The ‘Predestination’ Directors Give Us Some Super-Spoilery Insights Into Their Mind-Bending Movie

Predestination

The “predestination paradox” — which occurs when a time traveler becomes directly involved in the events he or she is trying to change — has provided the basis for such classic science fiction films as The Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and the original Planet of the Apes franchise. Until now, however, nobody had dared tackle a film version of “All You Zombies,” the 1959 Robert Heinlein short story that invented one of science fiction’s most famous (and virtually un-filmable) predestination paradoxes.

The Spierig brothers, a writing-director duo consisting of siblings Michael and Peter (both 38-years old), took on the challenge with Predestination, a riveting new retro-futuristic cipher. Ethan Hawke (star of the Spierigs’ previous film, Daybreakers) plays a time-traveling secret agent on his final mission: To stop a notorious terrorist before he bombs New York City in 1975. In the process, he must recruit his replacement, a very mysterious character. And this is where describing Predestination gets tricky, because the plot is an interlocking series of spoilers, a twisted knot that defies any logic outside of the film’s elegantly constructed world. We invited writer-directors Michael and Peter Spierig to take a deep dive into the intricacies of Predestination, which is available on VOD now and will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on Feb. 10. Our interview is full of spoilers, so if you’ve seen the film, read on.

I’ve seen some summaries of this film that outright state what it’s about, and I’ve also seen you guys describe it in cheeky, obtuse ways like “a transgender mind-bender.” So does it matter if the audience knows what the twists in this movie are?
Michael: I think it’s impossible to keep it under wraps. I mean, you give away anything in this film, and it’s kind of a spoiler. The short story has been around for a long time — you can look it up, it’s quite easy [to find]. [Predestination] is a very, very difficult one to pitch. [Laughs] For me, what’s interesting is the second viewing. Once you get past the twist novelty of it and actually dig further into the characters, there’s a real richness to them that I think is really interesting.

Watch the trailer:

Is there a point in the film at which you want the audience to have figured it out?
Michael: Some people get to the end of the film and have no idea what it’s about. Other people get it in the first five minutes. So our thoughts were, if people are onto it and they’re ahead of the game, then we’re still going to throw in all of these gags — there’s the song that’s actually mentioned in the short story, “I’m My Own Grandpaw.” There’s little inside jokes like the line “son of a bitch” and that sort of thing. And Ethan would always talk about how interesting it was to play a person who’s acting. Like in the bar, he’s pretending to be a bartender. And he obviously knows who that person is, and the repercussions. So it was really interesting discussing what he’s actually thinking in those moments. So yes, it’s certainly interesting on the second viewing.

I was surprised at how faithful this film is to “All You Zombies,” the 9-page Robert Heinlein story upon which it’s based. While working on the screenplay, did you have any moments of revelation where you went, “Aha, this element is the key to making it work as a film?”
Peter: Well, we felt like there was somebody missing that was going to bring Sarah [Snook]’s character, the Unmarried Mother — or Jane, at that point — into the Space Corps and then into the Temporal Bureau. We needed a character that could teach her, and that’s where we came up with the idea of Robertson [played by Noah Taylor]. And we also felt like there was a thriller aspect to the Heinlein short story that’s just barely touched upon. It was already in the building blocks of what he had done, so once we started to write that in, it felt pretty organic, and sort of worked within the framework of what Heinlein had already set up.

In casting Hawke and Sarah Snook, those parts could have been played by three actors, or maybe even one actor. At what point did you come to a decision about how many people you needed to pull this off?
Michael: When we wrote the script, we sent it to Ethan because we’d done Daybreakers with him, but we weren’t entirely sure which part he was going to play. Ethan really loved the script and he came onboard, which was wonderful because, obviously, that gets your financing moving. But the other casting decision came down to deciding whether we were going to cast two people: A male for the male part, and a female for the female part. Ultimately, the more interesting choice was to see if we could find someone who could play both, which neither of us were entirely sure was going to work. We auditioned a lot of talented young Australian actresses, and there were some really, really talented girls, but Sarah came in and she was just incredible. We work really closely with our makeup and effects artist on all our pictures, and we showed him Sarah’s audition and said “Can we do this? Can we turn her into a man?” And he pretty confidently said, “Yeah, I think we can do it.” So it was a bit of trial and error. We did a lot of testing. We were all a bit nervous about it, but Sarah was amazing and Ethan totally believed in the idea.

