The Infinite Man — Hugh Sullivan interview
This interview was originally published in October 2014 on Hopscotch Friday.
The Infinite Man stars Josh McConville, Hannah Marshall and Alex Dimitriades as three characters stuck in diabolical love triangle that criss-crosses time — but does not travel very far in space. Dean (McConville) creates a time machine in order to relive the events of a weekend getaway to an abandoned hotel with girlfriend Lana (Marshall), after she abruptly leaves him in the company of an ex-boyfriend, stoned former Olympian Terry (Dimitriades).
While the low-budget Australian film, shot in one location in South Australia with funding from the state’s Film Lab, has been marketed as a science fiction romance, audiences can expect a far more complex picture than that shorthand would suggest. “It certainly helps when people have some sense of what they’re getting in to”, says director/writer Hugh Sullivan.
The Infinite Man presents us with a character so riddled with self-loathing he goes to extremes — time travel — to avoid dealing with his relationship with Lana. For Sullivan, this was the main appeal of the concept behind the film.
It’s this character, his emotional and psychological state, that I was interested in looking at. That was really at the heart of the writing for me. I guess time travel was just a really good way to explain this character more than anything.
“He’s creating so many obstacles; it makes it very difficult for somebody to love him as well. It’s not traditional rom-com fare I suppose!” he says, laughing.
“A lot of people have classified it as a science fiction rom-com and that’s certainly not how I saw it. It has time travel, it has comedy and it does have some romance in it as well. As far as a genre description though, it’s a difficult one. It’s something I never really troubled myself with too much.”
What makes the approach of the film to its ‘hero’ most interesting, is how his use of time travel causes him to encounter future and past versions of himself, all with their own plots and agendas focused on Lana as a romantic ‘object’.
Meanwhile she and Terry are shown to have become radically altered by their experiences in the time-looped hotel. The oblivious ex-boyfriend for example evolves from a drug-addled failed sportsman into a genuinely romantic Byronic type given to quoting Greek philosophers (“any excuse to get Alex Dimitriades to speak about philosophy” says Sullivan).
“Certainly whilst Dean is in different emotional states, the core focus in his character remains constant. He sees his future self as being entirely together, but when he finally arrives at that point in time he realizes nothing has really changed.
“I don’t know if it’s the normal approach where the one character who doesn’t change is your protagonist. I’ve never been a big believer in the necessity for characters to change in films. Often I just find it unbelievable. This is quite a short and contained film and the arc should reflect, or fit within that. I think it suggests the possibility of change and it felt to me and that was what I was going on. It felt right to me.”
Somewhere Robert McKee is plotzing.
This adds to the unpredictable feel of The Infinite Man, a genre film that clearly understands the tropes of cinematic romance well enough to upend the anticipations of its audience. That takes the rules of science fiction, which relies on the understanding that this version of reality can be either slightly, or entirely, different to what we are familiar with. Science fiction just happens to allow for budgetary sleight of hand, if the premise can win the audience over.
“I was trying to make something that I’d want to watch at the end of the day”, Sullivan explains, “a three-hander in a single space. It might not be something I’d normally gravitate to, depending on its treatment. For me it was going to be the strength of the concept and its execution.
“The film was developed with the South Australian Film Corporation’s Film Lab initiative. They fully finance low-budget films, so we knew from the outset what sort of budget we were working to. How do you create a film on this budget that people want to see and enjoy? There has to be something to help it stand out.
“There’s so many films out there, it’s hard to compete at the best of times. It’s simply going to come down to the strength of the idea. We set certain constraints early on in terms of locations and characters. Time travel seemed like a very good way to multiply these ingredients that we were working with and create something a little more expansive.”
This filmic form of oulipo, which like the surrealist cinema of Cocteau, or Godard’s Alphaville, creates a sense of the fantastic or futurism simply through practical effects and clever use of settings. The Infinite Man has an internally consistent universe consisting solely of Dean, Lana and Terry, looping round and round again in the one location. Sullivan refers to these approaches by Cocteau and Godard as ‘creative use of quite limited means’ and The Infinite Man feels like an Australian cousin of these classics.
This approach also resulted in a bewildering script that by the film’s conclusion is revealed to have multiple layers somehow consistently overlaid throughout. It is certainly not a linear plot, with the various characters all co-habiting the same space and influencing each other without their knowledge.
“It was a process of constant revision, like the story of the film itself in some ways. I do believe in just finding the story as you go along. Which did make for a frustrating and time-consuming process, but it’s just the way I’ve always worked and it comes naturally to me. There was an unusual amount of revision, because once one thing changed in a single scene, then everything changed. Finally when I had an ending I was happy with, I had to go back and change everything again.”
The resulting film impresses given its comprehensive drill-down of time-travel logic. The Infinite Man excels not only as a genre picture, but as an example of low-budget Australian cinema using every means at its disposal to create something with sheer imaginative breadth.
