Remember Coherence? Its Director on Where This Very "Poor" Film Came From

Sometimes poverty doesn't limit your imagination. It sets it off.

"When the comet crossed the sky, different times and spaces intersected, and all order broke down."

Coherence is a science-fiction film about parallel timelines. It is set at a dinner party among eight friends. As the film opens, a comet streaks across the sky and the phone screen of the lead character, Emily, who is on the line with her boyfriend Kevin, suddenly shatters. Strange things follow, one after another: at the dinner table Emily hears a conversation she feels she has heard before; the house loses power; in the pitch dark someone pounds on the door; an unsigned note turns up outside; and when she looks up she sees an identical house across the way, with another version of herself inside, doing exactly what she is doing right now...

Everyone in the house panics. They mark themselves and the friends around them by rolling dice, by carrying glow sticks labeled with tape, by whatever method they can think of. Along the way they turn up the secrets they have been keeping from one another — secrets that leave some of them guilty, others bitter, and at least one of them planning to walk into another house and kill the version of himself inside...

At the end, Emily steps out the door and finds, in the black night, countless identical houses and countless identical versions of herself...

The film's English title, Coherence, refers to the physics of waves interfering with one another. Behind it sits a theory most people have heard of — Schrödinger's cat: a cat shut in a box is both alive and dead. What happens to the cat the instant the box opens has produced two competing accounts. One says the cat can only be in a single state, alive or dead. The other says the cat picks neither "alive" nor "dead," and that both states exist at once in the universe: in one timeline the cat is dead, in another it is alive, except that the two timelines "decohere" within a very short span, so they never cross and instead run on side by side — the "parallel time and space" sung about in 《那些年》 ("Those Years").

In this film, the comet's arrival makes the parallel timelines cross.

Director James Byrkit says the film "took more than a year to plot out, five days to shoot, and a few more months to edit." There was no money, so the location was Byrkit's own house, and the whole film was made with two cameras, eight actors and four crew members.

"Having no money forces you to invent new ways of shooting," Byrkit told us. He also wrote Rango, which won Best Animated Feature at the 84th Academy Awards.

Coherence was made without a script. Byrkit wrote a 12-page outline, then told the actors who their characters were, how they were connected to one another and a few basic facts about the situation. Where the story went from there was up to the actors.

"At first we were all completely lost — the blackouts and the knocking really did startle us. It got much easier later, once we knew each other and knew the story," said Hugo Armstrong, who plays Hugh.

From beginning to end the film contains 450 contradictions and more than a dozen crossings between timelines. "Mind-bending" is what audiences most often call this small, hardcore piece of science fiction.

By the time we met Byrkit, fans had been asking him questions for two hours. "I thought four or five people might come to watch the film, but the theater was packed," he said, plainly unprepared for how eager Chinese fans would be. Byrkit said there may be a Chinese version of Coherence, with a Chinese director and Chinese actors.

We talked with Byrkit and Armstrong about how the film was made, what they wanted it to say, and the questions it leaves open. Some of the questions below came from the audience; the answers have been lightly edited and differ slightly from the exact words spoken.

QDaily: You've been asked before why you wanted to make a film like Coherence, and you said it was because you had "no money" — that's part of it. What was the biggest thing driving you to make it?

James Byrkit: I really, really, really wanted to make a film. I just love, love making films. And at that point I badly needed to make one, needed to tell a story, and Coherence was the cheapest of all the stories I wanted to tell.

As a kid I liked making up stories about myself — several different versions of myself. I'd also spend day after day inventing letters that stood for different meanings, and drawing places on maps that didn't exist. Back then I never thought I'd get to make films, but looking back, a lot of what I did was carrying me step by step toward that. I'd draw, for instance — put my ideas down on paper one picture at a time — and eventually I thought, huh, maybe I could turn all these drawings into a film? (laughs)

QDaily: So what is "no money" good for, as far as making a film goes?

James Byrkit: It forces you to think creatively. It forces you to come up with new ways of shooting. A lot of big-budget films look alike, because so many of them come out of the same studios and use the same technology, the same techniques... and what they produce ends up being boring.

Hugo Armstrong: A big budget means you can have whatever you want the moment you want it, and that can easily make you lazy — you don't want to spend the effort to create something new to put in front of an audience. But that new thing is the most interesting part of a film.

QDaily: James, you've worked on big-budget productions like Rango, and then you made a small, cheap film like Coherence. How do you switch between the two?

James Byrkit: First I go back through my own life and look for something like what the character has been through. If it's there, I put my own feelings into the writing — it's like rewriting my own life. I also let the character take over my life for a while. Say I'm going out to buy a cup of coffee: I'll imagine what that character would order, and how they'd see whatever happens while they're buying it. I listen to music, play with animals. All of it helps.

Those big productions are interesting too, but they aren't improvised, and shooting them isn't as free. The whole thing is so complicated that there are stretches in the middle where you wait around with nothing to do. On a cheap film I can do whatever I want, and the shoot runs smoothly — no waiting, no dead time. That way of working suits me better and leaves me far more satisfied.

QDaily: How do you turn scattered flashes of inspiration into part of a whole story? What is your working process?

James Byrkit: On Coherence I'd sit alone late at night and think about how to write the outline. I'd also talk it through with other people — with Alex Manugian, the actor who plays Amir in the film; he's really the film's other writer. Then at the end I'd think it through alone again. That went on for about a year, and what came out of it wasn't a script but a 12-page outline with some details about each character. I printed it and handed it to the actors, so that on the first night of shooting they had their own identities and their relationships to everyone else.

