movie without any permission or we didn’t want to go around town begging people to give us $500,000 or whatever. We were just like, “We’ve got a camera that we can do all of these aspects, let’s just figure out how to make it.”
So there was that aspect, and then there was just this notion that I think deep down we have a yearning to not be alone, and the idea of another version of us satisfies this weird primal desire that we have, I think. You don’t have to have a relationship with the person necessarily, but I think if you have this fucked-up life and you have all of these secrets that you keep inside that you don’t tell your lover, you don’t tell your therapist, you don’t tell anyone, you just keep them inside. If you saw another version of yourself that also had those things and just nodded like, “It’s cool man, you’re alright.” That would feel freeing.
Capone: Like there’s at least one person out there that “gets you.”
MC: Yeah, that gets you. “You go do your thing. I’ll do my thing, but I remember that night, and it’s alright man, it’s cool.” That’s satisfying in some ways.
Capone: And yet the thing that seems to be driving Rhoda is this idea that her other person might have made better choices than she did and might not have been quite as destructive as she was. But of course she takes that feeling and transfers it over to John [played by William Mapother], hoping “Well maybe if my other self didn’t do these things, maybe your family will still be alive.”
MC: Right. Totally, totally.
Capone: You could drive yourself crazy thinking about all of the diversions in your life where “If I had just gone that way,” maybe somebody did. It’s not usually an option we have to really focus on.
MC: It’s not something we really have to consider yeah, because from our point of view we just live one life, and it’s hard to even see what would have happened if you had done this or done that.
Capone: I love that we don’t see Rhoda in prison, we just see her coming out of prison and certainly the guilt is there and the brokenness is there, but we don’t see that thing about her that we might be tempted to pity.
MC: That’s Brit. Brit is a genius, by the way. Brit is so talented as a writer and an actor. It was very important, because pity is one of the most distancing emotions we can have, especially for a protagonist that we are trying to like, or we are going on this way with her.
Capone: That’s true, there might be people who don’t like her in the beginning, yeah.
MC: Yeah, you don’t like her, and she’s already has an uphill battle, because she’s just done this horrible thing. So what’s interesting about Rhoda and the way Brit plays Rhoda is she has no self-pity. Some people would be like “Woe is me,” or “There are other people to blame for it,” but not Rhoda. She takes the entire burden on her shoulders almost heroically and with bravery and without pointing any fingers and without any self-pity. She owns it and then she tries to make life better after owning it, and I think that’s what makes her so likable in a way, even though she is in such a horrible situation.
Capone: I know it’s kind of funny that Brit has ended up in these two barely science fiction films. I was telling her there are a couple of great science-fiction films that have come out this year that have done a great job of incorporating a love story into it without it getting embarrassing, like ADJUSTMENT BUREAU or SOURCE CODE, but you kind of have to dig through the sci-fi to get to that. But your film is the exact opposite: you kind of have to dig through the romance to find the science fiction. Did you guys dig science fiction just as a rule?
MC: Yeah, I mean we are into it. I’m into it for sure, like I love science fiction and I love science fiction so much that if I had $3, I would still try to make a science-fiction epic movie, and that’s kind of what we were doing, like not a lot of indie, shoestring budget films approach science fiction. There was PRIMER, which was badass, and there was MOON, but MOON had a decent budget, but still a small budget, but it’s not often that the shoestring budgets try to approach sci-fi, because it’s hard. Nowadays, there’s so much of it that’s based in the spectacle, because part of sci-fi is fantasy and seeing things that you have never seen before, and that’s just one of the elements of sci-fi, but sci-fi is also about the literature of ideas and reality with a twist that is a science-fiction twist.
Capone: Social commentary…
MC: Social commentary, yes. DISTRICT 9 is fucking brilliant, by the way. It was done for $30 million, which for a movie that looks like it cost a $120 million and made like $250 million. But what I loved about that film is it had this verite aesthetic with the way the camera is kind of handheld and shaky, you’re like “Wait, is that spaceship really above Johannesburg?” It doesn’t feel like this sweeping crane shot; it’s more like the gritty new cameraman’s shot, and I wanted to do that with this, not with a spaceship, but with another earth. So, yeah, I’m a big fan.
