This week, I got a chance to sit down for a round table interview with Mike Cahill and Michael Pitt, director-writer and lead actor of I Origins. We talked about the inspiration for the film, some of the technical aspects of making it, and why small sci-fi films can talk about love and other universal concepts.
Question: What was the inspiration for the movie? Where did you come up with the ideas?
Mike Cahill: It came from a June 1987 cover of National Geographic magazine, "Afghan Girl" photograph taken by Steve McCurry. It’s a really iconic photograph and she has these stunning green eyes, it’s the feature that’s most prominent about the picture. And what was interesting is Steve, the photographer, didn’t know her name or anything. She came in, it was in a refugee camp in Pakistan, took the picture, and off she went, to play with her friends or whatever. And that photo turned out to be super famous, and for years and years and years he would get letters saying: “Who is this person? Who is this person?”, and he didn’t know. He didn’t know her name, she didn’t sign a release form. So 17 years later they went to go and track her down but they didn’t know what she looked like. The one thing that they did know is what her eyes were like, because of those piercing green eyes. And that’s when I started to learn about iris biometrics, that this a real thing that everybody’s eyes are unique, that from a photograph you can get an iris scan, which is basically the cracks and crevices in the eyes, you can extract those from a photograph and get a unique, it looks like a social security number code, 12 digits. And your eyes stay the same your whole entire life. And they went and they mounted this expedition to try and find her and a bunch of different women were potential candidates, they had these piercing green eyes and they say “I think that might have been me”, and they had a biometrics company scan the eyes and it wasn’t her, it wasn’t the next one, it wasn’t the next one, until eventually they found her, Sharbat Gula. And I started thinking that it was so interesting looking for someone based on their eyes, and then what if, after we die, our eyes come back, in newborns. And if you present that sort of very simple data to a scientist, who has more atheistic tendencies, how would they grapple with that, especially if that person was someone they loved.
Question: [to Michael Pitt] So how does something like that get pitched to you? What drew you to this film?
Question: [to Michael Pitt] So how does something like that get pitched to you? What drew you to this film?
Michael Pitt: Money... [laughs]. I met Mike in Brooklyn, we both live in Brooklyn, and I kinda met him in a general meeting, and I was really taken by him. He had about 5 or 6 projects in his head. And he talked to me about I Origins, the idea of I Origins, and I could see that he had the whole movie in his head. At that point there wasn’t a script but everything was there, it was just a matter of him putting it down on paper. And I just kind of casually said: “That project, that particular project we were talking about was really interesting to me, you should try to put some time into it when you get the chance.” And like two, two and a half, three weeks later the first draft was on paper. And that script… was pretty much the script. Yeah, we changed things, like nuances, dialogue, we certainly worked with the actors. And he was really gracious about letting me develop my character. Filmmaking, at its core, I think is a collaborative art form. Some people get that and some people don’t and Mike is able to really grab gems from everyone, he’s super talented, but he’s also able to really keep a focus on what his mission is, and that’s a hard thing, not everyone has that.
Question: I wanted to talk about the way you shot the film. With Another Earth you had a lot of handheld shots, and in this it seems like you didn’t have as many, you wanted to go with something different.
Mike Cahill: We still have a lot of handheld shots, they’re a little bit more stabilized. And I wanted to try, I mean, I was going for a sort of poetic realism. Handheld has a sort of an alive feeling to it. But I worked with this great cinematographer Markus Forderer. I saw a film that he shot in Switzerland, well he didn’t shoot it in Switzerland, I saw it there, and I sort of tracked him down and I’m like “I need to work with this guy”, like I could feel that we were in sync. And we were lucky to be able to shoot this film with two cameras simultaneously for most of it, two Reds, an Epic and a Scarlet, and I would operate one and he would operate the other. And it was amazing, it allowed us the ability to capture really wonderful gems. But also I wanted to experiment, to push and find some new boundaries, new land in terms of techniques and aesthesis. The film for example, for example, has a double vertigo shot, the first time ever in movie where we harnessed this tool, this robotic techo-crane that you can program all the positions of the camera into. So it allowed us to do a vertigo shot in, 180, and do a vertigo shot out, in one continuous move.
Question: Did you have more toys to play with then on Another Earth?
Mike Cahill: Yeah, a little bit more…
Question: Another Earth wasn’t on Red, was it?
