Interview [Written]: Mike Cahill (“I Origins”)
A WGA interview with Mike Cahill, writer-director of the new movie I Origins.
With I Origins, writer-director Mike Cahill is now two for two telling human stories through science. His first feature, co-scripted with Georgetown classmate Brit Marling, Another Earth, presents parallel universes explained by theoretical physics’ string theory. I Origins, which premiered at Sundance 2014, posits a character-driven squaring of the circle between observable fact and faith, science and God, through the modern technology of iris-biometrics. No, really.
An excerpt:
This is your second film using metaphors of natural or scientific phenomenon to tell stories of human experience. Why is that a useful or exciting format for you?
I’m inspired by science. As an artist or writer you are trying to transmit an emotion to an audience. You want that to be rare, unique and powerful. For it to be rare and unique, you need new landscapes to tell stories. My last film had to do with parallel universes, this one has to do with my iris biometrics and the reoccurrence of precise iris patterns in infants. If you tell stories using cutting-edge science — string theory, biometrics — you have all of a sudden a new landscape to try and get to some fundamental, existential questions we have — questions of loneliness or death and what happens after we die, fear of death — trying to form a narrative that can explain that feeling that you have when you look in someone’s eyes for the first time and recognize them, feel connected immediately. In a way, ever since those Existentialist writers of times past, we have been charged with the task of giving our lives meaning through narrative. They don’t have to be true, but they just pour meaning into our lives. It’s our responsibility to give our lives meaning. I take that very seriously and want to tell stories that could feel real.
Giving our lives meaning, discovering what makes us happy or content, is the work of philosophy. I’ve had this thought that truly relevant philosophy might then have to be found through biology as the core of who we are, and therefore potentially revelatory of what we’re meant to be doing. Maybe that’s where it is?
Right, maybe that’s where it is! Exactly. That’s definitely where I would sniff around and look for it, for sure. We’re learning more every day. If you think about the sum total of human knowledge as a circle, that circle is expanding just like the universe is expanding. Hopefully it will expand infinitely just like the universe is expanding infinitely, but the force that propels expansion is the work of scientists. We know more Tuesday then we did on Monday because on Monday night some scientist discovered something. And that might be a biologist, an astronomer, a chemical engineer. There is something to it. The more and more we learn, the closer we get to understanding what this is all about. I don’t think we’ll get farther away.
The movie’s trailer:
For the rest of the interview, go here.
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