Writer/Director Michael Felker talks THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT

Introduction

Michael Felker’s Things Will Be Different was a standout selection at this year’s Overlook Film Festival. The film secured distribution from Magnet Releasing and will hit theaters and digital formats on Friday, October 4th. 

Screening alongside such heavy hitters as In a Violent Nature and the Nicolas Cage-led Arcadian, Things Will Be Different stood apart at the festival with a startlingly original premise. A microcosmic setting with world-shattering implications, and two dynamite performances from its leads, Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy.

Premise

The synopsis for this mind-bender begins simply enough: Fleeing the police after a close-call robbery, two estranged siblings escape to a mysterious farmhouse that transports them to a different time. Wait, what?

Joe (Adam David Thompson) and Sid (Riley Dandy) think the farmhouse is the perfect place to hide. And for a good while, it is. Just when they think they can return to their lives, however, the architects of the portal reach out to them with a mission that will find their lives irrevocably altered.

Featuring music by Jimmy LaValle of the band ‘The Album Leaf,’ Things Will Be Different scratches every itch of the sci-fi/thriller genre. Of course, when the opportunity arose to chat with writer/director Michael Felker, I had to jump on it. 

Interview:

Eric McClanahan:

Hi, Michael! How are you?

Michael Felker:

Good to see you, Eric. How are you doing?

Eric McClanahan:

I’m great. Very excited to talk to you. I saw the film back when it was at the Overlook Film Festival, months ago. Maybe a year ago? It’s been a while, but I loved your film. 

Michael Felker:

Oh, thank you so much. 

Eric McClanahan:

Thank you! So, let’s get right into it. What I like about the film, immediately, is that the characters in the film accept the reality that they’re shown, right away. So it allows us as the audience to accept it right away. And that reality is this space outside of time where they can lay low. Did you have a space like that when you were writing this? How did that idea come to you?

Michael Felker:

Well, I’ve had this world for a while. Stories that have either been thrown away in a garbage can or put in a drawer, but I had this world of just like interdimensional interstates of just being to hide out. It’s been under the secret of American mid-century folklore for a long time, but then I cracked it by basing it off my relationship with my sister – we just don’t see each other enough – and it kind of spawned some ideas between that, and my dad, who is a big science fiction lover, who was helping me crack some of this story stuff.

I think you nailed it on the head in that they not only accept it but they have no choice but to accept it because of the corner that they’ve painted themselves in. Because of the hurried, rushed nature of getting away as fast as they can, we have to go along with them for the ride. It helped crack a lot of the hard choices you have to make as someone who’s saying “Hey, you have to buy that there’s time-traveling safehouses that are hidden across America. And here’s two people rushing right into it and using it right away.” So, yeah, that’s a really good observation, Eric.

Eric McClanahan:

Thank you. Speaking of the two of them, the film is carried by two amazing thespians. How did you find these two (Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy)? Tell me about the casting process. 

Michael Felker:

Absolutely. As soon as Rustic Films with Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, and David Lawson, Jr signed on after they’d read the script, they set me up with a wonderful casting director, Chrissy Ellington. She found Adam and Riley right away and put them on top of both piles of “Here’s the Joe pile, here’s the Sid pile.” Not only are they the best two individual actors, but they’re also the best pair. They just felt like brother and sister. Even when they read separately for the audition.

The audition was reading the two hardest scenes of the movie. They talk over drinks while they’re waiting to go back the next day and then the fight they have in the middle of the movie when they’re talking about who to trust and whatnot and what’s going on with the house. They had to read those two scenes and I knew if they could do those scenes, they could carry the movie. I know there’s a lot of action and blocking elements and whatnot. But those are the two scenes that have to work for you to buy them as characters. To buy them as siblings.

