I had never adapted someone else’s work before, but I’ve always been open to the idea. On a whim, I decided to shoot off an email to Igor. And the rest is history!
The same for you, Igor, where did you get the idea for your short story? Why was this a story you had to tell?
Igor: The kernel of the story was given to me by someone else. When I was in college, I spent part of every summer teaching math at an academic summer camp for high school students. The first summer I worked there, I was a teaching assistant to a very experienced instructor, and he told me that a few years earlier, he and one or two others had come up with the core mathematical idea of the story and presented it to the students as a way of illustrating some aspects of number theory. I found the whole thing very clever. The idea then rattled around in my head for a year or two and eventually a plot grew around it, and I had my story. The name of the mathematician in the story (and the film) is actually an acknowledgment of the person who first gave me the idea, who is himself a math professor.
Colin, how did you come about finding Igor’s story? Are you a fan of short fiction?
Colin: I regularly tell myself, “Colin, you need to read more.” I spend so much of my time watching movies, scanning facebook and my twitter feed. I spend a disproportionate amount of time in front of a computer.
Every time I commit to reading a work of fiction, every time I pick up a book, I feel so refreshed. Alas, it does not happen very often. I can’t call myself a fan of short fiction, because I just haven’t read enough of it. It’s something I will continue to berate myself for.
Igor, how did you feel about your story being adapted to another medium? What was it like reformatting it to film?
Igor: I was delighted and very flattered that Colin liked my story enough to base a film on it. The story had been published on the web almost ten years earlier, and, while it was still posted in the webzine’s archives, I had no expectation that it was still being read, so I was very pleasantly surprised when Colin emailed me.
Going in, I knew nothing about screenwriting, so when we decided to collaborate on the script, I checked out a couple of screenwriting books from the library, and learned enough, especially about formatting and terminology, to make an attempt at an initial draft, and the whole process went very smoothly after that. We sent drafts back and forth and had several long phone conversations, and the script slowly evolved over time.
While the first half of the film follows your story fairly closely, Igor, how do you feel about the changes made?
Igor: I’m the first to acknowledge that the original short story is fairly slight, so it made sense to try to add some dramatic heft for the film. The film was Colin’s project, and I just tried my best to help him explore different possibilities for the storyline and find and refine the one truest to his vision. As we got later in the process, and closer to filming, the whole thing became better defined in Colin’s mind, and the later script revisions were very much based on his ideas for the direction he wanted to take, which was entirely appropriate given that his level of investment in the project was orders of magnitude larger than mine. And I’m a big fan of the changes and additions--they give the film a far richer texture than my short story.
What was it like adapting the story to film? Were there any difficulties doing so?
Colin: I thought it would be a pretty straightforward matter of translating the story to the big screen. When I read the short, it seemed like something I wanted to simply visualize. In my head, the story just worked. So I was surprised to find that it took a bit of wrestling!
From the outset, Igor was as gracious and collaborative as I could have hoped. The writing process was a true collaboration, and I was impressed how irreverent he was with his own source material. Igor was up for trying anything, and for allowing the collaboration - and the film itself - to evolve throughout the process.
As we worked on the script I began to ask more and more questions.. Should our protagonist be this passive? Is bleem too mathematically superficial? Do we really feel the stakes? Maybe the stakes are too impersonal? Is the ending too anticlimactic? Are we paying everything off as well as we can?
For a time, we experimented with lots of small tweaks and changes. Different ways to communicate the same story point, different gags, different variations on dialogue. We even experimented with the value of bleem - for a moment we made it a secret number between four and five.
It wasn’t till the eve of production that I pulled the rug out from everyone; after a number of conversations, critiques and brainstorming sessions, I did a major rewrite that significantly restructured the story. The new version used a framing device that entwined our two characters in a more concrete way. It provided a backstory and a somewhat more punchy ending. Many of these ideas emerged from a pivotal discussion with my creative producer Roque Nonini and director of photography Michael Lloyd.
At the time, I was not entirely sure it was the right direction to go. After all, didn’t I like the original story just the way it was? I vascillated for a long moment, allowed Igor and my professors to weigh in. Sometimes you gotta just go with your gut. Now that the film is out in the world, I feel like I probably made the right decision. But I still wonder what the other version would have been like.
We’ve heard, this was a film school production (but it is certainly doesn’t look like one). How did that effect the production? Was this limiting or helpful?
Colin: Thanks very much! You’re right - this was a student film from beginning to end. I think for a lot of the crew it was one of the biggest projects they’ve worked on in film school! It was a learning experience for all of us, and I think we were all fighting against the “student film” feel. I’ve always cared a lot about production value, and the entire team spent a lot of time and effort making this film look and feel as professional and “hollywood-quality” as possible.
