Fate Or Fancy

“I could answer your question,” considers Michael Spierig, pausing mid-interview, turning to his identical twin brother before proceeding. “But Peter, can we really answer this question without revealing too much? What do we do here? Like, if someone who hasn’t seen the film reads this, it’ll ruin the film, won’t it?”

Starring Ethan Hawke, Noah Taylor and Sarah Snook (“People haven’t even begun to see what she’s capable of,” enthuses Peter, regarding his leading lady), the film was shot at Docklands Studios. Melbourne isn’t quite the Spierigs’ hometown, though. The 38-year-olds had an itinerent childhood: born in Germany, they lived in Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra as kids, spent an adolescent stint in New Jersey and finally returned to Brisbane. Throughout, the pair were VCR obsessives, watching the iconic genre pictures synonymous with the ‘80s dreaming of making their own films: “We grew up on Star Wars,” Michael says, “and loving the same movies helped us not hate each other.”

After graduating from the Queensland College of Art, they cut their teeth directing ads, their four years in the commercial world taking them from novices to seasoned pros. They used the cash they made to bankroll their ambitions: investing “every cent [we]’d ever made from commercials” into financing their debut feature, 2003’s Undead. A “labour-of-love made with a lot of help – and a lot of favours – from friends and family,” the film was a wild genre picture predating the current billion-dollar zombie-entertainment industry.

“At the time, there were no zombie films being made!” says Michael. “We had such a love of that genre – from [George A.] Romero and Sam Raimi – that we said, ‘Hey, let’s make one!’ Of course, by the time we’d actually finished it, there were like ten of them coming out. But we looked at people like Raimi and Peter Jackson, how they’d got their start working in low budget genres. With a zombie movie, you don’t have to spend millions of dollars getting movie stars, the genre itself is the movie star.”

Their second film, 2009’s Daybreakers, was another genre work, a vampire movie set in a doomed, post-apocalyptic future. Predestination may be based on a short story, All You Zombies, by sci-fi icon Robert A Heinlein, but it represents an ambitious departure for the Spierigs. “Predestination is less of a pure genre film, more something that spans different genres,” Michael explains. “It’s definitely a science fiction film, there’s no question of that. There’s certainly thriller aspects to it, as well. But at the same time it’s also a period film, and it’s, as much as anything, a drama, one exploring these characters. It’s fun to cross genres, to cross multiple time periods, to cross all these ideas.

“It’s rare that you find a story so complex, so rich with paradoxes and wild ideas, so challenging to the norms of narrative structure,” marvels Michael of Predestination’s paradox-riddled tale. “Heinlein was one of the true greats of that early heyday of science fiction writing; [Isaac] Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and Heinlein were really the guys back then. But Hollywood, for whatever reason, has never really tapped into him, in the way that, say, Philip K. Dick has been so often adapted.”

Though shot in Melbourne, the Docklands interiors are used to portray Cleveland and New York at various points in the 20th century. Rather than taking Heinlein’s original tale deep into the 21st century, the Spierigs chose to preserve the 1959 original’s timeline. “It was really fun to create what we thought [Heinlein’s] vision of the ‘60s or the ‘80s of the future would look like,” says Peter. “Those periods, from the ‘40s through to the ‘90s, are all so distinct, so visually interesting, so I loved being able to stay true to the original story and create these visions of an imagined future as an alternate past.”

With Opening Night imminent, the brothers are excited but wary. “That’s where we are at the moment,” says Peter, “weighing up what we can and can’t say before Opening Night. We’re so honoured to be screening it MIFF, who showed Undead a decade ago. We think it’s a good film for a festival: it’s really for people who like to go to the movies and be challenged, to have to think, to see something that isn’t your standard story."

Opens Miff, 31 Jul, Hamer Hall & in cinemas nationally 28 Aug