Things Will Be Different (Credit: Magnet Releasing)

Director Michael Felker doesn’t only show the horror of time travel in his feature directorial debut, Things Will Be Different. But also the dangers of losing time with family. The sci-fi crime drama, in which two on-the-run siblings are stuck in a time-traveling safe house, is not only heady but personal.

The writer, director, and editor of Things Will be Different is no stranger to making intimate, high-concept dramas reach a level of scale greater than the locations on-screen. Felker previously edited Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead‘s films, like Spring and The Endless. Again, with Things Will Be Different, Felker remind audiences ideas are often bigger than a big budget.

Recently, the filmmaker spoke with Immersive about crating his time-travel crime drama.

I read your dad was a great inspiration for this movie. What do conversations about time travel between your father, an engineer, and yourself, an editor, sound like? What’s discussed? 

Michael Felker (Credit: Jori Lynn Felker)

Oh gosh. Okay, so that’s an answer that has spanned probably dozens of different conversations over 20 years. I think it used to start with us just going to see time travel movies and debating the rules of how Back to the Future time travel would not theoretically work with certain concepts of time travel, but work with its own specific time travel. How does Marty do this and this doesn’t get affected here, blah, blah, blah. A lot of stuff for nerdy people like us toil over. 

But then when I got more into the film industry and editing more, we had this conversation about, what’s an okay rule to break and what’s not an okay rule to break? I even pitched him a time travel movie that I got stuck on 10 years ago where I was like, “I can’t quite figure out the rules. I don’t know if the audience knows this or this.” And then he just shook his head and was like, “Michael, if you would’ve invented time travel, you wouldn’t be writing movies. You would’ve invented time travel and gotten the fuck out of movies.” 

I was basically like, right, right. Just go make your own internal logic, but then give it a fun story and characters we can just latch onto and get to know. So, it’s kind of the middle ground. My dad’s a little loosey goosey where he is like, “Yeah, but that’s just more fun than the real answer.” You’ll find that there’s a lot more overlap in the Venn diagram than not. 

So even when you made your rules, was it okay to break them at any point if it fit the emotional logic of the story? 

What’s funny is, I had the world, the internal logic and rules for this universe for a while. It only came to light when I had the right story. I had stories that hit dead ends, in terms of just like, oh, is there actually a reason we’re following this character or do I just want to play around with it? I think finding the brother-sister angle, which is loosely based on me and my own sister, was a real emotional point for me.

And then to have the characters ping pong off what seems to be in the window of the rules that they don’t understand, it’s more interesting for the characters to then react and go, “Why am I basically hurting my hand on an invisible wall?” Breaking your rules can lead to some very interesting ideas and new avenues in which you can explore. But if you have really interesting, exciting characters, just fighting within those rules can be as interesting if told well.

Things Will Be Different (Credit: Magnet Releasing)

When did you know the siblings weren’t only the stars of the story, but that you were using time travel as a metaphor to explore trying to mend a broken relationship? 

I think it came from the fact that me and my sister always have this plan to, “Hey, let’s go and do a Zoom call,” or “Hey, I’ll come out to visit you this year.” And then old habits die hard. Life gets in the way, one thing happens to another, and then before you know it, it’s been two years and that promise of a visit or a promise of a big long phone call we catch up just goes by the wayside. And you didn’t even notice it. It was like a blink and two years went by. It’s just how we live our life now, especially post-pandemic. We just can’t keep track of time or things.

For me, it was really important to have these old habits die hard, no matter how much we try. Sometimes we’re just not destined to link up even with a sibling. Life just pulls us apart. And there’s some optimism to look through it, for sure. Maybe you can catch things, be able to break out of a vicious cycle if you’re really able to find human change and course correction.

But old habits being the most tough thing to take down, you’ll just repeat the same cycle and then before you know it, you’re 40 years older and life got away from you. 

And when did you know the song “Too Late to Turn Back Now” was just right for that story?

It’s actually just one of my favorite songs. I had played around with it back in film school for some short films. I think it’s just such an ear worm of a song, but also, just has some deeper feelings that stew around inside your body. It was actually one of the first things when I was writing the script, I even wrote in the script, put this song in here.

It is the thing that will tell you as soon as the movie starts, basically, they’re doomed; that’s the cycle right there. And having “Too Late to Turn Back Now” just echo through your ears as just a weird haunting siren call is very fascinating to me. 

It oddly adds to the scope of the story, just being this larger-than-life song you know inside and out.

It’s one of the biggest things we went for and were glad we were able to put it in because it is also another linchpin to this world we live in. Here’s the world that you and I know is a real song that we hear, and then when you get deeper into the movie, you start hearing songs that you are familiar with, but they’re not of our world.

And so, it just opens up a whole new can of worms off, just how far did they go? Where did they go? Are they even in the same timelines anymore? It was such a crux to get that song; it made the movie feel alive and deeper in ways that are hard to just write or direct. 

The movie is contained, but the ideas in the movie are so big that the movie doesn’t feel small. Did you know the movie could achieve a level of scale beyond the location just with the ideas you’re playing with? 

I think so. I learned a lot from being an editor for Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead on all of their movies. One of the best things they do is make an idea that feels incredibly big, feel manageable to do in a small budget. For me, a movie can only shoot convincingly to what its budget and time is. You could sometimes watch an indie film and they try to swing for the fences because they watched Interstellar or a big giant sci-fi movie, and they just don’t have the capacity or the means to match that level. 

When they swing for something of that scale, you see the cardboard cutouts, you see the flats around the sets. What’s cool about the scale of this movie, at least I think so, we are kind of confined as much as we can with what we know with Joseph and Sidney, and the rest of it is just a fog that fades off into a black.

