Screenwriter, producer, and director Jason Stone had a very specific vision for his young-adult sci-fi adventure At First Light (now playing in select Canadian cities), but it’s not the one most audiences would likely expect. More indebted to brainier, more ambiguous sci-fi fantasies of the 1960s and 70s, the latest effort from Stone (The Calling, a couple episodes to TV’s Riverdale, the cult short Jay and Seth Versus the Apocalypse) eschews the sort of mythology and backstory heavy plotting of recent genre efforts geared towards young people in favour of a more nuanced, character based approach.
Théodore Pellerin stars as Sean, a struggling, small town California teen who lives with his nearly catatonic grandmother and troublemaking younger brother. Sean doesn’t get out much except to make some extra cash by selling family jewelry and heirlooms, but one night at a party he reconnects with Alex, played by Stephanie Scott, a former best friend and current crush who has grown estranged. Not long after the party, Alex comes in contact with some sort of extraterrestrial energy source that has fallen from the sky. Dazed, confused, and having a good chunk of her short term memory wiped out in the process, Alex turns to Sean for help. Sean agrees, and the pair are quickly pursued by government agents keen on figuring out what might have happened to Alex. The young woman begins developing somewhat uncontrolable powers, and appears to be giving off a form of radiation that could make anyone around her very sick. In spite of all the frightening things happening around him, Sean never wavers in his quest to help Alex in her time of need.
We caught up with Stone over the phone on his film’s opening day to talk about his restrained approach to genre, the importance of setting a believable stage, how stressful it can be to not have a leading man just before shooting, and the small California town that had a huge impact on the look of At First Light.
Films these days that revolve around young people that include sci-fi or fantasy elements often come packed with elaborate mythologies or flashy gimmicks, but what you’ve done with At First Light is a bit more adult and restrained. This is more of a throwback to films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind than a modern day young adult blockbuster. For you, what’s it like creating a film about young people that has a more restrained approach to storytelling?
Jason Stone: I’m so glad that you picked up on those sorts of references, not only to something like Close Encounters, but overall we always wanted the film to have a 70s vibe in general more than a modern day one. I think that approach is a more interesting way to approach where we are now, you know? For me it was always about trying to find the right tone and world for the story.
I had worked on this for a while before it actually got made. Young adult oriented sci-fi really started to become a thing as I was already working on the script, so it was always a nerve wracking thing for me; paying attention to those kind of trends while I’m making something like this. When I started writing, I was early on the trend, and by the time i finished, we were already well into it. (laughs) But I never try to write or work on projects just to chase some sort of bigger idea or whatever’s happening in the cultural landscape because you’re just going to lose everything you loved about the story you were trying to tell in the process.
In this case, I’m just glad that people were still interested in seeing stories in this way. I always knew that what I was trying to go after was a little different tonally and structurally from what was out there. I never wanted to do The Maze Runner or anything like that. This was much more about making a story between two people who were going through this extraordinary and personal adventure while all of these other extraordinary things were happening all around them. It was very much about my desire to keep that story as intimate as possible.
It can’t be easy to find two young people to play roles like this, not just in terms of finding people capable of portraying friends who have grown estranged and one has a crush on the other, but in terms of where the actors have to go to physically demanding places as the film progresses. What was the casting process like?
Jason Stone: The physicality wasn’t a huge concern of mine immediately. They were young, and in terms of the action stuff, there wasn’t anything too crazy, per say. But one of the things that was a huge surprise for me – and this kind of goes back to your first question – is the amount of time it actually took me to find these actors.
In total, it took me about two and a half years to settle on my cast. I was casting basically the entire time I was writing. Brian [Kavanaugh-Jones] and Chris [Ferguson], two of our producers, were always eager to get going on finding the right talent, because they knew it was going to be a lengthy search. I always had an idea of what I wanted for each of these roles, especially at first for Sean, even a bit more than Alex. Sean was our window into this world, so I was always focused on what I thought that character should be.
Stephanie actually came onto the project relatively early on. She had just worked with one of my producers on another film, and they gave me a call and told me about her. We talked to other people, but she was actually the first person we talked to about the film. She was great.
Theo was actually the last person we cast. We were already deep into prep on the movie in our offices. We were getting ready to start shooting, and we still didn’t have a lead. (laughs) That actually seems to be a pattern of mine. (laughs) I’ve been in that same situation before, so I just had this sort of zen resignation to something like that this time around. In my head and deep down, I was obviously terrified, but I always just kept telling myself and everyone around me that we were going to find the guy in time and it was just going to happen. I just have to keep believing that, or else we don’t have a movie.
