A Place In Time

When Safety Not Guaranteed screened at the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, audiences cheered at the quirky indie time-travel movie's climactic finale. It's a reaction director Colin Trevorrow's seen before. “When we went to Sundance, I had no idea if we were going to get laughed out of the room, we didn't know what the reaction was going to be,” the 36-year-old filmmaker remembers the film's premiere. “That was the first place we heard the cheer.”

Though he admits he'll cheer anything (“I cheer a good taco”) Trevorrow has particularly fond memories of cheering Back To The Future's own time-travel leap, back in his childhood, and he's glad to get cheered, even at screenings where the film's oddball sense of humour may not be so well received. “Screening the film in other countries, people look quizzically at us and don't understand our humour. We unintentionally made a uniquely American movie, because our main character has really, really high confidence levels without the facts or reality to back that up.”

That uniquely American quality translated perfectly to uniquely American locales. “We played very well in rural areas. For independent films, that's rarely the case. There's something in this film that really connects with people in the middle of the country. I think it comes down to this: it's a film about these very cynical people from the city leaving their comfort zone and entering a rural area, finding this person that those in cities make fun of, and then they discover that this guy really has them all fooled.”

These city slickers include TV's Aubrey Plaza and Jake Johnson, and the main character is played by 2012 indie-movie everywhereman Mark Duplass, who plays a backwoods mystic undertaking a top secret time-travel mission. Writer Derek Conolly took cues from “all these crazy characters” he knew in his Floridian childhood, as well as initial inspiration from a 1997 classified in Backwoods Home Magazine (“sort of a libertarian, build-your-own-cabin-in-the-woods, have-a-lot-of-shotguns kind of magazine”) soliciting collaborateurs to go back in time. “Derek saw it, and thought, 'maybe the guy thinks this is real, maybe he really believes he can do this,'” Trevorrow says. “The world is mocking him, but maybe this guy has deep regrets, and he's driven by them.”

The classified was a joke ad, written by John Silveira to fill an empty space on the page on a print deadline, but thousands of people wrote letters to the address. “A lot of people who were lonely,” Trevorrow suggests, “and just filled with a lot of regrets.” Trevorrow and Connolly treated it essentially as a novel to be adapted, and had to convince the author to sell them the rights. It was a lengthy process that Trevorrow saw as completely mirroring the film Winnebago Man, in which filmmaker Ben Steinbauer befriends the star of a YouTube meme in hopes of making a film about him.

“John felt like he had been reduced to a meme and that, to a certain extent, the world was making fun of him. And, just like in Winnebago Man, it all comes full circle when we go to a film festival. John Silveira came to the Sundance Festival and he got to watch the film. After they cheered the film, I called him out in front of all two thousand people, and they cheered him.”