Capone: It is kind of funny how quickly people get used to having this other planet there like all of the time.
MC: Yeah, you digest it just as like the people in the story, because you know the first year or two years that this happened that we don’t see on screen, because we just jumped through it to four years later, the military must be crazily engaged, people are like maxing out their credit cards. “Apocalypse, apocalypse.” And then after everyone is sort of broke, they are like “Wait a second, I’ve got to pay my rent and go to work.” It’s up there, but life moves on, and that’s where we catch up with her.
Capone:One of the interviews I saw with you guys from Sundance, you talked a lot about how you were big fans of Kieslowski and THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE, in particular, and you can see exactly how you’ve expanded that to the 6.5 billionth degree. It’s great that you even acknowledge that, but that’s a slightly different take on it, but what did you get from that?
MC: You know, he’s such a sensual filmmaker, like the THREE COLORS trilogy and DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE, they are films that exist in reality, yet there’s a magic to them or a metaphysical quality to them like the idea of a doppelganger, the idea of in the RED, WHITE, BLUE trilogy how all of these people come together in that one final moment. So many things about his work that really inspire me.
One thing in particular are his endings of films. In the endings of his films, there is a certain breathlessness like how RED we keep seeing this iconic image of the girl in the bubble gum ad and her hair is wet, and it’s red in the background, she’s looking off camera, and we see when they took the photograph and we keep seeing this image everywhere through the film. And in the end of RED when the judge is watching the television, the boat has sunk, and they’ve rescued six people and it’s all of the main characters in the films, and she gets off the boat and her hair is wet, and there’s a man with a life jacket on who happens to be walking behind her and the news frame pauses on that shot and it is the exact iconic shot from before, and there is no way to explain what that emotion is, but it is so fucking powerful. In DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE, she comes home and she puts her hand on a tree, and that’s the final frame of the movie, she puts her hand on a tree trunk and it cuts to black. I can’t explain this, but I feel something about the power of the universe and how we are all connected and how there is all meaning to this and its not just destiny. And in so many ways, I was influenced by him and in subtle ways, just in visually with mise en scene, we play with the reflections in the mirror and the glass, and she keeps not wanting to confront herself, she keeps turning away from it. I could talk for hours, I’m sorry. [Laughs]
Capone: I could too. The other thing I thought was funny is the way you compared the making of this film to Lars von Trier’s FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS, which is such a great movie.
MC: He is amazing.
Capone: You know he’s doing another one with Scorsese.
MC: I heard that. That’s incredible! What is that going to be like, man?
Capone: Did it really feel that way where you were having things thrown in front of you?
MC: It’s like “Okay, let’s make this work.” You know. I fucking love that movie. It’s so genius, because he gets the guy to make it for the first time in Havanna, every shot has to be only 12 frames long, you’ve got to do it in a minute. And he keeps doing this, like “Now do it anime.” “I hate anime.” And then he makes him do one in India, which is so powerful and messed up, and you can see him holding back the tears. Then he’s like “Alright Lars, I’ve been through four of these things, what’s the fifth one? It’s going to be brutal. How much torture can you inflict on me?” He’s like, “No obstruction, make whatever you want.” And it’s the hardest thing for him to do.
The movie is interesting, but it’s like sort of modern, but it’s the least interesting among the five, and you get the thesis which is the constraints are the greatest gift, and they force you to grow. It’s like a tree growing around a weird fence, and it figures its way to get to the sun anyways even with the fence in the way.
Capone: They always said in the '30s when the Hays Code kicked in that the writers had to get really creative to say things in subtext.
MC: I love that.
Capone: Looking back, did the things that were binding you budget-wise and logistically, do you think you got a better film out of it?
