The Passing Of Time In Reverse

There were times during the making of Australian filmmaker Cris Jones' first feature The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom, the Opening Night feature at the 2016 Melbourne International Film Festival, when the writer-director and his leading man, actor Xavier Samuel, found themselves approaching what they dubbed 'The Otto Threshold'. 

That is, a point where a part of the story couldn't be logically justified. When that happened, the two men decided to toss logic to one side and rely on emotional authenticity to see them through.

"We just had to accept it," recalls Samuel with a laugh. "Play it simply and honestly."

"I thought I'd have to record all my lines backwards and re-record them forwards to see if it would change the dialect, the sound of his voice."

As The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom tells the story of a man blessed or cursed with 'retrochronology' — the title character, played by Samuel, ages normally but experiences the passing of time in reverse, remembering the future rather than the past — one can imagine Samuel and Jones bumped up against The Otto Threshold more than once.

"I had a notebook with me as I read the script, and I filled it with questions for Cris," says Samuel. Like 'What is Otto's relationship with spontaneity?' At one point I thought Otto would have learned English backwards — that would have been his experience with language — so I thought I'd have to record all my lines backwards and re-record them forwards to see if it would change the dialect, the sound of his voice. There are ideas that are so gigantic they're hard to wrap your head around. Cris and I sat down and talked for ages and ages about the logic of it all but also how you would experience such a life emotionally. It was a really wonderful challenge."

However, while the concept of Otto's condition may seem hard to process, it's to the film's credit that it explains and indeed expresses it clearly and coherently, and that once it gets that out of the way the film tells a moving story of life and relationships seen and understood in different ways from different perspectives — the tender-but-impossible love between Otto and neuropsychologist Ada (played at different ages by mother and daughter Rachel Ward and Matilda Brown) foremost among them.

"It's such a sad and beautiful thought, as happens with Otto and Ada, that she's meeting him for the first time as he's saying goodbye to her," says Samuel. "That kind of pathos is a wonderful thing for an actor to have to investigate."

Samuel is one of the busiest Australian actors around at the moment, building a body of work that includes international productions ranging from The Twilight Saga: Eclipse to Whit Stillman's Love & Friendship and homegrown projects like the hit comedy A Few Best Men and its upcoming sequel A Few Less Men.

He and Jones were originally set to collaborate on the filmmaker's Midnight In Byzantium before that film's funding fell through and Jones subsequently wrote The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom with Samuel in mind for the lead role.

"I read the script before I properly sat down with Cris, and it's such an original and perplexing idea — it's rare you read scripts with that kind of audacity," says Samuel. "But it's also a very simple love story at its core. That's Cris — he's brilliant but also really humble and eccentric. And he's been persistent and stuck to his guns, worked on his own ideas and his own films for years, so it's nice that Otto Bloom gets such a nice start in life by opening MIFF this year."