Jeffrey St. Jules is the writer and director of the new sci-fi thriller The Silent Planet; it follows two inmates in the near future who are sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor on a distant planet. As things unravel, they become increasingly paranoid and start to lose a sense of who they are and their past lives.
Jeffrey stopped by to chat with us about the movie.
Hey Jeffrey, how are you?
Hi Eoin, nice to meet you.
You too! So, we’re talking today about The Silent Planet; where did the whole idea come from initially?
Yeah, it came from my childhood fantasy of wanting to run away to another planet and live by myself basically. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do since I was a kid is make a movie set on another planet. Just one day I just had this image of a guy alone on a planet who is doing this monotonous task day after day, and it was kind of peaceful but also sad but like calm. There’s just something really beautiful about it to me and I just wrote down that image and then many years later came back to it and wrote a movie around it.
I was reading a previous interview you did where you mentioned that the idea of escaping alone to another planet always held in allure for you and I also find that strangely attractive. I don’t know if it’s because it’s an introvert thing…
Yeah, I used to definitely have like hermit fantasies (laughs). I don’t think I’d ever have actually been able to do it because it’s very hard to be alone, but sometimes you just get that feeling you want to leave everything.
Yeah, I guess after two or three days later we’d miss Wi-Fi.
(laughs) Oh yeah, definitely would happen pretty fast.
I believe this was filmed in Tablelands in western Newfoundland and it really gives it the genuinely otherworldly look. Why was it the right location for this story?
Yeah, so I was developing the film with Andrew Bronfman who’s based in Ontario like me and we’re trying to figure out we’re gonna shoot it in Canada somewhere so we’re trying to find what’s the best province for scenery and tax incentives. So, we landed on Newfoundland I can’t think of anywhere else I would have rather shot it now because it’s just so unique. The Tablelands is the only one of the only two places in the world where the earth’s mantle is exposed so that orange rock that they’re on is actually the earth’s mantle like from way way way down. You can’t get that anywhere else in the world so it doesn’t feel like you’re just shooting in a desert; you’re shooting in a otherworldly spot and then we brought on Mark O’Neill who’s our Newfoundland producer who kind of pulled all that stuff together for us on the Newfoundland side. There’s a lot of film stuff happening up there too so there’s great crews; it’s pretty remote to go to the Tablelands and it’s a national park so you have to very careful with conservation and not ruining anything, so we brought in a minimal crew and shot up there.
I particularly love the design and language of the aliens; they didn’t look like big insects which aliens always look like in movies. Where did you come up with that the whole idea and the language from?
I wanted a bit of a retro Doctor Who type feel to it but I also wanted something mysterious about them. We don’t actually know what they look like because they’re covered in these cloths and masks which in our minds were kind of organic. It was cloth but it was also kind of like growing from them in a weird way. Anyway it’s all these kind of ideas we had in developing it that nobody would know from watching it. in creating the language I was thinking a lot about whale music and wanted some like vowel-y sounds as if they kind of expressed the ideas more through the tonality of their voice than the particular sounds they’re creating. They’re called the Oeans and they’re just very vowel-y and they’re round and they’re kind of like big buddhas in a way too.
Why were Elias and Brianna so perfect for their roles?
Elias is one of our great Canadian actors and he just connected with it so much like we offered him the role and everything but when he got it, he just put so much into it. I talked to him, and he lived this character in preparation for it so I wouldn’t have known that in advance. Certainly, he’s got so much empathy in his eyes and his face like so much pathos that he just felt. I really wanted somebody who had that feels like they’ve lived a life but also felt like you really feel for them. Then Brianna had only done a couple films but she’s so precise and solid and just nuanced in everything she does and it was really cool getting them to work together; partly because they’re just really lovely people so it didn’t feel like there was any ego on set at all. Of course, Elias is a seasoned actor who’s done this many years and Brianna was starting out; although with Brianna, you would never know it was only her third film; she came on and just nailed everything right away. Elias is somebody who really wants to feel everything so he wants to get into that; he’s feeling it, he’s really happy about what he does and it was just a great contrast between them both. I think they just played off each other so nicely and respected each other’s characters and were great scene partners. For a two-hander movie like this I couldn’t have asked for more.
What role did music play in shaping the film’s atmosphere?
I usually I have a big giant playlist; for this one I only was listening to Rachmaninoff. Something about that vibe. that old kind of heavy Russian. There was a lot of inspiration from Russian sci-fi as well like obviously Solaris and then this film called Peraspera Ad Astra is a big inspiration for me so we ended up using some Rachmaninoff in the credits in the ending so that was a big inspiration. I didn’t end up using as much as I thought I would have but then my composer Darren Fong who I worked with on everything came in. It’s not a crazy amount of music in it but the music that’s there really helped kind of set the tone I think.
How would you like the film to resonate with audiences?
Yeah, it’s hard to answer that question because I think it’s not really up to me how it resonates with the audience. I think a bit of it is about guilt and facing ourselves and the importance of forgiveness and the importance of human connection, so if something resonates along those lines then I’m happy.
Thank you so much for the chat and hopefully see you in Toronto at some point.
Thanks a lot, take care and see you next time.