Ethan Hawke in Predestination

What efforts did you make for Ethan and Sarah to look like one another? How concerned were you with the physical resemblance?
Michael: We were a little bit concerned. [In the film] we said this was actually a facial transplant; it was a completely new face, essentially. We did do certain things to make Ethan and Sarah a little similar. The pieces of makeup that Sarah wears when she’s a man were actually molded off Ethan’s head cast. So we added Ethan’s chin to Sarah, and Ethan’s brow. We made them the same height and hair color. We had Sarah walk on little platforms and up ramps and stuff to make her look taller when she got closer to Ethan. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors.

How much of the effects are done with CG versus stand-ins?
Michael: We didn’t use any CG. As far as the actors acting with each other, and specifically Sarah acting with male and female versions of herself together, that was doubled and just basic split-screen tricks. Sarah would play the whole scene out as the man, and then we’d have to get a change — it would take three hours to change her back to a girl — and then we’d shoot the other side. But we would rehearse with doubles — and not just the stand-ins, the actual actors — so she had something to work off of. We tried to do as much in-camera as we could, so she wasn’t acting to green screens and tennis balls or any of that sort of stuff.

Tell me about designing the female astronaut program, Space Corps. Those scenes have a very distinctive look, but we only get bits and pieces of what’s really happening.
Peter: The actual concept is in the Heinlein short story, so we didn’t want to change any of that. In fact, he called it something very different — it wasn’t called Space Corps, it was called —

W.H.O.R.E.S. and W.E.N.C.H.E.S., right?
Peter: Yeah, so you get an idea of where Heinlein’s head was at with that kind of stuff. [Laughs] So we wanted to change that. But we did want to leave Heinlein’s ideas of what a space program might have been, or his fantasy version of what it was in the ’60s, having written the short story in 1958. It was kind of fun for us to project Heinlein’s version of his future that he saw at that point, rather than our reality. We found a design building in Melbourne that was just amazing, that gave us the look of Space Corps, and then we put in our kind of retro-fashion, which is a heightened version of ’60s fashion.

Ethan’s performance brings a lot of depth and emotion to this very cerebral story. What do you think gave him that human connection to the character? What is the bartender’s motivation, beyond the obvious “catch the bad guy?”
Peter: So his external aim is to stop the terrorist. Obviously, he’s on his final mission, and he’s got to set up all these events in order for him to exist. But really, he’s a guy that is in love with himself. We always talked about it as an extremely tragic love story. And what kind of effect that has on somebody, if the person they really connect with more than anybody in the world is themselves. And then it’s about finding your identity. It’s a very peculiar concept for a love story, and that’s what we all really got excited about: There’s going to be nothing quite like it out there.

Michael: It’s the ultimate form of narcissistic love!

The movie is based on a paradox, but in terms of the interior logic of the time travel, how far did you break that down for yourselves? Did you have a chart?
Peter: We spent a lot of time on the logic of where it all went, staying true to Heinlein’s short story. His timeline is very solid and there are charts online that break down “All You Zombies,” the original short story. So we put that up in the production office. We actually put it up in a chronological way, in order for the crew and the cast to really understand it, so a lot of our production meetings were just unraveling it for the. So we did plenty of diagrams, and then really had long discussions about where it all went and why it went that way and what it all meant, so everybody was very clear on what was going on.

I heard your next film is about the Winchester Mystery House.
Peter: That’s right, that’s what we’re busy working on at the moment. It is about Sarah Winchester, the woman who inherited the Winchester rifle fortune and believes she was haunted by all the people who were killed by the rifle. So she built this house to confuse the ghosts. I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know, but that’s the foundation of the film. A very, very scary haunted house movie: that’s what we’re hoping to make.

Image credit: AP Photo/Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, Ben King