“The Smartest Sci-Fi Films Are Low-Budget Ones”

BuzzFeed ran an article last week featuring two new science fiction movies: Coherence and The Signal.

Giant interstellar shoot-outs and outlandish alien races are great and all, but science fiction is a genre that can benefit from limitations as much as it can big-budget space operatics. It’s built on ideas, which means that with enough ingenuity, a smaller movie can do its own world-building by exploring a concept and how it affects people. Large-scope sci-fi may be big for the summer box office, but there’s also a long tradition of scrappier films exploring time or space travel, dark futures, and new technology, all by way of how it affects a small group of characters, an approach that can be just as mind-bending without the visual effects. When you can’t depend on simply showing how crazy a sci-fi phenomenon looks, for instance, you’re forced to concentrate more on what the experience of dealing with it is like, and those tropes can serve as a metaphor for experiences that are closer to home for the audience.

That’s the case for Coherence, an inventive indie written and directed by James Ward Byrkit that opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday and expands to more cities in the weeks after. Coherence is the story of a dinner party in which eight friends with long and sometimes fraught histories gather to play catch-up while a comet passes overhead. When the power goes out, they notice there’s a house two blocks away that remains lit, and a few of the guests venture out to see if they can use the phone. When they come back, one of them’s bleeding and upset by what he saw, and the other is carrying a mysterious box he stole that turns out to be inexplicably filled with photos of everyone at the party.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEceDz1Rodc

The flashier fellow indie The Signal, which opened in theaters last week, also combines a drama about relationships with a sci-fi mystery, though the more it delves into the latter, the less interesting it actually becomes. Directed by William Eubank, The Signal starts in the company of a trio of brainy tech types — friends Nic (Oculus’ Brenton Thwaites) and Jonah (Beau Knapp), who are driving Nic’s girlfriend, the “CalTech turncoat” Haley (Olivia Cooke), to school. As they road-trip through some gorgeously photographed middle American landscapes, Nic and Jonah feud with a hacker who goes by the handle “Nomad.” Nic is dealing with a degenerative disease that has him using crutches, and he’s pulling away from Haley, the prospect of a long-distance relationship and his progressive illness causing him to try to sabotage their bond.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwgfeR2pMuE

There are plenty of smart low-budget science fiction films that come to mind: Mad Max, Primer, The Terminator, Pi and Moon to name a few. I don’t think there’s any necessary correlation between big budgets and dumbed down movies, although I’m sure we could all name more than a few spectacle sci fi flicks that just don’t measure up in any sort of intellectually satisfying way. So are the smartest sci-fi films low-budget ones? Smells like hyperbole to me.

However allow me to put a spin on the title of BuzzFeed’s article: How a screenwriter interested in the science fiction genre would be smart to conjure up at least some low-budget story concepts.

Why?

Because it’s easier to get you noticed… and get them made.

That whole area of ‘world-building’ wherein the writer has to create a visual context far different than contemporary Earth is not only a cause for inflated budgets (think: Computer Generated Imagery), it also elevates the discomfort of Hollywood suits. An action movie is an action movie. A thriller is a thriller. Those are in the realm of a typical development executive’s life experience. But a science fiction film is, I believe, more of a challenge to them. It feels alien, strange and big. Those may be helpful elements for a movie marketing campaign, but for script development? Quite a challenge to get the story right.

In my view, that’s why the studios keep relying on a select group of writers who have a proven track record with science fiction projects (e.g., Spaihts, Lindelof, Kinberg, etc).

So here comes New Writer A with a $150M science fiction spec script. And here’s New Writer B with a $5M science fiction spec script. Put on your producer’s hat: If both screenplays are written equally well and both have obvious commercial viability, which writer would you feel most comfortable with?

Besides a $150M spec can only go to a handful of buyers: The major studios. Whereas a $5–20M spec can go to dozens of financiers and independent production companies.

You love science fiction? Great. Hollywood happens to love the genre now as well. But you’d probably be wise not only to come up with a smart story concept, but also one that is low-budget.

Get your foot in the door, prove you can write the genre, then maybe some day, you’ll be this guy working on some seriously big budget sci fi films.

For the rest of the BuzzFeed article, go here.

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