Making Ripples

9 September 2014 | 5:40 pm | Anthony Carew

Expansive ideas on a small budget; that's what director Hugh Sullivan was going for with the Infinite Man

Making a time-travel film was something that I’d wanted to do for a long time,” says Hugh Sullivan. The 33-year-old had long been an admirer of movies employing sci-fi’s well-worn conceit but didn’t want to make one to join their ranks. Instead of dreaming of vast visions of unimaginable futures, he saw the device much more pragmatically – as a way he could make a low-budget debut feature. 

“Time travel always seemed, to me, like a great way to make something that could be self-contained, that could be shot on a single location with a small budget, yet still feel expansive,” Sullivan offers.

The Infinite Man, Sullivan’s first feature film, feels expansive not by CGI landscapes, but by ideas. It was shot in the unused ‘motel block’ section of a caravan park in a Woomera dustbowl, the cast and crew lodging in one of the buildings, then shooting in the one opposite. “It was a pretty amazing feeling to roll out of bed in the morning and be right there on set,” Sullivan recounts, warmly.

Even though it’s contained to a single location, Infinite Man’s time-travel device creates a host of parallel possibilities and knotty paradoxes. Out to have “as much fun as can be had” with the genre, it’s a tale of a neurotic nerd (Josh McConville) obsessed with achieving ‘perfection’ while on a romantic weekend away with his girlfriend (Hannah Marshall). When her blowhard ex (Alex Dimitriades) shows up, these best-laid plans go awry, The Infinite Man’s infinite possibilities spiralling out from male insecurities and obsessions.

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“Time travel always seemed like a great metaphor for exploring the emotional journey of your characters,” Sullivan says. “[The story] gets tangled up just because it’s an interior journey more than anything; it’s about a character impulsively following his instincts, even when they’re self-destructive. We all circle back over past events, but here the main character does it incessantly and compulsively, so he turns that from an internal thing into a more external thing. That he invents time travel is as much a dramatic device as anything; it just seemed like the best opportunity to approach these ideas of repression and rumination in a very literal way.”

Sullivan spent two solid years writing The Infinite Man, so much of that time spent “staying true to the initial impulse [of] a single location [and] only three characters” and “making sure the time-travel mechanics added up”. However, the filmmaker found his script beholden to the same butterfly-effect principles that come up for characters caught in time-travel pictures. “Any time I made a change to any scene,” recounts Sullivan, “there would be ripple effects everywhere else, and I’d have to go through and make changes to those scenes, too. It was – no pun intended – time-consuming.”

The Infinite Man  is in cinemas 18 Sep