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Writer/Director Iqbal Ahmed Provides The Answer To Each Question Jordan Brown Asks |
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Sorry, that pun was too easy. As part of its year ‘round screening series, Other Worlds Austin SciFi Film Festival is proud to present the Texas premiere of THE ANSWER on May 19 (9:00pm) at Flix Brewhouse with writer/director Iqbal Ahmed in attendance for a Q&A after the screening.
Winner of “Best Sci-Fi Feature” at Shriekfest (Los Angeles) and the Rhode Island Intl. Film Festival, THE ANSWER is a SciFi thriller about an introverted young man, Bridd, who after being attacked must follow clues left by his dead parents in order to figure out who is after him – and who he really is. Programmer and Associate Artistic Director Jordan Brown got a few answers of her own out of the director in preparation for the screening.
JORDAN: You talk a lot about identity with this film - what made you want to tackle this theme in a genre setting?
Iqbal: Some of my favorite films have been identity movies embedded within a genre structure. In fact, I'd even argue that every superhero origin story is exactly that — an exploration of identity within a sci-fi/action/thriller world. In these cases, identity is explored in a larger-than-life reality. For my film, I wanted to explore identity at an intimate level — something I hadn’t seen recently. I wanted to talk about family and identity from the perspective of a character who has quietly suppressed his past and who lives his life day-to-day almost like a ghost. A character living in a small and anonymous haze. That felt like an interesting scope for a genre film — something purposefully small and unadorned. Something that resembled my own normal life, and quite possibly the lives of audience members who watch the film.
JORDAN: THE ANSWER does a great job of creating a believable story and characters in a really limited runtime. A lot of science fiction stories can get bogged down in exposition - how did you go about creating that balance of world-building and keeping the action going?
Iqbal: I always knew that the strength of THE ANSWER would be in taking a normal character and throwing him into a situation he wasn’t |
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SciFi Film Submissions
Features/Shorts May 1st to July 31st $45/$35 August 1st - Sept 15th $50/$40 Sept 16th - Sept 30th $60/$50
Regular Deadline - June 30th Shorts $35 Teleplays $45 Features $50
Late Deadline August 31st
Badges
On Sale in July Limited Quantities Available Badges available AT SCREENINGS
The Answer (Texas Premiere) Flix Brewhouse, 9pm, May 19th ($10)
The Team
Bears Fonté Founder and Artistic Director Don Elfant Director of Marketing and Development Jordan Brown Associate Artistic Director Debbie Cerda Programmer and Hospitality Director Gemmi Galactic Outreach Director Courtney Hazlett Programmer and Director of Operations Reid Lansford Programmer and Registration Director Mark Martinez Programmer and Social Media Director Dan Repp Senior Programmer and Events Director Micheal Thielvoldt Programmer and Tour Director |
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prepared for. Just like Bridd, my protagonist, I want the audience members to piece the story together as they progress through it.
I’m a big fan of engaging with a viewer and saying “hey, I think you’re smart, so I trust you to follow along.” I don’t love exposition. That’s partially why I set this movie in a world that we could all recognize. I wanted it to feel real and relatable. And I wanted the story to move quickly. The characters don’t get to sit around brainstorming every possible plan of action. Their lives are at stake and they need to move quickly. The exposition we get comes in small bite-sized pieces along the way — at the same time the hero learns them.
JORDAN: How did the aesthetic and design for the bad guys come about? Our team all agrees on how effective they are!
Iqbal: For a story in which so much hinged on story revelations and twists, I wanted my villains to feel ambiguous. I wanted them to feel menacing, but I didn’t want to give too much away. So I played with modifying what a Special Forces or S.W.A.T. officer might wear. Are these guys good or bad? Are they paramilitary?
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Do SciFi MacGuffins Provide THE ANSWER?
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DON ELFANT — Imagine one day you receive a package in the mail from your mom—the same mom who died 20 years ago. This is what happens to Bridd, the protagonist in the SciFi thriller THE ANSWER.
That’s a hell of a twist, right? And it has a name—it’s called a MacGuffin and it has a rich tradition in cinema, especially in Science Fiction. MacGuffins are plot devices, in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist pursues, but often with little or no narrative explanation.