MC: Definitely, because it’s interesting for what it is for sure, rather than if someone had said, “Here’s a half-a-million dollars, go nuts.” There’s a certain exhilaration in being able to achieve certain things, like the car crash. The way that we figured out how to do that with going to a junkyard and getting cars that were already smashed and finding the cars that matched it, so that we spent in total like $20 on the cars, doing a rotoscoped shot like a composite shot that’s not too complicated to do using a cherry picker instead of a crane, because we couldn’t afford a crane. We got a window washing thing that wobbled as you were going up. [Laughs] I’m like “Stabilize it man!” with my best friend who’s like trying to work it. I just remember that feeling of being on the top of this cherry picker like a 100 feet up in the air, and we are such a small crew and we're hanging there and we have all of this stuff, and I was just like “This is exhilarating. How did I get here? I love this moment.” I think the film is interesting because of that, because of the constraints. I think it makes it different thank a sort of cookie-cutter film, in little ways, in ways that I didn’t use prime lenses for example, I used stock lens on the EX3, and I could have used prime lenses, but I was like “I don’t know, I want to do something a little bit different,” it has just a bit of a different aesthetic with a different vibe, and for some reason that makes it feel fresh.
Capone: Even though people might not necessarily think of this film as the kind that has social commentary, it’s there in small doses, including the fact that we call it the other planet “Earth 2.”
MC: Ego. Hubris, yeah.
Capone: “We are the center of the universe, so that’s a different Earth.” Meanwhile, everyone on that planet is calling us the same thing.
MC: Yeah and someone says, “You really think they call themselves Earth 2?”
Capone: It’s the same idea of like, “Do you think people in China call it 'Chinese Food?'"
MC: Yeah, they just call it “food.”
Capone: Exactly. With all of the different job titles that you had on this film, was there one in particular you think you really nailed. It seems like a lot of those job titles were out of necessity more than anything else. I assume directing is the primary one, but how was the writing experience for you?
MC: I loved the writing. It’s interesting, because directing for sure and I love writing.
Capone: On a film like this, they probably all feel like one job.
MC: They feel like one, especially one so small, because it is just more of a continuous stroke, but writing is cool, writing and directing, the combination is interesting, because when you write there’s so much embedded in subtext. You write this line, but really what they are really saying is “this,” and you don’t actually write what they are really saying, you write the text and to be a part of that process and then also directing the film, you can find those moments are guided into those places if it’s not so obvious. They always say the example--and it’s kind of obvious--but Bogart being like “Here’s looking at you kid,” where what he’s saying is, “I love you.” When Rhoda tells the Cosmonaut story, she’s really saying “I’m a passionate woman who…” What he is thinking is “Who is this passionate woman who is really thoughtful and intelligent, and why is she cleaning my house?” When he says to her, when she goes “You know I applied to this competition; I’m going to go” and he goes “You are really going to go?” He’s really saying, “Please stay, I’m falling in love with you.” It’s not on the page, but it’s underneath the words, and I love that process and I love going from writing to directing. I want to continue to do that in life.
Capone: The subtext absolutely came through, especially thanks to your actors.
MC: They pulled it off.
Capone: What do you have coming up? Do you have another thing you are working on now?
MC: Yeah, totally. It's science fictionish. It takes place in the future and it’s all about reincarnation and it’s a drama inside of a larger context.
Capone: Did you write that script by yourself this time?
MC: I wrote it by myself, but Zal and Brit are may major confidants, so they were the first people to read it, they give me all of their notes. We're kind of a brain trust, but this is one, it’s the story that I wrote individually. Brit's going to play a role in it; and the three of us will collaborate forever, we're just like that.
Capone: Are you finding that you are having a slightly easier time getting meetings with people to talk about getting it made than you might have on your first film?
MC: Yeah, definitely. It’s a lot easier, for sure. It’s funny, even before making this movie I wouldn’t even think to meet people. I had friends who were like trying to package scripts and stories and put all of the dominoes together and then make the film, and I’m so outside the system and didn’t go to film school and I don’t exactly know how it works, so I just approached it in the way that I thought would work for me. So, I didn’t know you go and sit down and have meetings and say, “Okay, this is what I want to make and this is who I want.” I was just like, “Alright Brit, let’s go. We got an EX3, let’s start.”
[Both Laugh]
Capone: Cool, Mike. Good luck with this and whatever you’ve got coming up.
