Interview with Chris Vander Kaay - Indie Science Fiction Today
Franklyn (2009)
Writer-Director: Gerald McMorrow
Starring Eva Green, Ryan Phillippe, Sam Riley
In the otherworldly Meanwhile City, Jonathan Preest stalks the streets as a masked vigilante, hunting his nemesis, The Individual. Preest is the lone atheist in a strange society in which belief is a requirement for citizenship. In a parallel narrative in our world, a troubled young woman crosses life paths with a naïve man looking for true love and a minister searching the homeless community for his missing son. Events continue to draw them near to each other, bringing the two worlds crashing into each other. The shadow of the Iraq War aftermath hovers like a spectre over the events of Franklyn, an assured and mature science fiction drama. The film’s four main storylines each touch on troubles facing modern society, from relationship troubles and mental illness to homelessness and the deep religious divisions in humanity. Even the design of Meanwhile City and the costuming hold symbolic meaning, including the featureless mask that represents Preest’s shattered sense of identity. After studying film in New York, Gerald McMorrow premiered his skills as writer and director with the short film Thespian X (2002), about a man trying to get a job in a bleak dystopian future. It’s a thematic progenitor of McMorrow’s first feature film, Franklyn. The narrative of Franklyn is impressively complicated; McMorrow originally intended that this complex narrative be much smaller.
GM: It started out as a short film idea – I had a concept about an apartment building in front of a restaurant and what happens in the restaurant and the building over the course of one night. In the restaurant, there is an elderly man dining on his own. In the first floor flat opposite is a young woman about to take her own life and in the top floor flat is an armed assassin about to take the life of the elderly man in the restaurant. The assassin can’t get a bead on the elderly man due to the angle and height of the window and realizes he must take the shot from the floor below—so he interrupts the young woman from committing suicide and charms his way into her flat. From then on, she becomes the hero, going from trying to take her own life to trying to save it as well as the life of the elderly man. This idea started me thinking, reverse-engineering the story if you like—I wanted to know who the elderly man was to the assassin. I immediately felt it would be interesting if the man was the assassin’s father. If so, then why would the young man be trying to kill his own father? What if he didn’t think it was his father? Maybe he saw his father as somebody or something else? That’s where the idea of Jonathan Preest’s and David’s parallel skew on reality came from. Preest saw David’s father as the embodiment of evil and the cause of the girl’s death in Meanwhile City while he was simply the cause of David’s sister’s death in reality. Everything spread from there and in a sense the film was written from the end to the beginning.
You tackle a lot of issues that were on the minds of society at the time (and many of which are still relevant) like the Iraq War, homelessness and the struggle to deal with mental illness. Did you choose the fantastical aspect of this story to marry with these issues because it helps to make difficult conversations more palatable to viewers?
GM: It was definitely a time to question the motivations and aftermath of the Iraq war, there was a lot of soul-searching at the time as well as many documented cases of PTSD in the British armed forces. I was also interested in the different aspects of mental illness in the story. David’s was a complete break, he is a schizophrenic traumatized by the death of his sister and his time in Iraq. Milo was innocently deluded and in a romantic madness that consumed him after his failed relationship, and Emilia was on a path of selfdestruction that she chose to mask by camouflaging her masochistic urges with her creativity, her performance pieces. I guess what was more interesting to me was to take those ideas on even further. There are many moments in the story, especially at the denouement, that imply that there may be some truth lying behind the individual delusions. I always liked the idea that once David had died in this world, he carried on as Jonathan Preest in the other. The film’s structure, with the broken narrative slowly revealing itself to be interconnected in unexpected ways, is a storytelling concept that has become more utilized in recent years. Do you feel that in some ways this storytelling style more accurately reflects the way we experience life (with fragmented understanding), or was it just an attempt to adjust storytelling styles to an increasingly sophisticated viewing audience (in order to retain and maximize surprise and drama)? I think it’s a bit of both. I’ve always been a fan of parallel storylines and there is something to be said for this structure reflecting real life. There are constantly changing threads of fate in our lives, other people’s stories endlessly running parallel with our own, some tying in, some veering off. But I guess this is the nature of storytelling and drama, how these happenings intersect, how different people affect each other. I also think that audiences are becoming more sophisticated (despite what we see from the studios!). I think people are crying out to be challenged, to be manipulated, to be surprised and tested. In the film, the lead character Jonathan exists in a parallel reality from many of the other characters.
What do you think it is about the idea of alternate realities, other worlds or secret societies that continue to draw us in as filmmakers and viewers?
GM: I’ve always liked the idea of alternate realities, especially where it comes down to perspective. Who’s to say that the world that someone who is deemed insane is experiencing is any less valid than our own? In storytelling terms, the parallel world opens up infinite possibilities and that is of course desirable to writers and filmmakers. All fiction is based on a sense of “what if?,” and essentially, we are only restricted by our imaginations. It has also been a useful tool recently for rebooting classic story arcs. Star Trek, for instance, has been sent on a brand-new journey due to J.J. Abrams’ deft use of an alternative Star Trek “timeline.”
Franklyn is clearly touching on issues regarding religion: the main character being an atheist named Preest, the world of Meanwhile City being a largely religious society, and one of the other characters being a church warden. Did you have any specific goals thematically in the inclusion of these elements as part of the larger narrative?
GM: I tend to look at many of the problems in the world today as dogma-based. Meanwhile City is somewhere where we see the ultimate melting pot of religion, all as ridiculous as each other, but the more powerful [The Ministry] rising to the top and being in ultimate control. Meanwhile City is run on faith, and I took this to its ultimate level where you simply had to believe in something (anything, in fact) to have a permit to live and exist in the city. Religion is a manmade thing and so it is ultimately flawed. Jonathan Preest is the only atheist in Meanwhile City and this makes him the only rational person in an insane metropolis. All of this, of course, is simply a reflection of Preest-David’s deeper problems where his vendetta against the theists is a result of his rejection of the same in the real world, namely his father. David’s father tried to explain away his sister’s death by saying it was God’s will, his work as warden shows his commitment to the church. Sadly, it seems that his father has lost everything because of his blinkered faith—his daughter, his wife and then of course, finally, his son.