In THE ANSWER, the MacGuffin turns out to be an enigmatic video game sent to Bridd from his long lost mother. The specific nature of a MacGuffin may be unimportant to the overall plot. I’ll leave it to you determine the nature of the ‘game’ in THE ANSWER when you watch it Thursday, May 19 (9:00am) at Flix Brewhouse. No spoilers here. But you have seen many other famous MacGuffins in SciFi history.
George Lucas, for instance, describes R2-D2 in STAR WARS EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE as "the main driving force of the movie… what you say in the movie business is the MacGuffin… the object of everybody's search." In EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the bounty hunter Jango Fett is also used as a MacGuffin, and in EPISODE VII: THE FORCE AWAKENS, the MacGuffin is Luke Skywalker.
Alfred Hitchcock actually popularized the term "MacGuffin" and the technique, with his 1935 film THE 39 STEPS, an early example of the concept. He defined a MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, but as to what that object specifically is, he declared, "the audience don't care.” Lucas, on the other hand, believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that "the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen.” |
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Now it’s time for you to decide. Here are my top seven MacGuffins in SciFi cinema. Are these Hitchcock or Lucas MacGuffins? What other SciFi MacGuffins do you think should have cracked the list? Which ones shouldn’t be on the list in the first place?
7. Red Matter (STAR TREK, 2009) — In the J.J. Abrams reboot, the crew of the Enterprise goes after a Vulcan distress signal and come face-to-face with the Vulcan ship Narada and its enemy captain, Nero. It is during this time that Nero drills red matter into the core of Vulcan, forming a black hole that destroys the planet. Later, Romulus is threatened by a supernova. Spock attempts to use red matter to create an artificial black hole and consume the supernova. His attempt fails and Nero's family perishes along with the planet Romulus. Developed by the Vulcan Science Academy, red matter was valuable to both Vulcan and Romulus, and both were after it. Unfortunately, it caused the destruction of both planets.
6. Crystal Shard (THE DARK CRYSTAL) — Jen, raised by the noble race called the Mystics, has been told that he is the last survivor of his own race, the Gelflings. He sets out to try to find a shard of the dark crystal, a powerful gem that once provided balance to the universe. After the crystal was broken, the evil Skeksis used sinister means to gain control. Jen believes that he can repair the dark crystal and bring peace back to the world, if he can only find the remaining MacGuffin, er, shard.
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Star Wars The Force Awaken Is The Most Disappointing Movie of All Time
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BEARS FONTE — It seems like it often falls on me to be only one on our team of SciFi fans and aficionados to be hypercritical on films that everyone else seems to have given a free pass. Which brings me to Star Wars, Episode Seven, the Bank Awakens. Or whatever it’s called. Seriously, didn’t the force awaken in Luke in the original trilogy? Wasn’t that one of the primary plots, bringing back a belief system that had all but disappeared in the galaxy? Are we not told that Luke trained a series of Jedis in the years between the Ewok victory song (oh how I miss you) and this new installment? So did it go back to sleep? Did it hit the snooze button?
But before I go any further let me admit I had fun at Ep7. I am a Star Wars fan boy like any other. My entire allowance went to Kenner for years and I received the Death Star as a ‘good big brother’ present when my sister was born (which I’m not really sure I had earned yet… but still). I was just as excited as everyone else when the last ‘new trilogy’ was announced, and just as disappointed as anyone with how they finished. That being said, I was cautiously optimistic about the new trilogy. The first 4 and ½ seasons of LOST are my favorite television ever, and JJ had really done well with the Star Trek reboot. The promise of revisiting my favorite galaxy 27 years later and checking in with old heroes really offered great potential and of course the promise of more practical effects combined with what we can do in film now… and let’s face it, the obscene amount of money Disney was willing to throw behind these films, all of this made the film my most anticipated film release since THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
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We meet again, at last
One reason I had few memories of the film only moments after I had seen it, was that it felt like I had already seen the movie before. There is an astounding amount of lazy repetition in the film, the kind of story ideas and moments that should have never made it out of a first draft. Lame call-outs as simple as Han Solo asking about a trash compactor on the new death star do nothing to forward the characters or plot. Painfully out of place/fashion wipe-edits that are only placed in this film because they were in the original, do nothing but make me wish I was five again watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time, rather than this new film. And John Williams has mined this well a few too many times, that the score sounds well, like variations on the original by a grad student phoning in their degree thesis.