Michael Felker:

That process was really easy to go through once we cast them because then we just got on Zoom calls and talked for like ninety minutes at a time. Not talking about the script, either, because I wanted the brother and sister to feel alive to the point where they literally could just look at each other and know what’s going on. They could just have this secret language between them that even I don’t know – I just wanted them to feel comfortable with each other when lights are being moved or the camera has to shift quickly, they could look across the room at each other and see “I got your back and you’ve got mine.” Which is a very brother and sister thing to have.

So, yeah, we would all just talk for ninety minutes over Zoom and I would hop off and they would just keep talking on their own and develop their language, and from there when we got to set it just felt like a breeze. I would only shape takes here and there, but the nature of indie film is that you don’t have much time or money and we need to move quickly, and they were just nailing it. They bought into the characters, bought into the world, and made my life much, much easier that they were just great to work with and great, great actors.

Eric McClanahan:

In developing the script, there’s a moment when they first reach the farmhouse where there are people outside, which adds a bit of authenticity and urgency to what is happening onscreen. Was that in the original script or did that happen organically when you were filming that you had a eureka moment and said “I have to add this!”?

Michael Felker:

That scene was in the script from the get-go and the reason I wanted that scene – you know, we don’t have deleted scenes in this movie, strangely, everything that was written with occasional tweaks on scenes, themselves, is in the movie. That scene was there because we needed to buy that element, which we talked about before so that they could look at each other and know a plan.

They’ve done this before. Flanked some idiots, drunk, and got the jump on them. They’re executing a plan and I don’t want to have to explain the whole thing – the actors can just look at each other and we see the thing play out. I think that was important to know that “Oh, not only do I understand that they’re brother and sister on another level but I respect them because they have a history of being robbers and doing this thing and I’m excited to see them challenge the unknown from there.” I think that was a very important scene for us, for sure.

Eric McClanahan:

The house, I think, is going to be an icon, with everything going on in there, but then we get to the mill, then we step into the supernatural, almost a horror element. What was that inspired by?

Michael Felker:

That was inspired by a couple of things. We originally had a location we were going to shoot in and that was just a barn, so it was going to have horror elements, but it was just going to be this strange thing where we don’t know – I think great horror, and great cosmic horror specifically, is being afraid of something I see and just don’t understand how it works. It’s so weird that every turn of the dial on the safe is filled with anticipation, like “Is this not going to blow up? Is this going to link to a wormhole?” or whatever.

Then when we got to this new location, where we shot the whole film on, it was a rustic wedding venue, where they had a basement chapel as a backup in case it rains outside and they need to keep the wedding going. When you go down there and turn off all the lights, it’s creepy as hell.

There are weird stained glass windows that are in the ceiling, and just shine down, and you wonder “How does this place function?” Then we just rolled with it. We were just like “Go all the way. We can put the safe over here and we can put the body over here.” Just give this weird paradox of a Christian chapel that is buried closer to Hell. It was a weird dynamic that we just rolled with it, and it allowed the horror elements to go up times ten.

Eric McClanahan:

Tell me about the Engineers of the Other World. I guess, I’m using that word to define them, but that final scene where he’s talking to them and they’re so disinterested, so methodical. Where does that level of bureaucracy come from?

Michael Felker:

It came from a lot of the world-building in which, if you want to put it in the context of the film, the function of the vise grip, so to speak, they’re just so far removed from humanity at this point and they’re just serving things that have no face, they have no emotion, they are cogs in a machine. They have bosses on bosses on bosses and they are just trying to figure out what to do with this ant that’s flipping around.

They tried to take one little leap by saying “Hey we have this thing that’s happening with one of our houses, can you stop it? We can’t get close. We are functioning non-entities and literally, our main flaw is we can’t interact with time and people and humans.” And when that goes to shit, they just have to figure it out. They’re so disinterested, so distant, that the only way we get close to them is when they show flashes of humanity, or flashes of the curvatures of faces or their eyes, that allows the camera to get closer.

