Interview: Bradley King (Time Lapse)

Horrornews.Net: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us for a few minutes. I’m right in the middle of watching Time Lapse for the 5th time.

Bradley King: Five times? [Laughing] You’re the first person to say that, I love it!

HNN: I just love this movie dude! I first saw it last year at the NYC Horror Film Festival & couldn’t get enough of it. To be honest, when I first sat down to watch it, I thought to myself that it was gonna be just another time travel flick. One that didn’t make much sense, one that had a Twilight Zone vibe running through it. And quite frankly, I’ve seen that done 1000 times already – so I didn’t have much hope. But as the film progressed, I realized that there was something different going on here. Your film stands out because it’s smart! And everything in it made sense, which is something that similar films never achieve. They always end up having their characters do something that just doesn’t add up once the film is over. But Time Lapse avoids all of those complications brilliantly. What was the inspiration you (& co writer B.P. Cooper) had for writing this?

 

BK: Thank you for those kind compliments, We appreciate them! Occasionally we get posts on our message board telling us that the film doesn’t work, and that kills us because Cooper & I hate watching time travel movies with giant plot holes & such. We spent a lot of time watching these movies and spent even more time writing this to make sure that it would work. In terms of inspiration, we knew we wanted to make an indie movie. We only had so much money to spend so we had to keep the whole thing small & contained – within certain parameters. We knew we wanted to do something in the science fiction genre, we love films like Primer (2004) and things like that. But credit to Cooper, he had seen a movie called Timeline (2003), that I hadn’t seen yet. In that film a camera was put in a time machine and then sent somewhere into the past, so from there he riffed and thought to make the camera and the time machine parts of the same device. From there. I got really excited and started extrapolating the characters, the location and what the scenario might play out like.

HNN: I’m glad you explained it to me like that, because I never got the impression that you guys were trying to be smarter than your audience. Everything that happens in the story is put in service to the story – it’s all very logical and well thought out. And even though you might figure out something that’s gonna happen before it does, I don’t think you’d be able to put all of the pieces together before the movie ends. It all plays out so logically, you’re thrown for a loop when nothing especially crazy happens. I wasn’t expecting it to be so logical & well thought out, I was waiting for some giant special effects sequence that made no sense to occur.

BK: We should probably just publish everything you’re saying right now!

HNN: Please do! Let’s talk about the casting for a moment, was there a long casting call involved, or did you have actors in mind for the roles before you started production?

BK: Our casting director, Rick Montgomery, helped us make lists. But we knew we wanted Danielle (Panabaker) because we had just seen her in a film called Girls Against Boys (2012), and we knew she’d be great in the role of Callie. We met her once, she read the script, liked what she read, and she was on board. We had to meet a few more people for the other roles in the cast, but we ended up really happy with both Matt O’Leary & George Finn as the other two leads.

HNN: John Rhys Davies plays a small, but pivotal role as Mr. Bezzerides, but he’s basically only seen in photos…

BK: That was a heartbreaker, I’m a huge fan of Mr. Davies and his work! We looked at a few different actors for the role, but he was always our first choice. He agreed to do the role, and we actually did shoot some scenes with him, but in the post production process we realized we (as writers) sort of screwed up. We needed to cut his material, so he only appears in those photos, but I believe we’re planning to put some of those scenes back in (as deleted scenes) for the bluray release.

HNN: Who designed the camera in the film? It’s both foreboding and impressive at the same time.

BK: Well I have a background in graphic design, so I started the ball rolling with some initial designs but they were really rough. But there were some things on my mind that I knew I wanted for the final design, I wanted it to have a sort of vintage/retro look to it. I knew I didn’t want any microchips or lasers complicating it either – I wanted it to look kind of Steampunk as well. So I hired a concept artist named Howard Schechtman, and he & I bounced some sketches back and forth until we both had a design we liked. But even then, we didn’t especially expect to have that exact design on screen because we didn’t know how much money we’d have to build it. We found a fabricator named David Mendoza and he managed to put it all together for us just the way we wanted it.

HNN: So what’s next?

BK: We have a lot of stuff on our shelf that we really wanna get to, and while a few of them are action a/o fantasy scripts, we really want to stick with science fiction. We have two scripts that we’re getting ready to raise funds for, and I think that if you liked Time Lapse, then you’ll really like these two as well. Additionally, we have some interest from people who’d like to turn Time Lapse into a TV show. There are a few things that we’d like to get to first, but that’s something that might be happening sometime in the near future as well.