But the dull edge of nostalgia hurts most in storytelling. The lazy repetition of plot elements lifted from the original film droops like murky shadow over the proceedings here. A would-be Jedi without their parents? Check. A missing Jedi that the rebel alliance desperately needs? Check. An estranged father and son? Check. A desert planet? A quirky bar? An opening title scrawl? Check, check, check. It almost feels like they reduced the first Star Wars film (it’ll always just be Star Wars to me, never the dull pointless title A New Hope) to the most generic elements, tossed them in a hat and pulled them out one by one as story point.
Judge me by my size, do you?
The worst offender is the main ‘danger’ of the film, which happens to be a giant planet-sized starship that can wipe out planets in one shot. This was repetitious when they did it again in RETURN OF THE JEDI – now it’s just lazy. Is this the only idea the bad guys have in the Star Wars universe? But not just the element itself, but the need to have the film tie up in some sort of small ships race along the edge of a planet-type weapon and blow it up… it’s story by the numbers. One of the worst things the new film did was swipe aside years and volumes of great Star Wars literature, tons of great story ideas from serializations like Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy or Kevin J. Anderson’s Academy Trilogy. These stories have a proven track record with fans and actually introduce new ideas and plots into the |
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So why did I immediately forget most of the movie mere hours after watching it? Why have I not bothered to see it again? Why do I groan when I hear people talking about it, lavishing it with praise? Because I hold Star Wars to a higher standard than any other series, and because J.J. Abrams and his team didn’t. This new film suffered from lazy, repetitious storytelling, a disregard for the original trilogy, and a whole mess of missed opportunities. No, it wasn’t a terrible movie (I even said Fury Road wasn’t a terrible movie) but given all that could have been done, this was not the film I wanted, nor the film the series deserved.
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galaxy, rather than just new characters into cookie-cutter stories.
The basic premise of the Force Awakens seems to be it worked once, let’s do it again only bigger (the new Death Star being the most visual example of this). We have a fight scene on bridge in a giant air duct. We have the millennium falcon flying through something it shouldn’t be able to navigate. We have storm troopers and at-ats and a bad guy in a mask and wisecracking robots and other robots that only communicate in noises, we have small sized wise creatures living in remote planets, we have much of all three films, shoved into one. Maybe they are getting all the old ideas out first and leave the next two movies lots of room to be original (somehow I doubt it).
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Also on OtherWorldsAustin.com→
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STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS IS THE NEW HOPE FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS |
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By Debbie Cerda — A year ago I wrote a blog post about the thrill that I experienced the first time I watched the original STAR WARS -- as well as excitement while watching the trailer for Episode VII - THE FORCE AWAKENS. I am pleased to say that I was not disappointed.
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FLIX PROFILE: MEET GREG JOHNSON! |
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By Don Elfant — As you may have already heard, Flix Brewhouse is the new home of Other Worlds Austin SciFi Film Festival. We hope you are just as excited as we are, but in case you don’t realize why this is such a match made in the stars, we are digging into the Flix world, starting with this profile of Greg Johnson, Director of Sales and Marketing.
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ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: THE MOST SCIFI BANDS OF ALL-TIME |
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By Bears Fonte — Just as SciFi crosses over several genres, it often crosses into other art forms. I've always found the landscapes of Degas and de Chirico to resemble the other worlds I create in my mind when reading a great SciFi novel. Wrapping your head around an Escher can cause the same kind of wonder experienced when tripping over a Phillip K. Dick short story.
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3rd Annual OTHER WORLDS AUSTIN SciFi Film Festival —————------—December 1-4, 2016---------------- |
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*|IF:REWARDS|* *|REWARDS|* *|END:IF|*
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