TOTAL TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT

THE MAKING OF PARADOX
By Paul Williams

I'm migrating articles over from the EHP website to this blog. This piece was originally written on 26 February 2004.

What is a paradox? According to the battered old dictionary at home a paradox is ‘that which is apparently absurd but is or may be really true.’ And I think that just about covers it.

Paradox is a love story/time travel/horror film.

In short: Back in 1999 Ben gets struck by lightning and starts to see visions of the past, namely vision of a murder know as the Tube Killer who stalked the underground in 1949. The flat Ben lives in was the Tube Killers lair. He also meets a girl who lives in the flat in the future. He is warned by two time guardians to stop mucking about with time as it has serious consequences. Ben doesn’t listen and uses information from the future to meet the girl from the future in the present but this ends the future. The Tube Killer escapes out of the psychic scar that Ben has been using to travel through time and starts killing again in the present. Ben ends up an apocalyptic future, infested with the soulless corpses of the Tube Killers victims. Then Ben helps kill an older version of himself and finds that his friends have turned into freedom fighters in a zombie city. And then things get really complicated...

A MULTI-LAYERED, MIXED-GENRE MISH-MASH

Paradox started life as a horror film idea I had after wondering around in the cold after a clearly mad tour guide on a Jack The Ripper walk. It was bitter, it was dark, it was a part of East London you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be caught alone in, especially in the dead of the night. But the mad tour guide (with hair far too curly for his own good, and a bright yellow puffer jack far too puffy than was clearly necessary) made the tour come alive and made the biting wind not seem to matter. It was the birth of Norris and the germ of an idea that would grow into Paradox.

It started as a simple ghost story/slasher film. Tourists on a ghost walk around the capital were slowly being taken and killed by the very killer they thought had died decades ago. The killer started with the stragglers at the back, the shadows taking them. They disappeared unnoticed by the rest of the crowd, all of them hypnotised by the over-enthusiastic tour guide. More and more go missing and finally the crowd realise they are all in mortal danger and run for there lives – but it’s too late. The tour guide laughs manically as he feeds his master, the hungry ghost of the Tube Killer. As a result, what starts to appear? Zombies! Hurrah!

There’s something about zombies – no, scratch that – there’s something about zombie films that just lends itself to a low budget. I have never seen a big budget zombie fest (I’m ignoring Resident Evil on purpose because it stunk more than a room full of decomposing skunks). The Evil Dead, Bad Taste, 28 Days Later, Dawn Of The Dead all low budget gore films that use zombies to great effect. There’s something inherently fun about dressing your mates up as decomposing corpses then slicing their heads off with a spade – or is that just me

That was the initial idea a nutshell. Meanwhile, in my clogged head, many ideas

clashed and bled into one another and as I worked on the Tube Killer other stories wove themselves in.
The big issue we here at EHP face on a daily basis is the lack of that papery thing most people call money. We need it and have none of it. To make a film, even a short, is an expensive endeavour and EHP has dipped into overdrafts, credit cards, other peoples wallets to scrape together the cash to make the films we have. With this in mind I started to think how we could make a low budget film with a large scope? Gladiator in a shoe box. The idea was to set a story in one place, but at three different times – past, present and future. One set – big story – low budget. This lead onto the prickly problem of time travel!

Films and TV series that have attempted time travel or messing around with time: Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3, The Time Machine (duh!), When Peggy Sue Got Married, Minority Report, Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Terminator, Timecop, Donnie Darko, Star Trek 4 – The Voyage Home, Groundhog Day, Quantum Leap and, of course, Doctor Who. This is by no means all of them, this is just a selection; some good, some bad, some spectacularly awful; I’ll let you decide which category each of the above fall into. They all do one thing though, and that’s prove how difficult time travel is to handle. There are many rules and time travel can easily get away from you and get very complicated and covered in paradoxes before you can scream ‘88 MILES PER HOUR!’ A classic example of this is Terminator and you can read how in our web-only scene from the forthcoming improbable marathon that is Paradox (oh, the shameless plugging).