You never want to feel like you’re settling. You never want to settle for someone who might be a good actor, but that you wouldn’t believe as being a part of the world that you’re creating. It’s such a privilege to get to make films in the first place, that I never want to feel like I’m phoning it it just to get something made. If I get to that point, I should probably just give it all up and find something else to do. The actors are always one of, if not the, most important parts of a movie. Your leads are everything.
I saw maybe 2,000 people alongside my casting director over the course of the year. At the end, we came down to about three or four that we thought we could play Sean really well. They were all really talented people who would have done a great job, and the movie would have worked on some level. But when I saw Theo, that’s when I knew I found someone who could make the movie into something special and intriguingly different from how I imagined the character.
Theo was someone whose information was sent to me several months earlier from my casting director. I was sent a clip of a film that he had done, and it was a link in an email with a bunch of other auditions and reads, and I didn’t even see the link to it. When I was getting panicked, I started going through every email about every casting that I’d ever gotten throughout pre-production. It was a link to a forty second scene from a film that Theo had just shot and that hadn’t come out yet, and in the scene he doesn’t even really say anything. I just kept looking at him, and I thought that he was totally different from anything I had pictured for the character of Sean, but I knew that he was way beyond what I had wanted and what I had written. I knew we had to find and talk to him.
I got back to my casting director to put us in touch, they got so excited because they thought when I hadn’t asked about him, they just assumed that I wasn’t interested or that I never watched the link. He was at an acting school in New York, and we skyped that afternoon. He was exactly the same person from when I talked to him that day until the end of the shoot, which is to say that he had a remarkable amount of focus, clarity, and politeness to him. He was so kind and thoughtful, and that description of him helped us through the entire process. We talked for a little bit, but he hadn’t read the script yet because when everyone in casting thought we weren’t interested in him, they never sent it to him. He hadn’t properly auditioned yet.
I went to New York to audition him personally. At this point, there were no callbacks. It was Theo and this other small handful of actors that we were mulling over. It was very binary, and it was at the point in our production when it was really all or nothing in terms of casting. We did this audition, and he found an actress to do a scene with him. I found this room at the hotel I was staying at, and it was a pretty terrible place to do an audition, actually. It was on the mezzanine and it was really noisy and the set-up was lousy. He felt like he tanked the audition, and it wasn’t his best bit. Once we wrapped it up, and started talking and hanging out, I still had this tremendous feeling that this was the right person for the job. I didn’t know why I felt it, but I thought it was the right call. I thought he would take me out of the comfort zone of what I thought this film needed to be. I thought it would be just the right thing.
I went all in on the email I sent to the producers, who by this point in pre-production were starting to get nervous, about the casting. I said I was all in, but I wasn’t even 100% sure by that point. I just had this overwhelming hunch that this was the right call. Everyone loved the clip I sent to them and were really excited. And then, on day one, scene two, shot one, we were in a convenience store and he did this thing where he casually swipes a lighter while the lady behind the counter has her back turned. It wasn’t in the script, but it was so perfect. We hadn’t rehearsed yet. We only had time to rehearse after the first weekend of the shoot, so we hadn’t even talked about anything like that. The way he did that with such recklessness and such a “fuck you” attitude made me breathe a sigh of relief and think that I had definitely found the right guy. It was so satisfying, and I think if the movie works for people, a huge part of that is Theo.
What was surprising is that when it did get physical and it came time to shoot the parts of the film where Sean is getting sicker from being around Alex and from the radiation poisoning, he was just so intensely powerful with it. I always thought I would have to cake someone in make-up and micro-manage the character to really sell the jeopardy of it, and I ended up not having to say a word and to barely do anything at all. I just stayed out of it, and it was so incredible to watch. Even a lot of the seasoned actors who were on set – especially Kate Burton, Richard Burton’s daughter, who’s worked with some of the best and who Theo had to act opposite of – kept coming out of these takes and scenes really taken aback by what they’d just seen. She was blown away, and so was everyone else. Theo’s power as an actor really elevated everyone’s game around him. We were super lucky to have found him.
Before you get into the sci-fi aspect of the film, you immerse the viewer in a depiction of poverty in middle America, and it feels realistic to what it’s like to live in those sort of margins. How important was it for you to set that sort of cultural and economic stage before getting around to any of the genre elements?
