Ask AJ Bowen to describe time-travel drama Synchronicity, and he calls it “if a sci-fi film made love to a noir, and then their baby made a movie in 1982 that was looking at what a potentially dystopian future to the year 1982 would be.” He laughs. “Talking about it is easier than doing the damn thing.”
The film is the brainchild of writer/director Jacob Gentry, who said the script was inspired by media coverage of the large hadron colider at CERN. He said, “I didn’t even take phsyics in school, I wasn’t particularly gifted in science, but I became fascinated by it.” He also found there was an unexpected crossover with one of his favorite genres: film noir. He said, “Science is like cosmic detectives, so I just thought it would be fun to conflate those two preoccupations.”
As for his science-fiction influence, it’s the back-and-forth narrative of Back to the Future II. While he admits it’s not his top time-travel movie (“it probably wouldn’t make my top five”), it does have his favorite time-travel narrative conceit, “which is Marty McFly seeing scenes from the first movie in a different point of view.” Gentry treated this as his “jumping off point. … I could take these film noir tropes – the femme fatale, the big heavy, the guy who’s pressing his thumb down on the schlub who’s trying to solve this mystery – and really turn them on their heads.”
In this case, the schlub is scientist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight), who, along with his fellow researchers Chad (Bowen) and Matty (Scott Poythress), thinks he is on the verge of developing teleportation. Instead, they have stumbled upon time travel, and their experiments quickly become a quest to rewrite events that they thought were set in stone.
The idea of a cosmic do-over should spark a sense of recognition in Bowen and Gentry, since in a way they’ve been here before, on their first collaboration: 2007’s The Signal.
That little indie horror is one of the great coulda, woulda, shoulda moments of genre cinema. A super-low budget anthology of interlocking narratives, shot by a small cadre of Atlanta filmmakers, its simple conceit – of madness as a disease communicated by a static radio signal – connected with critics and genre fans. It performed well for a zero-budget indie with no names, but it was nowhere near the breakout hit for which the creative team, the studio, and its advocates hoped. Bowen said, “That one was an amazingly educational experience. We had started to believe the hype as only one who is doing their first real movie in their mid-twenties can. We had no reference point. ‘Oh, we’ve made it, it’s all happened.’ And then when it opens to $144,000, we find ourselves a little surprised that Magnolia’s prepared to take another one of our movies.”
But it was the launching point for many careers. All three segment directors – Gentry, David Bruckner, and Dan Bush – now have a degree of name recognition; and Bowen’s role as Lewis, the twitchy, deranged antagonist of Gentry’s segment, marked him as a talent to watch.
And now Synchronicity is The Signal‘s heir. Not only does it reunite much of the cast and crew (Bowen, Gentry, and Poythress, as well as actress Claire Bronson, producer Alexander Motlagh, co-producer Alex Ore, and composer Ben Lovett), it’s even getting distribution by Magnolia. “We probably owe them our first-born by now,” said Bowen.
Reuniting the team was a pretty easy task. Bowen said, “I got a call from Jacob. We see each other five days a week, and live about a mile away from each other.”
When Gentry handed him the script, he thought he was just looking for some friendly insight and feedback, but “pretty quickly when I saw the characters of Chuck and Matty, it was pretty clear that Scott’s also going to be in this, because his full name is Matthew Scott Poythress, and Chuck, well, Charles is my actual middle name. So I went, ‘Oh, I get what you’re doing here, buddy. Very clever.'”
The script was a reminder to Bowen of his days growing up in Atlanta, watching Eighties movies with Gentry. However, getting the The Signal team back together was a way for filmmakers and actors with more established careers to get back to their indie roots. “We wanted to see if we could do it again,” said Bowen. “It was a long time since we’d worked with each other – not a long time since we’d seen each other – but we wanted to see if that was something we could accomplish now that we’re in the union. Now that we’re all grownups, do we have the ability to pull off a low-budget movie, or have we all gotten too soft?”
However, there was a new challenge. Video on demand was unheard of in 2007, but now it has changed the landscape for indie film. It’s easier to get distribution, but there’s less money for production. Bowen said, “It’s lowered the sales price, so it lowered the ability to necessarily add an actor or someone that works on a movie beyond the producer capacity. But if we keep the overhead low enough, then we can retain creative control to do whatever the hell we want.”
However, there was one addition to the small, tight-knit cast: sci-fi character-actor legend Michael Ironside as Klaus, the industrialist with an eye on the profitability of Jim’s research. Gentry admits he may have had a slight ulterior motive in bringing the actor on board. “I am a super-fan of him, but even more so a superfan of Paul Voerhoeven.”
His plan, apart from getting a performance from the grizzled wardog of sci-fi, was being able to quiz him on stories from the set of Total Recall: However, that never quite played out the way he hoped. “He would always be about to tell me one of these stories right when we were about to roll camera or were rolling camera, so I always had this Sophie’s Choice between hearing this amazing story that I’ve been dying to hear and I’m in a rare position to hear it firsthand from the man who lived it, or shoot the movie.”
Bowen described Ironside in simpler terms: “A god amongst men. I brought my copy of Visiting Hours from Los Angeles to Atlanta and pulled it up in front of him and said, ‘You must sign this. Nice to meet you. I am one of your biggest fans.'”
Bowen became an even bigger fan as shooting continued. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with an idol, and he admits the experience can sometimes be a little disappointing. “I fully expected that Ironside would be that way, but I got a serious education from him. What blew my mind was that he was one of the most gracious human beings I have ever met.”
Synchronicity is on limited theatrical release, and is available on VOD from Jan. 22.
This article appears in January 15 • 2016.