“We really spent a long time wanting to create somewhere that felt bureaucratic,” Freyne says. “It felt like it had these rules and boredom and tedium to it… It’s very vibrant and exciting but it’s an artificial world, and I think we see particularly through Callum’s character that it’s a weird stasis to stay in for a long time.” Still the director thinks it is supposed to be initially beguiling as a way station. The filmmaker even takes mild offense when we suggest the brutalist architecture could be its own form of hell.
“That’s actually my idea of heaven!” Freyne insists. “I love brutalist architecture, and if I could live in the Barbican or the National Theatre in London, I’d be very happy. I also love the idea that this was a place that was redesigned recently. But for the afterlife, that was the ‘60s when that architecture was kind of the idea of utopia almost.”
Another core aspect of the film is designing what individual “eternities” that souls are forced to choose between. Some are basic, such as a “Mountains” eternity that Luke favors, and which looks suspiciously like British Columbia. Meanwhile Larry prefers an overcrowded “Beach” eternity. Yet some are incredibly specific, be it a “No Men Ever” eternity or a “Capitalist” one where you can spend eons looking down at the poor from a Manhattan high-rise. “Some people do think there’s no point of being rich if somebody else isn’t poor,” the director observes.
One of his favorites though was also among the first things he shot for the afterlife: a 1980s-style infomercial called the “Weimar Germany But With No Nazis!” eternity.
“That was mine,” the director admits. “I think that was one of the first ones I wrote, and that probably is my favorite. And actually shooting those ads, those kind of infomercials, it was the very first thing we shot and it was probably the funnest day. It really set the tone for the whole shoot.” In fact, he is eager to revive such commercials’ visual language. “We shot those on DigiBeta, and I’m going to be the Chris Nolan of DigiBetas. I want to bring it back. I want to shoot an entire feature on DigiBeta!”
Nonetheless, the hope is that as funny as the movie can be, it also triggers something in viewers.