Mike Cahill: Another Earth was on the Sony EX-3. And it shot 1080p, actually we shot 720p. And it was like, I remember when we sold it to Fox they were like: “Is there any way we can make the picture, like… better?” And I’m like: “…Um, what do you mean?’ And they’re like: “I don’t know, just better.” But this we shot in 4K so it’s like “boom!” And there’s so many visual effects shots that are invisible in there…
Michael Pitt: We have 200 visual effects shots in the film. The eyes of the little girl are done in post…
Question: Well, you know it’d be kind of hard to find two people with the exact same eyes…
Michael Pitt: For me it’s the best way to use visual effects. Mike was using I would say really current, state-of-the-art equipment for this movie, but I don’t see this movie being dated. You’ll never see that, and that’s the hardest thing to do with visual effects. You get all this new gear and, you know, very often the filmmakers will just exploit it, it’s just there, it’s all out in the open, and then five years later it’s just like: “Yeah, it’s actually not that cool anymore.” So to do it seamlessly is a really precise thing, and what they were doing with those eyes, putting those eyes, Astrid’s eyes in Kashish’s head, is really complicated. That’s really really complicated work. To be honest, when he was talking about it, Mike was really obsessing over it all throughout the film. There was times when I was going, “Is this going to work?” But it did, he pulled it off.
Question: Why do you feel that these big, large-scope sci-fi stories are good for telling small, personal love stories?
Mike Cahill: You know sometimes when you watch those big sci-fi movies and you see the army generals and heroes, and I always wonder what everyone else is doing. You know, everybody else is doing something. And they eat, sleep, shower, use the toilet, and like there’s this other paradigm now. And I think also, in the intimate stories, you can touch upon something universal, like loss, or wanting somebody back.
Mike Cahill: We still have a lot of handheld shots, they’re a little bit more stabilized. And I wanted to try, I mean, I was going for a sort of poetic realism. Handheld has a sort of an alive feeling to it. But I worked with this great cinematographer Markus Forderer. I saw a film that he shot in Switzerland, well he didn’t shoot it in Switzerland, I saw it there, and I sort of tracked him down and I’m like “I need to work with this guy”, like I could feel that we were in sync. And we were lucky to be able to shoot this film with two cameras simultaneously for most of it, two Reds, an Epic and a Scarlet, and I would operate one and he would operate the other. And it was amazing, it allowed us the ability to capture really wonderful gems. But also I wanted to experiment, to push and find some new boundaries, new land in terms of techniques and aesthesis. The film for example, for example, has a double vertigo shot, the first time ever in movie where we harnessed this tool, this robotic techo-crane that you can program all the positions of the camera into. So it allowed us to do a vertigo shot in, 180, and do a vertigo shot out, in one continuous move.
Question: Did you have more toys to play with then on Another Earth?
Mike Cahill: Yeah, a little bit more…
Question: Another Earth wasn’t on Red, was it?
Mike Cahill: Another Earth was on the Sony EX-3. And it shot 1080p, actually we shot 720p. And it was like, I remember when we sold it to Fox they were like: “Is there any way we can make the picture, like… better?” And I’m like: “…Um, what do you mean?’ And they’re like: “I don’t know, just better.” But this we shot in 4K so it’s like “boom!” And there’s so many visual effects shots that are invisible in there…
Michael Pitt: We have 200 visual effects shots in the film. The eyes of the little girl are done in post…
Question: Well, you know it’d be kind of hard to find two people with the exact same eyes…
Michael Pitt: For me it’s the best way to use visual effects. Mike was using I would say really current, state-of-the-art equipment for this movie, but I don’t see this movie being dated. You’ll never see that, and that’s the hardest thing to do with visual effects. You get all this new gear and, you know, very often the filmmakers will just exploit it, it’s just there, it’s all out in the open, and then five years later it’s just like: “Yeah, it’s actually not that cool anymore.” So to do it seamlessly is a really precise thing, and what they were doing with those eyes, putting those eyes, Astrid’s eyes in Kashish’s head, is really complicated. That’s really really complicated work. To be honest, when he was talking about it, Mike was really obsessing over it all throughout the film. There was times when I was going, “Is this going to work?” But it did, he pulled it off.
Question: Why do you feel that these big, large-scope sci-fi stories are good for telling small, personal love stories?
Mike Cahill: You know sometimes when you watch those big sci-fi movies and you see the army generals and heroes, and I always wonder what everyone else is doing. You know, everybody else is doing something. And they eat, sleep, shower, use the toilet, and like there’s this other paradigm now. And I think also, in the intimate stories, you can touch upon something universal, like loss, or wanting somebody back.
You can read our review of I Origins here.
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