This Film Has 180 “Forks in the Road” and 7 Different Endings. Would You Enjoy Interacting With It?

A film from Switzerland lets the audience decide where the plot goes.

If you are used to sinking into a theater seat and waiting for the screen to change on its own, then Late Shift, screened at the New York Film Festival, will challenge that habit.

The plot is a standard thriller: Matt, a student who works part-time in a parking garage, gets caught up in a robbery. But you can feel the difference the moment you walk into the theater. First you take out your phone and connect to the theater's Wi-Fi, then download an app called CtrlMovie. You cannot watch this film without it.

As the film opens, the story unfolds slowly. While Matt is working the night shift, a woman comes to the security booth and asks him for the keys to a Maserati parked in the garage. The screen cuts to a close-up of her, and two options pop up below: “Okay” and “No Way.”

At that moment the same two options appear in the CtrlMovie app on the audience's phones. Press the matching button and your choice travels to the projection system, which steers the plot by majority vote. If most people choose “Okay,” Matt hands over the keys; if not, he doesn't. The film itself never pauses while this happens. It keeps playing.

The audience becomes part of the film and decides where it goes. That is a surprise for viewers, and it is also how Late Shift sells itself. On its official website it calls itself “the world's first interactive theatrical film.”

Interacting with the audience is nothing new. QDaily alone has covered plenty of examples: a KitKat billboard that recorded passersby's dance moves, Apple's interactive Game of Thrones e-book, Google's poetry-writing wall.

What sets Late Shift apart is its scale and complexity. Across the whole film it is built around 180 moments where viewers can make a choice, and 7 different endings. That is likely to draw audiences back again and again to explore other plotlines and other endings.

The company behind Late Shift is CtrlMovie, a Swiss startup. “Ctrl” is short for the English word “control.” Together the name means “control the movie” — exactly what the company wants audiences to do with Late Shift.

That is what the film's director, Tobias Weber, wanted from the start. Long ago he picked up a habit at the movies: whenever a protagonist made a big decision, he would ask himself, “What would I do if I were the protagonist? What would I choose?” It occurred to him that he could hand those choices to the audience and let them decide where the story went.

At first, though, Weber did not entirely treat this as a film project. “The idea was actually also used in brand marketing,” Caroline Feder, assistant producer of Late Shift, told QDaily. “So the whole company was actually an advertising agency at first.”

Weber thought the time was right for interactive film because he saw how widespread mobile devices had become. A phone can play a film and let the viewer make a character's choices on the touchscreen at the same time; a movie theater makes that considerably harder. So when Weber began experimenting with interactive film, the plan was to release the finished film on mobile devices, in the form of an app.

Weber has a technical background himself, and with the help of some outsourced programmers, a test version of the app with full functionality appeared in 2013. It took him about a year, and in that time they also cut a demo reel of about five minutes, whose plot was essentially the opening stretch of Late Shift.

“We showed the reel to some professional filmmakers. Most of them seemed encouraged, and told us: ‘Give it a try, you might succeed,’” Feder recalled.

Perhaps because of that encouragement, and partly out of personal interest, Weber soon launched plans for a feature — the Late Shift we can see today. To shoot it well he even spent a while studying at film school. Producer Baptiste Planche and assistant producer Caroline Feder joined one after the other, and CtrlMovie was formally founded in 2014, devoting itself entirely to making interactive films.

The film cost about 1.5 million Swiss francs (roughly 10 million yuan). That is not a high figure, especially in Switzerland, where prices and labor are expensive. In China or the United States it would buy a low-budget independent film.

But Switzerland has its own advantages. Take the United States: the market is big enough and the film industry is complete, so capital favors expensive commercial blockbusters. The Swiss market is small and has no capacity for blockbusters, so money willing to go into film flows instead to small independent productions like Late Shift.

Late Shift is one of them. Feder said the 1.5 million francs came mainly from three Swiss institutions: the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, Swiss German Radio and Television, and the Swiss Culture Foundation. On top of that, because Late Shift was produced in the UK, it qualified for the British government's tax rebate. Together these solved CtrlMovie's financing problem.

Raising money is a problem every film has to face, and on that point Late Shift's experience was ordinary. Production was another matter: there the film turned extraordinarily complicated, and the script alone was a huge headache.

A traditional screenplay, apart from the necessary descriptions of scenes, shots and other details, mostly just lists the characters' dialogue in chronological order.

Late Shift had to build the audience's choices into the script, so the script kept branching — something a traditional screenplay cannot do. The crew organized it with flowcharts, the kind used in programming.

The slide in the picture below shows how. Each box holds a complete piece of dialogue; the bottom of each box carries different options depending on how far the plot has gone, and arrows link the segments together into a complete script.

The hardest part of writing this way is not the flowchart but keeping the plot coherent and consistent. That is hard enough in an ordinary film: in the zombie movie Train to Busan, released not long ago, exactly how long it takes a bitten person to turn became something fans criticized. That is a script's consistency breaking down.

