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here was an angel in the auditorium at Georgetown University. She was blond and beautiful, and she was on her feet – leading a standing ovation for Mike Cahill. Cahill couldn’t see her, though. He was up on stage accepting an award for the short that had just taken first prize at the university’s film festival. He was playing it cool and wasn’t wearing his glasses. All he could do was peer into the crowd as his co-director, Zal, stared in awe. “Who’s that girl?” Zal asked him. “What girl?” Cahill replied. The girl came up to them later and introduced herself, said she was called Brit Marling, said she loved their work, said she’d do anything to be part of their films – hold a boom, a light, whatever. “Why don’t you star in them?” Cahill suggested. This is not the origin story of Another Earth. It’s only an aspect of it – the seeds of a partnership that would take root and grow. The beginning? That happened much earlier – in New Haven, Connecticut, in the mid 1980s, when a mother bought her son a toy camera for his birthday. He was seven-years-old and was soon to have a revelation. His name was Mike. He probably didn’t have long black hair and he definitely didn’t have a moustache, although he has both today – like a refugee from a war that the alternative kids lost. At seven, he might have been cute. Maybe he had the same spontaneous laugh. Maybe the same way of being intensely present. Mike had a thing for Matchbox cars, so the first thing he did with his Fisher-Price Pixelvision was film one of them as he pushed it along. Then he had an idea. He filmed his brother pretending to drive, then he went back to the car. Watching it on tape, it looked like Mike’s brother was actually driving the car. He sensed he was onto something big. At seven-years-old, Mike Cahill had discovered montage. “I realised that if you juxtapose images you can create a new narrative – that the combination of images together creates a new meaning,” he recalls. “That was fucking mindblowing for me because there was power in it.” This is the origin story of Another Earth – the power of discovery that implanted a sense of wonder and possibility in a boy. They were emotions that gestated as the boy got older, got an economics degree and started experimenting with video art. Eventually, they’d force him to drop everything and set out on a $100,000 self-financed feature film.
There’s been a lot written about the renaissance of twenty-first-century science-fiction, but the thing is, most of it is true. Another Earth takes its place alongside Primer, Moon and Monsters as a home-grown genre piece inspired not just by advances in affordable technology, but by a spirit of intellectual adventure that harks back to the great moments of the ’60s and ’70s. Cahill got switched on to sci-fi after he moved to LA and started driving around the city while listening to an audiotape of Dr Richard Berendzen. Berendzen was an acolyte of the master, Carl Sagan, and his measured drawl about the cosmos, Galileo, Aristophanes and the Library of Alexandria provided a “beautiful emotional narrative” that captured Cahill’s imagination. Technology, too, was critical. Cahill had always been an experimenter – whether producing video art under the pseudonym ‘Dale Teeth’ or just pointing and shooting, trying things to see what happened. “I like playing,” he says, framed against a bare brick wall in the LWLies office, “just having cameras around, shooting stuff, even if I’m going to throw it away. I didn’t go to film school, but I made my own film school through experimentation, watching, eating up material and reading every screenwriting book imaginable.” He learnt a few tricks – some technical (like shooting someone in the frame, then shooting the same frame without them and dissolving the two so that the person disappeared), some emotional. But the breakthrough came one day when he tried compositing two versions of himself and conducting an interview. “I sat down, then another version of me came and sat down opposite, and one me started very obnoxiously interviewing the other,” he recalls.
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