The independent feature Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox is beginning a theatrical run after a successful festival run. The film stars Samuel Dunning as Tim Travers and features Danny Trejo, Joel McHale, Keith David, Felicia Day, and David Babbitt. Written and directed by Stimson Snead, this is the story of a self-absorbed and misanthropic scientific genius who attempts to solve the time traveler’s paradox by exploring what happens when he kills his past self. Dunning and Snead recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom.
[This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.]
What was the initial spark that inspired this piece?
Stimson Snead: I have been studying science, astrophysics, and astronomy as a hobby. I like bringing real science into my films. I saw a time travel movie that I did not care for. It did everything wrong and focused on the wrong things. It got the science wrong, and there is real science behind time travel research. It inspired me to outline what a good time travel story would look like, and it turned into the Tim Travers short film with Sam.
The whole point of the short and the Tim Travers character was to do a story with no arc for the character, and then when it came time to do the feature, we had to abandon that entirely. That’s where the genesis of the story of self-acceptance and self-love for this fundamentally awful human being began.
That’s very interesting. Sam, how did you first get involved, and what appealed to you about this?
Samuel Dunning: Stimson had seen me in a short, and he thought I’d be good as Tim Travers for the short film. As an actor who is always looking to showcase my abilities, this was a dream. We had lots of fun, and then it did well on the festival circuit, enough so that Stimson planned a feature-length version. Hue told me it would be the same thing but bigger.
I was going to do it either way, but what interested me the most about the feature was the character arc. We had all this extra room to actually dig into this guy’s humanity. There was just so much in the feature that I was like, “This is so much more fun to play with.” It’s a ton more work but a great challenge as a performer.
There’s a good chunk of the movie where you perform by yourself with other iterations of yourself. Was that intimidating at all?
Samuel Dunning: Thankfully, we did the short first, which had lower stakes. It’s always a lot of work whenever you’re on a set. At least I had that homework going into the feature. I taught myself to compartmentalize; I do, to this day, acting-wise, only focusing on what I have to do that day. When we’re doing a scene, you only need to focus on the intentionality of the words here; as soon as that’s done, wipe that part of your brain in the next part. That was the only way I could approach it because it’s so much work and so much dialogue that it’s impossible to keep it all in your head at once. So it’s best to try and break it into pieces.
Stimson, back to you. Are there good time travel movies that you liked that inspired you? There are so many classic ones (Back To The Future, Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Primer, Time Crimes).
Stimson Snead: I was making a conscious effort to avoid all of them. I love many of those films, but we consciously avoided them. The closest we got to it was a polite nod to Back to the Future, with the stolen plutonium line, because that’s a nice little callback that I appreciated.
The biggest inspirations were more shows like BBC’s Red Dwarf. That’s where the storytelling’s DNA is much easier to track if you’re familiar with it. This film also gets into one of my pet peeves: the notion that dealing with a serious idea should be done seriously. I feel like no. People are silly in real life, and intelligent people can sometimes be extraordinarily stupid. Tim Travers, in any given scene, while always consistently the same character, depending on the context, can be brilliant or shockingly stupid.
Congrats on putting this together and actually getting it into some theaters. That’s a Herculean feat at this point. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Stimson Snead: As far as the budget goes, all I’ll say is it costs a lot less than it should, but still a lot more than I would’ve liked. It is so interesting going through the business side versus the artistic side of this film. On the artistic side, this film has been met with uniform praise at festivals. We’ve connected beautifully with audiences. Critical response has been very generous. It’s been the fuel that has gotten us through the last year and a half, and it is just how warmly received this film has been. It’s been an experience that has meant the world to me. It has been a great payoff to all the work that went into this.
On the flip side, the industry right now isn’t just bad for independent films; it is actively hostile. They have created an incentive structure built around the logic that independent filmmakers don’t need to survive and shouldn’t survive. It is a hard time to be an independent filmmaker. Getting it to the point that we’re getting a theatrical, and we’re actually getting a proper release so that people can buy and watch this film feels like nothing short of a minor miracle. Thanks to Ben Yennie for spearheading the release.
The supporting cast is great. What was it like working with Keith David and Danny Trejo?
Stimson Snead: Keith is an extraordinary gentleman. He wanted to meet each person and shake everybody’s hand, and he’s such a soft-spoken man in real life. Danny Trejo was the nicest, sweetest man. It’s strange for a guy who plays almost exclusively violent bad asses that he is an absolute teddy bear of a person.
After a successful festival run, what’s it like to share this with the rest of the world?
Stimson Snead: I’m just glad we’re here at last. Independent filmmaking is struggling right now, not just for us but for everybody. Occasionally, you get to where we have gotten, and that’s a big event, so please come and support us. I’m excited that we’re finally going to regular audiences because this is the real audience. I’m glad that we’re here, and thank you to everybody who follows the press in journalism like this. It’s what keeps this small part of the industry alive.
Samuel Dunning: The fact that we can do any of this in this indie film climate is extremely rare. It takes a lot of work to get here. I would like to say thank you to everybody who saw the film. One of the most important things you can do to continue to help is to keep spreading the word about the film and just don’t let it disappear.
Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox is now in limited release.
