In twisty time travel tale, Michael Felker’s filmThings Will Be Different, starring Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy is a unique crime thriller that leans into everything there is to love about the sci-fi genre. Estranged brother and sister Joseph (Thompson) and Sidney (Dandy) head to an abandoned farmhouse after carrying out a robbery, where they’re able to travel travel to escape the consequences.
But then a mysterious entity emerges that prevents them from returning to their timeline. Being held captive, there are demands that need to be met in order for Joseph and Sidney to leave.
A great sci-fi story is one that raises questions, and prompts discussions and theories about what you’ve seen, while not leaving things too open ended where you’re completely lost. That balance is something Felker is able to find and maintain throughout Things Will Be Different.
“From my experience as an editor working on very similar movies, the horror movies of Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, I learned a lot about what people need to be clear on, and what is good confusion by design,” Felker told Yahoo Canada. “So the biggest thing is that, for me, as long as you’re able to latch on to the characters and find them compelling, and people you root for, good casting with some good scene writing between them can really go a long way. Once you have that to latch on to, it makes those questions worth pursuing.”
“For me, it was literally balancing the good confusion meter versus bad confusion meter. Good confusion is … a good question to leave the movie with, or to really stew on. … Let’s leave that in as a thing to pursue. Or bad confusion where it stops you from emotionally engaging with the characters. … So we try to fix those elements there and just get people back on the life raft, so to speak, in this ocean of questions.”
‘It just feels like you’re living life’
While Felker is navigating genre elements in Things Will Be Different, there’s an intimate feeling throughout the story that’s really bolstered by this brother-sister relationship.
“I was inspired a lot by my own relationship with my sister, who’s a little under two years older than me, and we just have this camaraderie where we can text each other or call each other and we pick up where we left off,” Felker said. “The one to two people in your life that you could just basically not put up a front with, and everything’s OK.”
“We really wanted to have that, even though there’s distrust and moments of being let down, every sibling has had that, including mine, but when they are good, they are good. They’re able to eat breakfast and be chummy with each other and have a good time. And I think that’s incredibly important to have. … And then us three, Adam, Riley and myself, working on just developing this easy camaraderie and allowing them to have their own secret language between the two of them that they can then take into the chemistry of their characters.”
In order to establish these “lived in” performances, Felker worked with the actors in a way where sometimes they weren’t breaking down the script and the scenes, but rather just talking to establish a bond.
“There’s putting on a performance and then there’s feeling lived in, and certain movies expect you to be like, here’s a performance that’s very heightened, and then there’s certain movies that are like, here’s a very lived in thing that it shouldn’t even feel like you’re acting. It just feels like you’re living life,” Felker said. “I tried to get through to this part here by just not even pretending we’re doing a movie for a hot second. We would get on a Zoom call and go on for like 90 minutes at a time sometimes, where we’re just like, ‘Let’s just talk. … Let’s just get to know each other and just feel comfortable.'”
“That allows us to be able to talk to each other on a personal level while we go and act out these scenes, but it also allows them to kind of feel what level they need to be in. … They needed to feel like brother and sister that aren’t putting on for anybody else except for each other. So it was just lots of conversations, lots of just living in it, and then it was effortless when we got to set. … It was a lot of two to three takes at a time. They really nailed it.”
‘We know there are answers on the outside’
While this may not be what every movie watcher wants to hear, Things Will Be Different is certainly a film that strengthens with multiple watches, but it’s for good reason.
In the farmhouse, for example, Felker has filled the space with different artifacts that might lead you in certain directions to understand the circumstances of how these wormholes that exist. Just as the characters are trying to find connections between what’s happening to them and what they’re seeing in the house, so is the audience.
Without spoiling too much, there’s a moment at the end of the film gives us a glimpse at the reasoning behind the time travel circumstances of the film, and why the siblings are trapped, through a really compelling minimalist setup, and brilliant use of light and shadow to give us a glimpse of the forces pulling the strings, so to speak. The way it’s shown the film makes you want to know even more.
But Felker also has a lot of the lore to this story established, much more than we see in this film, which is likely to make many hope for an expansion of this world in the future.
“We were able to make these definitive choices that feel like they have weight to them, because we know there are answers on the outside,” Felker said.
“We do have treatment for what happens after, which is exciting, and we’re kind of just curious to see how this movie lives on its own for a little bit. … The last thing we want to do is tell people what it actually is, and then they just immediately stop asking questions while they’re watching the movie. Right now we’re kind of in this fun stage [of] let the audience engage, ask these questions, … to allow them to fill in their own theories and the gaps that are there before we definitively start trying to fill it in. Or at least make an answer to some of these bigger questions.”