The Ties That Bind in Things Will Be Different

If you ask Michael Felker what his debut feature, Things Will Be Different, he’ll point to a multitude of genres. It’s a thriller, a temporal mechanics sci-fi drama, and a noir. But at its heart it’s a film about, and birthed from, family.

The film receives its world premiere this week at South By Southwest in Austin – the same place where one of the film’s biggest influences, Blood Simple, was shot. Like the Coen brothers’ masterpiece, this is a crime drama about “characters who make the most impassioned choices, but not the right one.”

This time those choices are made by bother and sister bank robbers Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy), who hole up after a big heist in a seemingly secure safe house. It’s not just that this farm is geographically remote. It’s also seemingly adrift in time, and the siblings believe that this temporal anomaly will be the solution to their ills. “Hope is the big crux of all their character decisions,” he explains. “They just hope that this time we’ll change it, or this time will be mended and we’ll solve all our relationship problems. And hope sucks. It’s a dangerous thing, especially if you don’t have the tenacity or the will to shape that.”

The relationship between Joseph and Sidney is a rare depiction of siblings who have remained close in adulthood. That’s a relationship, with all the unspoken history and shorthand, that Felker said doesn’t appear enough in movies. Moreover, he says, “I wanted to explore how you can’t get rid of that family no matter how much you have changed and evolved and become separated over the years.”

Those binds are something Felker knows a lot about, as the siblings’ relationship draws deeply on his connection to his own sister. “She’s my other brain,” he says. “We’re children of divorce, we moved around a lot, and the other constant was the other one.”

Even though they are adults, each with successful careers (her as a scientist, him in film), and they live far apart, there’s still that connection. He pulls up his sleeve to reveal a tattoo, the Triforce symbol from The Legend of Zelda: He has one, he explains, and his sister has one to match. “Anytime we have a bad day, or anytime where we don’t see each other enough, all we do is just shoot a picture of that and send it to the other one. We shoot it back and that’s that. Sometimes it’s just wordless, or it’s just ‘I love you’ or ‘Hey, I had a hard day,’ but most of the time we just send it as is.”

That’s something he put, wholesale, into the film, as Joseph and Sidney also share ink. “It’s their anchor to always come back and remember that they are my brother, they are my sister, and they will always be a part of me.”

But as big a factor in the story and in his life as his sister is, she wasn’t the only family member who had a major influence on Things Will Be Different. “I grew up as a huge sci-fi or thriller guy because my dad raised me on those movies,” Zelker says. When his dad got home from an engineering job, he’d put on some escapist movie and they’d all watch something together (age appropriate or not, Zelker notes). Then he’d take them to Taco Bell, or for coffee as they got older, “and he would just be like, ‘Well, what did you kids think of that?’ And then I, as an 8 year old, would go, ‘I barely understand The Matrix.’”

Like those tattoo texts, those conversations and chats about stories and storytelling remained a constant in Zelker’s relationship with father. So when he was developing ideas for his first feature, it was only natural to talk about them with his oldest sounding board. “I just went, ‘Dad, I’ve got this idea about these brother-sister bank robbers, they go into this house, and I want to do something with time travel in the house,’ and we just sort of spitballed all these world rules. … Two months later, I had a script.” During the writing process he also workshopped with his wife (“she’s also a big sci-fi fan”), and then the final stage. “I sent it to the boys. Justin, Aaron, and Dave.”

The boys in question are writer/director duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and their longtime producer, David Lawson Jr. “Every time I write something, whether it’s genre or not, they read it immediately.”

After all, family isn’t everything. There are, of course, the friends we make along the way, the friends that influence us and who we influence. So if you’re watching Things Will Be Different and feel a certain resonance with the films of Benson and Moorhead, that should be no surprise. Felker has been their go-to editor since "Bonestorm," their segment of the 2014 V/H/S Viral anthology, through features including Spring, The Endless, Synchronic, and Something in the Dirt – the last three of which all play different games with nonlinear time. The duo and Lawson all came aboard as producers of Things Will Be Different under their Rustic Films shingle, and the eagle-eyed may even catch a cameo by Benson.

With everything seemingly in place, Felker was ready to start shooting, with another connection to his own history in place: He was going to use his old family farm in Michigan as the filming location. It was woven into the script – quite literally, as there was actually a map of the floorplan in the drafts, so if he mentioned a room or a transition then the reader could actually follow the geography. However, circumstances change, and he had to relocate filming to another farmhouse, this time in Indiana. Another script draft, another map (this time, Felker notes, there were numerous extra outbuildings he could build into the narrative).

But just because he took the production out of Michigan, he wasn’t about to take Michigan out of the production. “Outside of my DP and my co-editor, every department head was based out of Michigan, whether it’s Grand Rapids or Detroit. There are so many talented people and creatives that are making anything they can there. Whether it’s cool features, genre stuff, or even just commercial work, they’re all making a great, wonderful film environment there. So I was lucky to have a crew that I could go, ‘Hey, do you mind popping to Indiana? We’ll put you in an Airbnb, we know it’s only just a few hours,’ and they made it a hundred times better than I hoped it would be.”

Things Will be Different

Midnighter, World Premiere

Monday, March 11, 10pm, Alamo South Lamar

Wednesday, March 13, 11:15am, Alamo South Lamar

Friday, March 15, 7:15pm, Alamo South Lamar