I was really fortunate to be able to rally together some of the most talented students at SCAD. Although I was in undergrad, my cinematographer and production designer were graduate students and they each pulled together a pretty amazing team.
In that respect, making this project in the context of film school was an absolute blessing. Mounting a production a formidable task, but the infrastructure of film school provides crew in the form of students, guidance in the form of professors, and resources in the form of equipment, studio time, and sound libraries and renderfarms. This film could easily have cost over 100K if we had to pay for everything out-of-pocket.
Igor, were you involved in the production of the film?
Igor: Very minimally. Colin did send me some of the casting audition videos, and I gave him some feedback on those, and I also sent him photos of several pages of my handwritten notes from one of my college physics classes to be used as a visual reference in some of the production design.
Where was this filmed? What was the production like?
Colin: We shot the film in Savannah, GA on location and in a studio. We built two sets - one for the interior of the psychiatrist’s office, and one for the interior of Ersheim’s room. We shot all this material on a RED camera using a beautiful Cooke zoom lens from the 70s. We shot a few pick-up shots and inserts with a Canon DSLR, including the exterior of the psychiatric facility, which I had my younger brother shoot for me in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Since everyone was in school, I assumed we’d have to primarily shoot on weekends to avoid conflicts... but as it turned out, the vast majority of the crew was willing to skip a few classes for the sake of our film! Since we only had our actors for a limited time, it made sense to shoot in large multi-day chunks rather than limiting ourselves to the weekend. Still, production was intermittent and spanned over quite a few weeks!
Any plans on writing a sequel?
Igor: Not at this time. I think the original story’s idea would need to be expanded in scope, like it is in the film, in order to support a sequel.
How have people been reacting to
the film, Colin? Has it opened up any opportunities your film making?
Colin: I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the reaction to The Secret Number. It’s not a film for everybody: some people are stoked, others are confused. I’ve gotten a lot of critiques and a lot of compliments as well. I’ve enjoyed seeing it play in a few festivals across the country and watching the comments roll in online. It’s been a very gratifying project!
The short on its own hasn’t opened doors in any dramatic way, but the culmination of my work has certainly led to some great opportunities. I know I’ve worked with some amazing talents, met some fantastic people, and improved as an artist and director as a result of this project.
Igor, how do you feel about the finished film? Is it how you imagined your original story when writing it?
Igor: I’m thrilled with the film, and I’m excited to have contributed to it. Working with Colin on the script was a really great experience, and then the film turned out better than I ever imagined. I think the production values are amazing, and Colin just did an awesome job all-around. Compared to my own vision of the story when I was writing it, the film is darker, deeper, more ambitious, and definitely more impressive.
What are you working on at the moment? Any feature film plans in the future?
COLIN: During the day, I’m currently working at Pixar Animation Studios as a Camera & Staging aritist. On my own time, I’m tinkering away on a few more ideas for short films. I’d love to tackle a feature of my own someday, but I’ve got no concrete plans!
Are you currently working on any other stories? Do you plan to move on to novels in the future?
IGOR: I am working on several new stories, and I also have a story coming out in Asimov’s Science Fiction in a few months that I’m very excited about. I have no specific plans to write a novel, in part because, as a reader, I gravitate much more to short stories than to novels.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/344123031/waylines-magazine-year-two
Dearest Chandra:
I was the first to wake, one month out from our new home to be and twenty-four hours before everyone else. The bulk of the deceleration is already done; we’re at a bit less than normal Earth gravity now. Remember those little sleeper jaunts we used to do out to Io? It’s nothing like that, Chandra. I feel like the inside of my head’s been scrubbed with a wire brush, sinuses desiccated and tongue glued in place. I don’t think any language has suitable words for how I feel.
But if you’re viewing this message, you already know that, don’t you. You’ll have had your own unpleasant awakening from long-term cold sleep on the colony ship and be what... three weeks out from this planet? I know they weren’t planning to wake you engineers in the first round. I have to remind myself of that; time has gone out of joint, with me awake in the future and you in the unreachable past. I can’t wrap my mind around it. Discussion of general relativity was notably lacking from my medical school curriculum.
But a year and a half from now, I’ll get to hear your own complaints in something close to real time instead of a recorded vid. And I’ll be oh-so-sympathetic, I promise, down on the surface of HD 108874. Or what did you say the Chinese techs were calling it - Dragon’s Horn? Less of a mouthful at least. Maybe I’ll take the vid feed on a little stroll through a grassy meadow, so you know what you’re waiting for.
Just a second, I’ve got to sit down. My quadriceps are cracking like freezer-burned meat.
Where was I... right. Before we left, I had no idea why they wanted to give me a full day by myself, doing nothing but wandering the halls. Now I understand. I could barely take care of myself the first twenty-four hours, let alone anyone else.
