So you basically just had to start spooking them. I tried to say, “At a party of smug Northern California white people, what would be the most normal types of people to run into?”, nobody draws attention to themselves as having this incredible unrealistic character. And that’s why, specifically, we chose not to give them broad characters. Were they given any guidance about the tone of the film? It turns from jokey to serious very quickly. I just basically thought, “What would a person know at this time?” They didn’t know what was in the box they didn’t know what the glow sticks meant they didn’t know when a fight was going to break out. Were there moments beside the power outages that were genuine surprises for the actors? They had no idea about the bumps and power outages and surprises that were coming. And it might have a bit of a backstory that they would tell, or a bit of motivation - like, “If this happens, you’re gonna want to do this.” Or, “Somehow get outside tonight.” They didn’t know what everybody else was told to do, so it was all a surprise to them. We shot over five nights, so each day, the individual actors would get a page of notes for what they had to do that night. How much information did you give each of the actors going in?
But take all these things that are all in you, and exaggerate them and push them to a level that makes for a compelling story.” And he really got into that. I got together with him and I said, “I don’t really want you playing you. His character, Mike, is a former Roswell actor, and several other key traits seem to be taken from his life.
I’m curious about Nicholas Brendon in particular, since I was a big Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan. We spent weeks with photographs of our possible friends and connections, saying, “Who looks like they’d be a couple? Who looks like they’d be friends?” The casting was the key part - Alex Manugian, who plays Amir in the film, he and I wrote the outline together. was told, “Just be ready to cook a chicken for eight people you never met before.” And five minutes after they arrived at my house, they had to be longtime friends and lovers and married couples. They are all people that would trust me enough to come over to my house with no knowledge of what we were doing, and no script. So in terms of the cast, how did you go about assembling this group of friends? Did they know each other prior to shooting? Especially after and Rango, I was just craving getting back to simplicity and purity. When I was storyboarding for these huge movies, I was just doing that so I could fund my crazy independent experimental film projects. Did you think about pursuing other funding?
You’ve been working on a pretty high-budget level in terms of your screenplays, but you made this film with minimal resources. But then it took a year of planning and charting and figuring out all the puzzle pieces and the character arcs and just making it all thematically cohesive.
#COHERENCE 2013 CAST MOVIE#
were standing in my living room with no money and thinking, “How do we make a movie that’s about something besides the obvious relationship troubles that a million indie movies do?” And that led to this cosmic fractured-reality idea. How did the idea for Coherence come to you? In this extended ( and spoiler-heavy) interview, Byrkit - whose résumé includes co-writing 2011’s Rango, as well as storyboarding work on several Pirates of the Caribbean films - tells Yahoo Movies how he assembled his jigsaw puzzle of a movie.
The film’s top-notch ensemble cast includes Nicholas Brendon (formerly Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Lauren Maher (Scarlett from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies), and Byrkit’s story collaborator Alex Manugian, who guided the improvisation from the inside. Every attempt to set their own house apart, including a “code” of placing a random object in a box, is mirrored in the other dimensions, as the friends begin to question their own relationships and the nature of reality itself. Phone service goes down, the power fails, and gradually, the group realizes that something even more bizarre has happened: The comet has fractured their reality into multiple dimensions, each with its own identical house and dinner party. In case you need a quick plot-refresh: Coherence follows those eight friends over the course of one night, when a comet is scheduled to pass over the Earth.
#COHERENCE 2013 CAST FULL#
Coherence director and story co-writer James Ward Byrkit likes to refer to his low-budget, improvised thriller as a “funhouse.” But Coherence isn’t a jump-scare movie, or a “gotcha” shocker full of cheap parlor tricks instead, this taut, disarming drama plays out like a great Twilight Zone episode, taking an everyday situation (in this case, a dinner party of eight friends) and giving it a smart sci-fi twist.