Relax, I’m From The Future
A conversation with writer-director Luke Higgingson
Relax, I’m From The Future was a surprise fav of mine at last year’s Fantasia Fest, and it’s finally getting a theatrical release! The movie is a punk rock sci-fi comedy with a lot of wit and even more heart starring Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords, Our Flag Means Death) and Gabrielle Graham (Possessor, Twenties) as an unlikely duo trying, sort of, not really, to save the world. I got a chance to speak with writer-director Luke Higginson a few weeks ago about all the work that went into his debut feature. Read our (lightly edited for clarity) conversation below!
Tell me, how do you describe this movie to other people?
It’s very much my attempt to work through my anxieties about the future and the state of the world in a way that might bring me some comfort without eliminating the very real cynicism I have about it. [My short film in 2013] started as a simple joke idea — the idea of an unprepared timetraveler — and then when people sort of liked that film more than I expected, I thought about how I would make that meaningful enough to expand it. And as I noodled on that, Trump got elected, and Covid happened, a lot of terrible things happened... It really became a source of therapy for me to write this ridiculous film and pump my anxieties into it. That’s really where I found what the film was about.
There is an incredible dynamic between Rhys and Gabrielle — how did you work your story with them?
Gabriel Graham was the first person that I knew I wanted to cast [as Holly]. I saw Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, and she had such presence, but I didn’t know if she was funny, so I watched Twenties… it was clear she had comic chops.
For Casper [Rhys Darby’s character], you have to be on board with following him even when he does some questionable things. And also, he’s on screen for so much of the movie that it had to be someone with real energy, especially in a script that’s mostly people talking to each other. There weren’t a lot of people that I felt fit that. Then when his name was floated, it was immediately like omg holy shit that would be amazing! My producers at Wango films are phenomenally gifted at getting scripts in hands. I spent a couple of days building up a dossier of arguments for why he should do the film. And when we got on the call and he was just like “Hey, so I just wanted to meet ya and make sure you were ok with me doing this movie”, I was blown away. He had this tiny little window where we could get him for 15 shooting days and he agreed to come up [to Hamilton, Ontario] and do it. I’m still pinching myself about that, it was amazing.
In terms of working with them, because of that window of time, there was no time for rehearsal. There was barely time for Rhys to learn his lines. I got one hour of Rhys and Gabby in a room together before the first day of shooting… Something clicked, it was like Oh it’s Casper and Holly, they’re hanging out!
The scene in the playground — where the two of them are sharing a bottle of booze and talking — was incredibly cold, absurdly cold. And they were both very underdressed for that weather. They were both improving and bouncing off of each other. That was the scene where I felt like ah there’s something special between these two in particular. It was cool, it was really special, both of them are just amazing.
Wait, the shooting schedule was only 15 days?
We had Rhys for 15 days, and we shot for 18 days, but Rhys is in almost all of the movie.
How did the music in the movie play into writing your story and how did you manage to clear all those songs?
I knew a ton of people in the Toronto indie-rock punk scene and I always knew that if I ever got to make a movie, I knew all these great songs that no one knows. I listened to a lot of that stuff writing the film — Holly being part of the punk scene was very important to the character. I gave [Gabrielle] a playlist of a bunch of 70s CBGB stuff, she watched a documentary on Poly Styrene. That really embodied the vibe of the music. I wanted it to be all Toronto music on the soundtrack, it’s basically a split between songs from bands that I played with or went to see back in the day and bands that are still operating right now. The big coup was getting Pup involved, which was really exciting. They didn’t have to say yes at all, but they really were big fans of Rhys and [because of Covid] I think they were a little itchy to get on stage in front of a bunch of people. We got to use a few of their songs, as well as Metz and Bad Waitress and a couple of other great bands.
In terms of the licensing side what I didn’t expect as a problem was that many of those bands no longer exist and never had any kind of official existence in terms of paper work or legality, so I perhaps foolishly did not see that coming as a problem. Anagram, Sailboats Are White, Lunchmeat — all great bands that I love, but [licensing their songs] was a trickier thing than I thought it was gonna be.
What are some of the challenges or joys that you encountered in the editing room, putting this thing together?
The editing process was long, longer than I expected. My baby was 6 months old when we started shooting, which was a real challenge for me and my wife. I literally edited the film with my baby next to me, so it took a while. But really, it was about matching the film to Rhys’s rhythm. When we [cast] Rhys, who’s one of the best improvisers comedically in the world, I knew that [for the edit] I was gonna want both sides of the conversations he has with Gabby. So any time that Rhys is talking to another person, there’s two cameras going at the same time and that really allowed us to use the little moments of inspiration and improvisation. If Rhys gives you a piece of gold, you know that you have it covered. That was big, I think both in the shooting and in the editing.
Time travel can be a tricky narrative device! How did you build the rules of this universe?
I knew right off the bat that I was neither capable nor interested in doing something scientifically “accurate”, but you also don’t want the audience to feel like you don’t give a shit. It has to feel like there’s an internal consistency. So my guiding principle was that rules of time travel are going to be what serves the humour and the story, and then once I have those things, to make sure it’s internally consistent. It actively subverts what I felt was the most common tropes — like in Terminator, you have to be naked to travel through time, in my movie you have to have no skin showing of any kind. In most time travel movies you can go back and forth, in mine you can only go back. When drafting it out, I went with the ideas that I found funny, then once I had the beats, I worked very hard to make sure it was internally consistent within that.
What was screening your film at Fantasia like?
It was incredible, I can’t say enough good things about Fantasia. I wanna shout out programmer Carolyn Mauricette, who saw a very rough cut of the film without any of the sound mix or special effects. She saw it, she got it, she connected to it. It just meant so much, that phase of the editing process, you’re very emotionally fragile, you have no idea if you’ve made something that works or not, and that was such a vote of confidence.
What are you hoping people take away from this?
I am genuinely very excited for people to see Rhys do this. I feel like he uses some muscles that you don’t get to see him use normally, he’s such a star. And I think Gabriel Graham is incredibly slept on, like she’s a successful actor but I think way more people should know her. I’m gonna sit in on a bunch of screenings — I never need to watch the movie again, but I do love watching the audience watch it, and there are some moments in the back third of the movie that I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing an audience react to.
I didn’t even ask you about Julian Richings!
He’s incredible! I got him [cast as Percy] by recording a video begging him to be in the movie because he’s a legend! I first saw him in Hard Core Logo when I was a teenager, he’s so captivating. So ya, I recorded a shameless message and sent it to him, and luckily he is the sweetest man in the world, just the easiest person in the world to work with — I can’t say enough nice things about him.
I think this movie has a lot for a lot of different crowds of people — you got the gays, you got the nerds, you got the horror fans -
Those are all my people! Those are my favourite type of people!
I’m excited for people to see it!
Me too!
BC — sept 2023
