Mike Cahill Tells Me About Another Earth, Bringing Documentary Skills To Sci-Fi And His Upcoming Projects

[Brendon Connelly]

Mike Cahill's debut feature, Another Earth is science fiction. Maybe it's not what your parents would have called science fiction, but the label sticks.

The story is about a young woman, wracked with guilt after she plays a major part in a terrible accident. At the same time, a strange planet, a second Earth has appeared in the sky.

Soon, we learn, it's an exact duplicate of this one. And it appears to be populated with people.

Very familiar people.

The film stars Brit Marling, and was co-written by Marling and the director, Mike Cahill. Both are very much in the ascendancy right now.

I talked to Cahill about the film, moving from video art and documentary to fiction, about creating sci-fi for an intelligent audience, and a little bit about his upcoming projects.

Here is some of what he told me:

I did many years in documentary and video art but the thing that?s attractive about fiction is being able to control where the story goes. Being able to use fantasy, science fiction or an element that is not ?real? but allows us to get closer to what it means to be human.

Brit and I made several documentaries together. The thing about documentaries which is awesome is that you get a sense of the authentic, real human living their life. And humans are weird. The choices we make are not clich?s, real emotion unfolds in sometimes bizarre ways which is fascinating and beautiful.

I was interested in taking that element, and the element of being able to capture a scene on the fly without storyboarding it and finding the beauty in the moment; in taking the freedom of that and applying it to a story we write with a final emotion that we?re going to build to in the final scene. That seemed really compelling.

The transition to fiction felt smooth as I was able to use everything I learned in those years of doing documentaries.

We did some blocking and for certain scenes that were technically challenging we had to block carefully, like the accident, for example. But there was a certain amount of freedom. We weren?t lighting for four hours. There?s some lighting but it?s very minimal. There?s only two types of lighting work ? the super professional and the most minimal. And we couldn?t have the best, so we went for the most minimal.

What came first was the question of ?What would it be like to meet yourself?? and ?If you sat across from another version of you, would you like that person, or despise that person, or envy that person?? and ?If that person did something terrible, would you be able to empathise with that person??

Connection is only forged through empathy. Another version of yourself may have the highest possibility of empathy, with their shared history and understanding, no matter how fucked up and twisted it is.

We came up with the premise ?Let?s have all 6.3 billion of us, a duplicate Earth and we?re all up there? but which story should we tell? We could tell 6.3 billion stories. So we should tell a story of somebody who really needs to meet themselves. Somebody who really needs to, in a way, let themselves off the hook or forgive themselves. Not that we necessarily get all the way there, but we offer the possibility of that.

So, that person is our protagonist and the antagonist is her guilt. She makes a mistake and creates this guilt. Society punishes her, but it doesn?t eradicate that guilt. She doesn?t hold this guilt with any self pity. She has this warrior approach to her guilt.

The questions that, for me, are the most interesting are not about ?good? and ?bad? but when it becomes like a Sophie?s Choice question, the choices we don?t want to make. And it?s a good thing for the audience to be questioning whether her choices are right or wrong. But if she were confronted with herself, how would she judge?

Brit is playing a character who walks along the line of being sympathetic and falling into having no sympathy. We see that her intentions are pure. She fucked up and she admits it to herself ? she could blame it on the other Earth, but she doesn?t. She doesn?t say ?I was distracted, or it was chance or it could have happened to anybody else.?

There?s a certain thing that some Hollywood movies do, which is spoon feeding, not taking the intelligence of the audience seriously. The filmmaker is building a bridge, and if you only build it 90% of the way, the audience have to be part of the process.

I think the bridge in this film goes far enough. I think a lot of the answers are there. In that final moment, if you pause the film and read through the outfits and so on, the answers can be found.

At this point, Mike discussed the very last scene of the film. Please skip this next paragraph if you wish to avoid spoilers. And for those of you who read it but haven't seen the film yet, rest assured that it will make sense when you do.

The idea is that the other ?she?, by some other means, gets onto that flight. That?s the logic. She went to MIT, she?s a space junkie, she had some other way. I don?t usually tell people that.

Spoilers over.

There used to be a lot of explanation and exposition in the film but I cut it out. I?m not trying to create a logical situation which is foolproof. You could poke a million fucking holes in this thing, but it?s a metaphor for illusion. If you couldn?t poke any holes on it you?d have lost all of this emotion.

I was excited when I heard about Melancholia, because Lars von Trier is one of my favourite directors. Dogville is one of my favourite films of all time. We?d finished making our movie when I heard about it and I thought that there must be something weird in the ether.

There?s also The Tree of Life which is looking at the cosmos. It made me feel there?s some kind of collective conscience and that we?re looking up for answers. With this timing, 2012 and what not, there are just ideas floating around and different artists have their responses to this.

I?m making a movie about reincarnation. That?s a new script that I?ve written by myself ? which is exciting and fun, though I do show it to my best friends and collaborators. It?s a story that?s been in my head for a very long time. It?s set in two time periods, split together and Brit is going to play a part. I?m working with Fox Searchlight on that, which is amazing.

And I have another one, set underwater which is technically more challenging. It will need a bigger budget but, one day, I hope.

Another Earth is released in UK cinemas this Friday. Brit Marling is going to be a star.

[CKdoubleU]

This movie blew me away. Brit was phenomenal, as was William Mapother (probably best known as Ethan from "Lost"). Without giving too much away, the thought of meeting yourself - but a slightly altered version of yourself - is fascinating. What I liked most was the verisimilitude; you actually felt this could happen.

Great, great flick.

[GraemeB]

The thing is-- there's a part of me that disagrees with it being considered a science fiction film, simply because the science fiction element is used almost as a backdrop for a very beautiful drama. What the other Earth adds to the story is a thematic component-- a philosophical question of what our lives could be like if things were different-- and its impact on the plot is only in terms of the impact of the other earth's sudden appearance for Rhoda and what she does in the wake of that.

It doesn't directly grapple with the science fiction aspects at all. Which may be why I loved the movie so much. And I agree entirely about Brit Marling, who is sensational, as is William Mapother. And the music by Fall On Your Sword is superb.