Original-Cin Interview: Relax, I’m From the Future’s Director on Opportune Casting
By Chris Knight
It was pure chance that New Zealand’s Rhys Darby became the star of Toronto writer-director Luke Higginson’s new movie Relax, I’m From the Future. Or, given the film’s themes of time travel, time loops and destiny, maybe it was always fated to be?
Whatever the cause, the effect is wonderful. Darby plays Casper, a man from an unspecified but not too distant future, who arrives in our time ready to carry out an equally vague mission. Or is he? I mean, yes, he talks about saving the world, but in the early going he’s basically homeless, having arrived without money or anything approaching marketable skills.
It’s lucky he runs into Holly (Canada’s Gabrielle Graham), who takes pity on him and gives him a place to crash. In return, he convinces her he is what he says, and soon the two of them are cleaning up on lottery tickets and sports gambling. (Casper memorized a lot of numbers before he left home.)
Higginson didn’t originally plan on Darby being his Casper, but he’s thrilled at the way it turned out. “Quite frankly, if I’d known he was on the table, he would have been my number one guy,” he says over a coffee at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, where Relax screened last spring ahead of its wider release.
Instead, he had already cast… someone else. He can’t say who, but when that person dropped out, Darby dropped in.
“The initial casting was honestly finding someone that was enough of a name for international distribution, that could get us a budget,” Higginson says. “That was the practical consideration.”
Read our review of Relax, I’m From the Future
“But then my guiding principle for that role, knowing that I had to have some flexibility about who would be available and who could do it, is it had to be someone that could be inherently likeable,” he continues. “Because the character does some dark stuff. And it is essential that it is someone that can be likeable throughout and can land a joke.”
Higginson is an accomplished editor of television (Dragons’ Den) and film (Red Rover, Dead Before Dawn). But Relax, I’m From the Future was his first feature as a director. So, he was a little nervous to be casting Darby, star of TV’s Our Flag Means Death and Flight of the Conchords.
“In our initial conversation, I very much viewed it as me pitching him: ‘Please do this movie!’ I felt very much like I was the one who was auditioning,” he remembers. “And then instead, we had this call and he asked me if I was OK with him being in the movie. And my immediate response was like: ‘Yes! Yes, of course!’”
Speaking of time travel, Relax, I’m From the Future is actually based on a short film of the same name that Higginson made 10 years ago, and which played the Toronto International Film Festival. It did well.
“It just struck a chord, and people liked it,” he recalls. “And a bunch of people were like, ‘I want to see a longer version of this.’ But it was a slow process, because it did start as a sort of one-joke short.” (If you see the film — and you should! — the short was basically the scene on the rooftop, between a time traveller and a suicidal artist.)
“A person from the future with no plan was funny to me,” Higginson says. “But it’s hard to build an arc around that because it’s very easy for it to just get boring. So that was actually surprisingly difficult to crack.”
He continues: “It was only when a bunch of things started going really wrong in my life around 2016 that it became me being like, ‘Oh, I really don’t think things are going to turn out well in the future.’ That allowed me to crack it open a little bit and give it what I think became the depth that it needed to be a feature script.”
For the record, Higginson says he’s in a better place now. “It was therapeutic,” he says of making the film. “It helped me, it really did.”
Higginson is, not surprisingly, a fan of (other) time travel movies.
“The one that made me fall in love with time travel movies is Back To The Future Part Two,” he says. “I have such a clear, crystalline memory of being I think 10-years-old, and watching it.”
Seeing Michel J. Fox’s character watching himself in a scene from the first movie “just blew my mind,” he says. “That was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.”
Others on his list include the 2007 Spanish film Timecrimes (Los cronocrimenes), and Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys from 1995. “Gilliam does that old, weird, dirty technology thing that I love so much.”
And speaking of future tech, Relax features a strange little handheld device, bland and innocuous, looking a bit like a defibrillator paddle. But it doesn’t save lives; quite the opposite. It emits a cheery “Hello!” before turning its victim into a cloud of vapour.
“The original design for it in the script was like, ‘What if Apple made brass knuckles?’ The idea of this corporate, mass-produced multitool that was very dangerous. And also sort of friendly.” So, equal parts hilarious and terrifying, not unlike Higginson’s imagined future.
“I am sort of a cynical optimist,” he says. “I’m not convinced that things are not going to go horribly wrong. But I do think it’s worth trying to make them better. And I do think that there is value in trying. And that’s sort of a happy enough place for me.”
Relax, I’m From the Future is now playing in theatres.