For Late Shift the problem is worse, because everything that follows has to stay consistent with every earlier choice. As the options multiply, checking that consistency gets far harder.

“If you choose to help a woman at the beginning, then that woman should show you some goodwill later on. But if you don't help her, she might curse you out instead,” Feder said, by way of example.

When the whole script was finished, they counted 180 moments that call for a choice; stringing together any single complete storyline takes 60 to 80 of them, and the whole thing leads to 7 different endings. Keeping all of it coherent and consistent took an enormous amount of work, as one can imagine.

That was the part Feder found hardest. You have to be extremely “careful and meticulous,” and above all “not get lost in the complexity of the story.”

The script added to the work of shooting and post-production too. One viewing of Late Shift in a theater runs only 85 to 90 minutes, but the film has to hold different segments for different choices, so its total length comes to 4 hours — about two ordinary features.

And although the audience has to make choices, the film never pauses to wait for them; for the sake of flow it plays straight through. That means the acting, the editing, the mixing of the score and everything else have to be finer, with no room for continuity errors.

Take the score. When the audience makes different choices for the protagonist, the music has to change along with them. So the composer had to work out how one piece of music could branch into two melodies to match the protagonist's different choices — no small challenge.

Heavy and complicated as the work was, CtrlMovie took 3 years from starting the Late Shift project to releasing it this year, which is not long.

It looks shorter still when you consider the size of the team. Three people worked on the early script, about six on post-production, and only during shooting did the team grow to around forty. Feder calls that “a standard-sized film crew.”

With Late Shift finished, what CtrlMovie has to work out now is how to sell it.

As mentioned earlier, Weber first thought interactive film suited playback on mobile devices best, and Late Shift appeared first as an app in Apple's App Store.

Like most apps today, it uses in-app purchases. CtrlMovie split the film into several chapters: the first is free, the rest are priced at US$4.99 (30 yuan in the China App Store).

Realizing that theaters could also be a channel for releasing Late Shift came later, when the film was nearly finished and test screenings had begun.

“We found there's a special atmosphere in the theater. When you watch this film together with an audience, you end up discussing the choices with the people around you,” Feder said. “I think it brings people together more than we expected — a wonderful experience. So we decided to release Late Shift in theaters.”

For that they built a system that lets theaters screen the film. At its simplest, Feder said, it takes a laptop and a Wi-Fi network: viewers download the CtrlMovie app and send their choices to the laptop over Wi-Fi, and the screen plays Late Shift normally.

Around the time the Late Shift app reached the App Store, Apple TV came out. CtrlMovie saw a miniature theater in it, one that would let a family watch Late Shift together in the living room. So they brought the film to Apple TV quickly, and the CtrlMovie app was updated this August to work with it.

Asked which of the three channels — mobile devices, theaters or Apple TV — matters more to CtrlMovie, Feder replied: “What I can say is that theaters are definitely a tool for raising the app's profile. Honestly, I think the app store has more potential as a revenue model.”

Since the Late Shift app launched in March, CtrlMovie has kept taking the film around the world for screenings, including festivals in Cannes and New York. That is how they hope to get more people to notice Late Shift, and interactive film as a form.

At the New York Film Festival, producer Baptiste Planche and Tobias Weber, who directed and wrote the film, talked briefly with the audience. Many filmmakers asked about the production model; on the whole, people found the film novel.

That enthusiasm among filmmakers still seems to travel only in a small circle. Before Late Shift came to the New York Film Festival, they tagged a New York Times culture reporter from their official Twitter account and got no reply. Neither Rotten Tomatoes nor Metacritic, the critics' site, carries a score for the film, which means the mainstream film world and its press have yet to notice it.

Caroline Feder still thinks attending the New York Film Festival helped them somewhat: “It connected us with some interesting people... now we're able to get in touch with theaters.”

That matters a great deal, because as a startup CtrlMovie still has to make money. Feder said app-store downloads and theatrical screenings have already brought in some revenue. As for whether it can turn a profit, they will have to see.

Besides making money from Late Shift itself, CtrlMovie has built software called CtrlEdit, which lets users shoot their own interactive films. They hope more people will take an interest in the form, so the company can license the software to them for extra revenue.

But whether the money comes from Late Shift and the interactive films that follow it, or from licensing CtrlEdit to others, all of it depends on whether interactive film wins acceptance.

The reviews under the app in the store look fairly good. One American user's review, titled “The Future of Movies,” read: “I love this game, and I bet this is the future.”

There are doubts too: some low ratings in the app store came from users who could not download chapters inside the app. On the technical side, CtrlMovie still has work to do.

And one viewer who watched Late Shift in New York said: “In the end, whether the experience is good comes down to the story itself. Sure, there's the fun of being in control, but making a film like this really demands strong writing skills and a story that suits the format — otherwise I'd rather follow everyone else and watch one ending, one storyline.”

If that is what most people think, why go to all that trouble — writing a script with flowcharts, setting up 180 moments that require a choice and 7 different endings?

(Intern reporter Chen Yixuan also contributed to this article.)