With time travel it’s easy to slip up, to suddenly have a gap in your plot the size of a black hole that is sucking the audience in and leaving them with an expression of total bafflement – remember the expression you had after watching the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded? Same one. How did I manage to avoid the Black Hole Suck (official term)? I ignored it. In fact I went even further, I made it part of the story. As a twisted result of this Paradox, with all its time travel, alternate versions of the future and people killing older incarnations of themselves it sort of makes sense. Sense in its own improbable, inexplicable, mind-bending way.

So, that explains the time travel and the zombie bits, what about the romance? Now, I’m a romantic at heart. Forget all the selling your soul, possessed pens, and the living dead stuff, I want to make romantic comedies. In all seriousness as I have said before, we as an audience, watching film, always need to relate or root for someone on screen. The audience needs to see something and say to themselves ‘I know exactly what you mean’ or ‘I know someone like that’ or ‘I’m like that’, and when your dealing with the realms of Sci-Fi and fantasy you have to anchor your story to reality. The love story and the friendships in Paradox have to work otherwise the story falls apart. No-one’s going to watch zombies devour a screaming victim and tutt to themselves thinking ‘The same thing happened to me only last week’. But everyone’s been in love, been in a friendship, been dumped, been the dumper, been hurt, been infatuated, been drunk, been struck by lightning. In order for the audience to come on this journey with you, through a zombie infested, time-twisting adventure, they have to believe. That’s were the love story comes in.

So, that’s how to write a time travel/horror/comedy. Now, how about filming it? In 2003 we made a trailer and some completed scenes... just got to film and edit the other two hours and we're laughing!

MERELY IMPROBABLE

From page to screen: the creation of a promo trailer.

‘How do we make this thing?’ we thought to ourselves. If we were just selling the script we would hock it around film production companies and funders until someone said ‘Kid, let’s make a movie!’ – to complete this picture the character should be chopping on a fat cigar. However, we don’t just want to sell the script, we want to make it – that’s a whole different approach.
We are selling not only the Paradox script, but also the idea that we are the ideal people to make it – future filmmakers! We have to make funders believe in EHP as much as we do. So, to accompany the script, we made a promotional trailer and here’s a short summary of how.

‘OH SHIT INDEED, MY BOY!’

Back in the cold January of 2003 we gathered a group of friends, family and actors and shot a selection of scenes from the script of Paradox. PT and I pulled out of the scripts key scenes, pivotal moments, and anything we thought was funny and, with the help of Scott Charnick, ordered them into a shooting schedule.
Now, it's known that a film is written three times: once when you write it and redraft, redraft and redraft; second when you shoot it, and compromise, improve upon and rewrite; and thirdly when you edit, re-shoot, test screen and re-edit. The upshot of this is that the focus of the film, over time, should become sharper and sharper until it could fry an ant. Sometimes this works – sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the main point to remember is that a film is never finished – it’s just left. You could go on refining, re-editing and re-shooting forever, but you have to reach a point where you are happy (the catch 22 is that you are never happy).

The point I am trying to reach is that filming a script is usually more an exercise in preparation and orgainsation. It’s easy to get lost and forget what you have filmed and what needs to be filmed – this is were the strict preparation comes in. So, while PT, Scott and I bashed the scenes we were going to film into a few days shooting, we were also trying to assemble a cast!

A few months before shooting EHP had arranged a read-through of the Paradox script, gathering a group of actors with the help of EHP regular and superstar Amanda Liberman (who later went on to play Florence). The read-through produced a mixed bag, but the two wonderful things it did produce was the beautiful Karen Fisher-Pollard (who played Laura) and the faultless Chris Courtney (Norris). The role of Steve I’d written specifically for Stuart ‘The Man’ Mangan, a fact he still can’t believe today. That was half the cast, but we still needed more and, most importantly, we needed a leading man!