There’s a fascinating way to paint these characters and I have so many world and lore and rules-type things that I’ll probably explore in future installments but for now, they are just a peek into a dark thing that we’ll never know. The coolest thing that I wanted to show them is that Joe and Sid, Adam and Riley’s characters, are secretly not the protagonists in this universe. They’re protagonists in this story but in this one moment, they are squashed. They are nothing right now, and I wanted that feeling to happen like a hammer in the dark.

I hope it works. 

Eric McClanahan:

It certainly does. What I love about the film is that the title doesn’t make sense until the end. So when you get to the end and realize what’s happening to Joe and what’s unfolding, you understand the title. And I think it’s a commentary on the way we try to control our lives to the point that we become something unrecognizable to ourselves and our loved ones when we keep trying to squeeze everything into the pattern that we want it to be. Does that sound right?

Michael Felker:

Absolutely. That’s really on point. I think it’s funny because if you just search on any message forum or Twitter or anything, just type in “Things Will Be Different,” and see what happens. You’ll see people just clinging to hope, for any of their situations. And that’s the crux of it. Specifically for Joe’s character, he just hopes things will be different for the better. Like we all hope we can back to our families. That this money will change our lives. We hope this safehouse will work as I was told when I got the book, and the really sad thing is that hope is only powerful if you have the capacity for change.

Otherwise, it’s just false promises you’re making to yourself. Old habits die hard. So when the ending does hit, he just said “Things will be different” to himself like forty times until he died and nothing changed. No matter what he did, Time was a cynical foot just stomping him like an ant. It’s horrible. So that’s why, not only do I love that the title comes at the ending but also changes shape right before your very eyes in the last scene. You say “Oh, it’s the same” and that sucks because you always want things to be different. 

Eric McClanahan:

Now, you mentioned that now that these Engineers have been introduced you may visit them again. Tell me a bit about what you have planned. 

Michael Felker:

Yeah, well, we want to see if Things Will Be Different can live on its own for a bit. A lot of the fun and a lot of why the movie is made the way that it is is because I want people to either be like Sidney, diving deep into lore, the bottomless well of answers or questions. Or they can be like Joe and just swing their fists at the sky like “Why did you do this to us?” I wanted the audience to engage with their theories and whatnot. But a lot of the people who love the movie are saying “I want to know more. I want to know what happens and what’s going on.”

I feel like the best sci-fi does this. The best sci-fi is the reach for answers, not necessarily getting the answers, but I want to keep going. I’ve already spoken with the actors and talked with other people about what an eventual Things Will Be the Same could look like. Or whatever the next installments are. We have treatments at least going right now that keep going with the same types of themes. The ultimate fight against Time. The ultimate parasite against human beings, sucking us dry. There’s lots of lore to be explored so we’ll see how this movie goes and maybe it’ll come sooner than we think.

Eric McClanahan:

If I could get personal, has your sister seen the film, and have you guys had a discussion?

Michael Felker:

Yeah, she watched the last cut before we edit-locked the movie a year ago. And then she watched it when it played at the Chattanooga Film Festival because most of my family is from Alabama. So they were able to drive up to Chattanooga, Tennessee, and she dug it. We now talk more, which is great. I mean, we always talked enough but the problem was we fell into that trap of “Things Will Be Different” where we’d set a Zoom call. Then six months or a year would go by and we’d say “Did we do that Zoom call or did it slip by us?” So luckily this has spurned more calls, more meetups, and more visiting each other. Yeah, it’s been nice.

Eric McClanahan:

Good, honestly, I think that’s the best outcome for the film. Well, I think we’re out of time but I really enjoyed talking to you. And again, I love the film and wish you all the best.

Michael Felker:

Thank you for the really good questions, Eric, I appreciate it. It means a lot. I’m glad that you watched the movie and engaged with it.

Magnet Releasing is bringing THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT to theaters and digital on Friday, October 4th.

Read more Cinema Scholars interviews!

THE MIRACLE CLUB: An Interview With Director Thaddeus O’Sullivan

THE WRATH OF BECKY: An Interview With The Directors And Star Lulu Wilson

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