Jason Stone: It was really important for me to make this world feel believable before I started manipulating it into this heightened sort of fantasy world. The idea that I always chased after with this whole movie was wondering what a serious, grounded, realistic journey would be for characters would be like for them. Again, there’s no mythology, like you said. This isn’t I am Number Four. There aren’t ancient civilizations that are downloading the necessary information into the minds of the characters. There aren’t going to be any human beings arriving that could provide the answers for every detail of everything that’s going on.
I find that the magic of most genre pieces like this, especially when it comes to sci-fi that specifically deals with aliens, UFOs, and stuff like that, is that they’re at their most interesting when they’re at their most mysterious, and for any mystery to take hold, the world the mystery takes place in needs to feel realistic and detailed. You want the audience to grasp onto a story like this with their own ideas, understandings, experiences, and interpretations.
In the movies that I most like to see, I love intros that give you a feel for the everyday lives and struggles of the characters. The status quo and the upending of that will always be what you care about the most. You shouldn’t care that a movie just has some aliens in it. You should care because these characters and their struggles are interesting. You’re following the people, their relationships, their problems, and you’re always seeing what it takes for them to get through their days. Once that all elevates, you can still see that status quo as an added layer that’s going to help or hurt or complicate their evolving daily lives into something else. If you just told a story about two kids living on the edge of a small Middle American town, you’ll always have a lot to work with, but just throwing aliens into a movie for the sake of having aliens in it won’t mean anything if you don’t have some sort of base. I’m someone who loves that kind of set up. It always helps me buy into whatever I’m going to see, and it gives me something extra to take from it after I’ve finished watching.
It can’t be easy to find locations that are as gorgeous and evocative as the ones you’ve found when you don’t have an extensive amount of time or money to make a film on this ambitious of a level that requires a very specific sort of geography and setting. What was it like finding the physical world of the story?
Jason Stone: Well, thanks for saying that, because next to casting, locations were the hardest things to find for the film. (laughs)
I had a very specific place in the world where I wanted to set this film. It’s a town in central California called Porterville. It’s a town that I fell in love with about a decade ago when I made a short film there while I was in film school. I just happened upon it one day while I was driving around with my production designer. We had driven about two and a half hours outside of Los Angeles, and we were chasing down a specific sort of barn that we needed for that movie, and there was something about this town once we got there and started meeting some of the people there that the trip became about a lot more on a personal and artistic level than just finding one place for a shoot. I became really close – and I still am close – to a lot of the people there. It has this sun-bleached, aging, all American vibe to it. There’s actually a sun-bleached, fading painting of the stars and stripes just on the edge of town that says “Porterville: An All American City,” which was a label people used to give towns in the 50s and 60s when that sign was probably put up.
For me, there was this aging, romantic feeling about the place. It was quintessentially everything you would have expected from a perfect, All American town fifty or sixty years ago, but after five decades and the march of progress, economic shifting, and various ups and downs, it sort of fell by the wayside and became this forgotten place for all but the people who still live there. No one else really knows about or or would really need to know about it, and there are hundreds of thousands of towns like that all over North America. There’s something beautiful to look at this place and see how it used to represent the country back then and how it represents the country now.
It’s still beautiful to visit. There are these rolling foothills, and in the spring they can go from pink, to red, to green when it rains because there are always weeks that pass without any rain, and once it arrives the change is almost right before your eyes. It has a landscape that really bridges the gap between the sky and the earth, and that’s a visual representation of the area that I was always trying to get to.
We have these people who are very much of the Earth. The main character’s name is Sean Terrell, which is obviously a reference to terrestrial, meaning “of the earth.” And Alex’s last name references something that comes from the light. So I always felt that these characters needed a place that would be a reflection of what they would represent.
Everything in the film was meant to resemble Porterville. I had the chance to shoot a couple of drone days there, just to get some exterior stuff and one scene on the way to Alex’s house. Everything else was shot in and around Ottawa. The other homes and apartments were all in Ottawa. Our production designer, Lisa [Soper] was a genius. We used an apartment for Sean’s house that her family had some sort of connection to, and the walls just had that wood lattice that felt so much like Porterville. She knew exactly what the look of this film was going to be like in my mind. She was able to find a gravel quarry outside of Ottawa that at the right time of day and in the right time of light looked sun-baked and like a desert, even though it was surrounded by lush forests that we had to block from sight with a lot of that gravel. (laughs) I couldn’t have really done it without her and her eye. Every scene in the film is probably shot in a total of three or four different places, but I’m glad it comes across seamlessly, because it took a lot of work to get it that way. (laughs)
At First Light is now playing at Carlton Cinemas in Toronto.
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