The trailer was going to be very crash, bang, wallop, and I knew in my head that it was more important for the people to look the part because of the short amount of screen time they were going to have. They had to convey a lot in a short space of time and, in my minds eye, I had a clear vision of them - I only had to find them in real life. PT found Keith and Emma when he looked up from his desk at work and saw Toby Wiedmann and Sharon Gosling (Keith and Emma). We were almost there, but still no leading man!

Ben was the pivotal character, the man the whole story revolved around, the linchpin, the keystone, the – the leading man. We searched high and low and finally found that the answer and the person was staring me in the face. Phil Thomas and I worked at the Science Museum to make ends meet, me with the film company and Phil with his design work. He was the only man who spent hours sculpting his hair to make it look messy – I’m sure this is a contradiction. He looked the part, he was the part, he didn’t want the part!
It took a while to convince Phil he was the ideal man for the role, and even days before the shoot he was convinced I’d find someone else – he always considered himself an alternative. Truth is when it comes to using non-actors there’s a little rule I follow: actor can play any role you give them, non-actor can play themselves or a heightened version of themselves. Phil was Ben, he just didn’t know it yet.

The cast had been cast, the best bits of the script picked, the locations prepped (PT’s flat and Amanda and Karen’s flat) – we were ready to film.

We had ten days to film selected scenes and it all went very smoothly thanks to a fantastic cast and, of course, PT and Scott. Sure lights blew, cast forgot their lines (Phil was the main offender), things went missing or weren’t there, but it didn’t matter. There was such a good feeling about the project that everyone gave 1000% (yes, I know that’s not a percentage).

Some of the highlights included:

Phil’s First Day. It would seem simple – walk down the hall, stop, drop the comics you’re holding, pick up an iron, CUT! It took 12 takes.

Tim and Wenzie. Kissing is never an easy thing to do, but kissing in front of two men, one of which is shoving a camera in your face, is next to impossible. Tim and Wenzie came through and Wenzie didn’t even flinch when PT flicked fake blood in her face.

Toby Wiedmann. I write some impossible speeches sometimes – ok, most of the time. The character of Keith had some tough dialogue to wade through, but Toby nailed them all.

Make-up. Thanks to the talents of Catherine McAuliffe and PT the zombies never looked so dead.

The Zombie Horde. Ah, the power of film. Before the shoot EHP went on a recruiting drive for zombies. We needed one shot of a few of zombies walking towards the camera, at night, down a dark alley. What we got was 30 people stumbling down a rain soaked cobble street. I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.

Norris. Chris Courtney got the character of Norris more than even I did, and I created him (Norris that is, I can’t take credit for Chris). He breathed life into my words and made acting look easy (which, trust me, it isn’t).

My Dad. Look, my dad can not act! He delivers his lines in this strange flat tone and when the camera’s on him he goes as stiff as a board. However, after the premiere, the one character everyone remembered was Trevor played by my dad. I wish I never wrote that ‘pretzel’ line.

Karen and Phil’s Bedroom Scene. It took us a couple of hours, the room was as smoky as a jazz club once we’d finished, but they worked so well together the scene came out great.

Amanda’s Monologue. Last shot of the ten days; 10.30pm, one of my stupid long monologues, Amanda trying to get her head round it, me wanting it in one shot. It took a few attempts but we got it, and my dad has comic-timing in his blood.

Bubble Bath Burst. Phil bursting out from under the suds was a great moment – and he did it three times.

The Whole Damn Experience. Each time I get behind a camera I forget how much I enjoyed it the last time. After a shoot your always worried about the shots you didn’t get, the converge you forgot, that the days of filming become a distant memory. But when your back behind the camera you remember why you're doing it. Why you spend all the time writing, preparing, organising. The film had an amazing bonding experience for cast and crew. You have such an intense time you feel like you’ve know everyone forever and are sad when the film is wrapped. I guess that’s why, soon after it’s all over, my fingers are dancing over the keyboard again, coming up with a new way of getting everyone together again.