There are rules and stuff like that, and the more I show you, the more the world can be. But also we’re a very tiny, tiny movie, so if I show you those things, you might just be like, oh, nope, that’s fake, that’s dumb, that’s stupid. It was important to really keep us in that contained viewpoint and then let this foggy mist be like this thing that the audience fills in or even wrestles with, this strange and unknowing. 

Things Will Be Different (Credit: Magnet Releasing)

How much back and forth did you have, whether with the rules of time travel and the relationship, about how much to share and withhold from an audience? 

It’s a constant question. It was one of the last things we tackled before we locked the movie, and it’s something we dealt with a lot on Benson and Moorhead movies specifically. What’s good confusion? What’s bad confusion, good confusion? Is there a question here that is actually exciting to leave to an audience, or is it bad confusion where you’re like, oh, I think I don’t understand a character and why they don’t do a thing, that’s bad confusion.

So, good confusion, you can kind of let the world fill in with all these things and the characters are asking the same questions as the audience does, and if I explain too much, it might just not matter. The more answers I give, the more questions.

People will still just have time travel. You’re going to leave with questions no matter what. So might as well leave them with the right questions that are fun and exciting, not the ones that are just like, so wait, how does quantum mechanics work? The red yarn becomes too literal and boring to me, so love leaving with a lot of questions, but enough for people to latch on and have an emotional attachment to. 

Which lines did you cut in post-production?

We have no deleted scenes, but we have small deleted moments. One of the biggest ones we actually had was a scene close to before the middle of the movie where they finally start talking with the forces that control the house through this safe and tape recorder concept. There is a cut section where Adam and Riley’s characters, Joseph and Sid, talk to each other being like, “Wait, does this tape recorder work? What should I do? I have to put it back in.”

There’s a section where basically they talk even more about what the rules might be to the point where they start referencing movies as a comparison. So there’s even a point where Sidney’s character goes like, “Oh, is it like that movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure?” And then Joseph’s character’s like, “What’s Bill and Ted?” 

I guess it was my way of saying, “Hey, if you’ve seen that movie, I won’t have to explain it too much to a viewer.” But then we cut it out. We were relying on people watching Bill and Ted; the small Venn diagram of that is going to be confusing. We even had at one point, Justin Benson, who’s on the tape recorder, even spell out a bunch of the rules. 

We had one cut where he just is on the tape recorder and just says all the rules, but as soon as we put it in, I had a very visceral reaction. I was just like, Nope. Why would he do that? He would not tell that to those people unless the audience needed to know it. That’s a cheat. I don’t like it. He doesn’t want them to know. So we’ve had, there’s those in the cuts, but that’s the closest thing we got to removing lines of knowledge. 

Things Will Be Different (Credit: Magnet Releasing)

How did the idea of communicating through time on a taperecorder come about? 

I think the first draft. It was a lot of conversations with my dad being like, “How do you have a time traveling safe house? How does that work?” How do you make it work where people can come and go and use it properly?” You would have these people, not the people who are like the Airbnb landlord, so to speak, are just also removed, not just from location, like a good Airbnb landlord, but away from time.

The only way you could communicate with them is literally leaving forms of communication that cannot be touched or messed with for strands of time so that they could pick ’em up in their times. That was a huge idea. It was me and my dad talking about what are the step-by-step processes of, alright, if you wanted to talk to somebody from time in the past and the future, what’s a way you can’t write it down on a piece of paper? 

If it blows away or gets burnt, the message gets lost in time, then you’d have no idea if it gets there. So you’re just like, what if we locked it into a safe that’s bolted to the ground and a tape recorder that’s tied onto a chain that can’t be broken off?

All right, at least the elements won’t fuck with the message, and that’s where my brain goes. That’s a taste of just like, here’s all these different things of just seeing how the rules play out and then just laying it bare for people to see. 

We began discussing rules. To conclude, what rules did you and your cineamtgorapher have for the camera? 

That’s a really great question because we did have very specific rules. [Cinematographer] Carissa [Dorson] and I, when we were designing the look for the movie, we even went into the location and shot photo boards instead of storyboards, just so we can know what lenses could actually work within the space that we’re shooting. Our two main rules, with two exceptions, were that the movie can either live on sticks or on handheld. We are not trying to build a dolly.

We’re not trying to do anything fancy with a crane or a jib. We are basically going to live in sticks or handheld land to just show the state of, Hey, everything’s stable, versus, oh my God, everything’s chaotic. We can play with those two and then I can concentrate on the edit, allowing me to find the edit to really let these shots sing dynamically all together. 

Now, there’s a couple of things we gave exception to. There’s a slider we use in the diner; it’s mainly for the opening and closing shots of the movie. We had a drone get pickups, but that’s just because we needed the camera to get from the sky to act basically on sticks in the sky, just pan up or down, but also don’t move.

That’s basically the rules we wanted to live in because this movie is staying in one place a lot of the time. You’re basically locked in a frame. You’re locked in the house frame itself, the A frame of this house. Why not lock the audience in this square frame and then let them feel unsettled? Make ’em feel trapped is a good concept for our rules. 

Things Will Be Different is now playing in limited release.

Jack Giroux
Author

In high school, Jack would skip classes to interview filmmakers. With 15 years in film journalism, he's contributed to outlets such as Thrillist, Music Connection Magazine, and High Times Magazine. He's witnessed explosions, attended satanic rituals, and scaled volcanoes in his career, but Jack's true passion is interviewing artists.