Words and interview by Hugh Robertson
Imagine you’re in high school, and you and some friends stumble across something that gives you super powers. All of a sudden you can operate machinery, move large objects around, even fly, all by using your mind. What would you do with your new powers? Sure, some of you would be all noble and altruistic about it and help little old ladies across the street, or whatever. And, statistically, some of you would go mad with power, hurling things through the window of your ex’s house and pushing all the traffic off the road during peak hour. But in all likelihood, you’d just have fun with it, and muck around with your friends.
This is the situation at the heart of
Chronicle, which follows three high school friends who suddenly become endowed with powers beyond their dreams when, at a party one night, they decide to go exploring in a mysterious cave. And it’s all fun and games for a while – making toys come to life in front of terrified children, moving parked cars a few meters – but things become darker as one of the three friends starts to go a little crazy (ok, a LOT crazy) with power.
I know what you’re thinking: you’ve seen almost this exact same movie a bunch of times. You’re thinking it, I’m thinking it, everyone’s thinking it – including Josh Trank,
Chronicle’s 26 year-old first-time director. Trank also wrote the original story that was used to pitch the film, and was adamant throughout the whole process that he was the guy to direct, precisely because he knew how bad the results would be if those making the film weren’t careful with the material.
When he was put in charge, Trank worked incredibly hard to make sure the film was as grounded in reality as possible, in much the same vein as Christopher Nolan’s
Batman films, which Trank has cited in past interviews as a major influence. The three main actors were set up in a house together during pre-production so their relationships with each other would be as close as the characters they portrayed, and the stunts rely on piano wire and good, old-fashioned stunt performers rather than computer-generated wizardry.
“It could [have gone] either way”, Trank admits. “We’ve seen this [Good vs. Evil] story done so many times that at this point we’re not just jaded to the visual effects, we’re also jaded to the stereotype of how things play out – it’s become so predictable. And, ironically, to tell this story in a very basic, simple, stripped-down manner is almost outside the box, even though it’s coming from something so mundane and ordinary as real life.”
Trank is remarkably candid about the potential problems with the film, particularly filming in the style of a hand-held camera. Was he at all concerned that this one decision could turn away audiences who are fed up with gimmicky nonsense? “I thought about that every day,” Trank admits. “In prep, in production and then when we were cutting the movie. And the main thing that you’ve got to do to avoid making it annoying or gimmicky is to avoid the ‘look at this’ – to not point attention to the fact that that’s what’s going on. To let the camera work be kind of invisible at a certain point. And I think that very quickly in to the movie you forget that there’s a convention behind the story telling, and that you can just enjoy it as a movie.”
Chronicle is generating tremendous buzz among both critics and moviegoers, a tantalising trailer and some very clever advertising giving away just enough so that people aren’t entirely sure what it is they are excited by, but they know damn well that they are excited. Australian Alex Russell, one of the lead actors, knows exactly how we’re all feeling. He had been sent the script purely to read, but within twenty pages was on the phone to his agent, pleading with them to get him an audition. “I hadn’t been as excited about something since I could remember,” he tells me. “I called my agent and said, “Please, please get me in for this, this is incredible. [Then] when I hung up and read the rest of it I did [called them] again. It was really, really exciting – I’d never read anything like it. It was unique.”
“We were always trying to find that happy medium where we weren’t trying to be too flashy with an idea that was really cool,” Trank continues. “It’s very easy to make a really, really great concept over the top when you fall too in love with it. [You just have to] let the idea play its role, and let it serve what’s on screen, rather than falling in to, “Hey, isn’t this a GREAT IDEA LOOK AT IT ALL OVER THE SCREEN BLAAAAAAAAH”.
It would be fair to say that one of the main reasons films fail is that directors and studios don’t understand their audience, and often don’t trust their intelligence. Time will tell whether
Chronicle is a hit or not, but if it fails it won’t be because Josh Trank doesn’t get his audience – after all, he’s one of us.