Six hours of cramping and crying. I feel like a wimp, complaining about it, when I was always the tough girl. All that got me through was the vid you made. That one of you reading from the newspaper. Listening to you laugh through the dry columns in the financial section helped. It really did. And I have so many more messages from you, just waiting to be opened like gifts.
See, I am a genius. You should listen to your wife more often.
Well, I have to get going. It’s three hours until the rest of the crew starts to thaw, all at once. Wish me luck, I’m going to need it. I’ll be glad to have the technical officers awake, and not just because it’s eerie, just wandering through the smooth corridors alone and listening for echoes. There’s an alert flag on the comm, but not one I recognize.
Dearest Chandra:
Time locks on your messages? Cruel, my love. But maybe you were right. Its given me something to look forward to at the end of the day. And I need that right now, more than you can imagine. I have so many worries right now.
The thaw is much worse than I expected. Forty-eight hours of grown men and women crying, screaming at hallucinations, and vomiting. I never would have guessed my head full of rusty nails was the easy version of waking. And I’m still not done yet... there are six left.
I’m sorry to report your brother was one of the vomiters. Which I think he’ll ultimately find less humiliating than hallucinations. Param’s always taken himself a little too seriously - you know it’s true - and I don’t think he’d be able to stand it if I saw him scrambling around barefoot on the decking, screaming about seven-eyed owls or Shiva dancing or being eaten by a paper lantern during Diwali.
Instead, I just held his head while he threw up into a recycler. His hair was still slimy with cryonic fluids, the cloying smell of them nothing short of choking.
He asked for you. He was so out of it, I had to remind him you were following behind. He grinned at me like a twelve-year-old. I think I’ve got a better understanding now about how he had your mother wrapped around his finger. He just said--can you believe this? Well, of course you can: “I thought if I felt this hung over, Chandra had to be somewhere nearby.”
I think it’s safe to say your brother sends his love. I thought about telling him, about the comm flag, but he didn’t seem to be in any condition to deal with it.
I just hope everyone will be back up to spec or close to it soon. We have a month until planetfall but there’s so much to do, and--
Sorry, I had to check on Germaine. He’s one of the hallucinators, but he’s finally come down. I think I’m in the home stretch, but I’m so tired Chandra. I caught myself singing in the hall, that love song you like. There’s a strange echo that brought my voice back; for a moment I didn’t sound alone.
Maybe you were here with me, in spirit. I know you don’t believe in that, and I don’t really either, but it’s a nice thought.
That’s the alarm for the next thaw, so I’ll just say goodnight to you now. It’s Xinfa’s turn I think... yes. Good. She’ll be able to deal with the alert on the comm.
Dearest Chandra:
The alert flag turned out to be something... big. I don’t know how to say this.
No, I know how to say this. I just don’t want to.
It was the outer marker for an occupied system.
And no, not what we’ve trained for. Not first contact. The voice that came from the beacon was human, pleasant and cheerful, speaking a Mandarin dialect with an accent none of us recognized.
“You have entered space of Colony AF-391, known as Guanyin. Please identify yourself. We welcome you in peace,”
The way we all went quiet, it might as well have been the delivery of a death sentence. The message repeated twice.
Param just said, over and over, that this couldn’t be right. As if he could overrule the message somehow by volume alone. I wanted to shake him, like he was broken and that would somehow get him unstuck.
Xinfa was the one who finally did something about it. She just keyed open the channel and called the beacon, had it bounce our signal back to its master array. There was a fifteen second delay, just long enough to make me hope... I don’t know. Make me hope that it was a mistake, somehow. But then another woman, though her voice was very different from the one on the beacon, answered. She asked us to id
entify ourselves again.
It made me so angry, hearing someone sound so pleasant as they shook the world upside-down.
I’ve seen expressions like that on Xinfa’s face before, when I’ve called a husband or mother and said that I’m from the hospital and am the bearer of bad news. It’s the look of a waking nightmare. Everyone just stared at her, even your brother. I’ve never seen him look so... so... blank. I couldn’t stand it any more and just jammed my knuckle into his shoulder blade. Then all he said was, “Send them our registry code,”
The next pause was far longer than fifteen seconds. We just waited and waited. Then the woman said almost in a surprised tone: “Advanced Scout Sita, welcome to Guanyin. We thought you were lost.”
Thought we were lost? What does that even mean?
Param was angry. He still is. He’s the Captain; he was supposed to be briefed on everything. He started shouting questions at Xinfa to relay to this new voice in the night, demanding to know how we could be lost, how was this even possible? But she gave us no answers in return, just, “This is a conversation best had in person.” What does that even mean? How can anyone be that cruel?