QDaily: I hear you shot the film at your own house in only five days. What was hard about that, and how did you get around it?

James Byrkit: There was one night we shot outside, and we needed the whole place to be completely dark — no lights, nobody around. But that same night another crew happened to be shooting right outside my house. They were making a Halloween commercial for a candy brand, on a huge scale: giant cameras and lights, props of every kind, hundreds of crew, and hundreds of kids in Halloween costumes. At one point the commercial's director came over and told a few of us to get inside the house and stop standing out there blocking their shoot. I told him, "We're shooting a film too — you're the ones blocking us!"

The shoot took five days, but editing took months. I started cutting it myself, then decided it was too complicated for one person, so I brought in a professional editor to finish the final cut.

QDaily: There's a lot of small talk in the film. Was it rehearsed, or improvised on the spot?

James Byrkit: The dialogue scenes were almost entirely unscripted. Most of it the actors improvised out of the situation. The production did give the actors cards with the most basic information — the points a given scene had to land, who your wife was, who was about to go into the kitchen and that you had to follow her in a moment, that sort of thing — but what they actually said was improvised. Later the cards got more complicated and started involving emotions: someone runs out the door and you have to find a way to bring him back.

Everything else was pure improvisation. There was no script holding anyone back, and that is exactly why they were able to play dialogue scenes of that quality.

QDaily: Did the actors know each other before the film?

Hugo Armstrong: I only knew Alex and James. Everyone else, including Beth, my "girlfriend" in the film, I met just before we started shooting.

QDaily: This sounds less like making a film than playing an adventure game.

James Byrkit: One good thing is that we shot in the order the story actually happens, rather than cutting the film into pieces the way some productions do — the ending first, then the beginning, then the middle. James set up situations for us, and the only thing I had to do was throw myself into them. Except I had no idea what would come next, or what my decisions would lead to.

At the start everyone was baffled, none of us sure what was going on, so I'd go to Alex for help, since Alex had worked on the writing. I'd catch his eye and ask him quietly, "What am I supposed to do now? Should I run out the door with him?" And Alex would answer, quietly, "No, no, stay in the house, don't follow him out." Later, once everyone knew how the story ran, it stopped being a problem.

QDaily: In the film, Mike says, "What if right now, we are the dark side of ourselves?" Do you have a dark side?

James Byrkit: What I wanted to say is that we are the source of our own fear. If something in your life makes you uneasy, it probably isn't other people — it's you. I don't think I have a dark side, but there are certainly things in life you can only settle by looking at yourself.

In the film, everyone's character is the same in every space. The only differences are when the power goes out in each space and what decisions people make, and those decisions lead to very different consequences. In real life, the small decisions that look like nothing can change your whole life, or land you somewhere completely different.

QDaily: What is your favorite work of science fiction?

James Byrkit: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The following questions contain spoilers

QDaily: At the end, Emily finds many houses. She picks one and kills the version of herself inside it. Why that house?

James Byrkit: Two reasons. One is that the power never went out in that house, so nobody there knows any of this happened; everything is calm. The second is that in that house she had said yes to Kevin's request to go to Vietnam with him.

QDaily: So where did the Emily who was knocked out and left in the bathtub go? If everything returns to normal once the comet passes, then who is calling Kevin the next morning?

James Byrkit: That's meant to be open too. One possibility is that the Emily in the bathtub climbed out, found somewhere safe and called Kevin.

QDaily: What happens to the Emily at the end of the film?

James Byrkit: I've thought about Emily's ending too. A lot of people probably read it as a fairly bleak one, because Emily shows the more evil side of her nature. But I think it's a fairly positive ending, because it means she has said goodbye to her old self completely, and she can start a new life in this new house. In her past there was already another version of Emily. She made a big mistake earlier, trying to kill the version of herself in this new house, but that self survived after all, and still exists in another world. She'll start a new life in this new world, having learned from the past.

QDaily: Did you consider any other endings?

James Byrkit: We thought of a second one: Emily and Kevin run off into the night together, and then Emily sees another version of herself running ahead. She does everything she can to catch up, and just as she grabs her, she feels a hand take hold of her own shoulder from behind. She turns around and sees thousands upon thousands of versions of herself.

We also shot a funny scene that we cut: everyone in the room is waiting nervously for Emily to come back when the doorbell rings. They open the door in a state of high tension, and it's the pizza guy.

QDaily: In one scene Emily says the conversation with her friends sounds like something she's heard before, and in another Laurie says she doesn't recognize Mike in the films he's acted in. What were you getting at?

James Byrkit: Emily finding the conversation familiar is mostly a clue — for her, and for the audience — that something strange is happening. The real reason she's hearing that conversation again is that she has walked into a new house.

Laurie not recognizing Mike does two things. One is that Laurie is teasing Mike, saying the characters he plays do nothing for her — the man on screen and the man in real life are two different people. And Mike's assessment of Laurie also carries the theme of the film: the you of right now may not be the real you, and there may be several versions of you.

The other thing is to make the audience curious: what's going on here? Did I walk into the wrong theater? Mike is played by an actor American audiences know fairly well — most people know Nicholas Brendon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But in Coherence, Mike says the film he was in was called Roswell, and at that point American audiences think, "Wait, am I imagining things?"

QDaily: Besides the blue and red glow sticks, a green one turns up later in the film. What does it stand for?

James Byrkit: The green glow stick has no particular meaning. It's only there to show how complicated the situation is. At first they found blue and red glow sticks; the fact that a green one appears later shows that things have already gotten more complicated than they imagined.

Cover image / Coherence