Why Has Sci-Fi TV Stopped Imagining Our Future?

There is no better way to start a long and tedious science fiction fandom fight than by asking for a definition of the genre. But to keep things simple, let’s go with the Oxford Dictionary’s wording: “Fiction based on imagined future scientific or technological advances and major social or environmental changes, frequently portraying space or […]

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The casting process for any movie is a difficult thing, one that involves nuanced factors such as figuring out schedules, availability, chemistry, or even just aligned visions. And then there are times where it just clicks. The many-hyphenated musical and artistic talent Flying Lotus had exactly such a moment while looking for the lead of his new sci-fi/horror genre-bender, Ash. He had a moment when he met Eiza González.

“It was the first thing she said to me,” Flying Lotus recalls of their earliest conversation while visiting the Den of Geek studio at SXSW. “She said, ‘You know, the script reminds me of Silent Hill.’” The smile practically bursts from the director’s face when the memory comes back. “I was like she’s perfect!”

When you see the finished film, the influences are apt. Set in a distant future on a strange alien world, Ash is a bizarre vision filled with dread, mystery—and even a dizzying first-person action sequence where González’s protagonist, a woman named Riya, must defend herself against a hostile force. Suddenly, a movie told entirely from Riya’s subjective point-of-view literalizes it in a fight scene with scalpels, fire, and perhaps a martial arts legend.

“It reminded me of Silent Hill 2,” González specifies about the whole film. “I used to play Silent Hill avidly and [Ash] really reminded me of that vibe. [And this] energy was always something that I wanted to do, and I loved the first-person perspective in movies. It just gives you a sense of being in it, and also creates so much anxiety. I thought that was dope.”

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The connection between Ash and iconic video game imagery isn’t entirely an accident either. As FlyLo confirms, he worked with gaming tools when designing visuals for the film: “I spent a lot of time learning Unreal Engine and trying to learn visual effects because I wanted to do some pre-visualizations, and I just wasn’t satisfied with my drawings,” he explains.

Yes, that’s a unique approach for film development, but Ash is an unique take on the proverbial haunted spaceship movie. “The script [written by Jonni Remmler] came like a jigsaw puzzle,” Flying Lotus observes. “It didn’t have to be constructed that way, but it just happened to be constructed in a way that was like, ‘What is this?’”

When Ash begins, González’s character Riya awakens on a desolated shuttle with no clear memory of how she got there or even who she is. All she knows for certain is the planet outside is bleakly oppressive, overcast in menacing psychedelic reds and purples. Yet that seems pitcuresque when compared to how seemingly all of Riya’s crew onboard the ship has been wiped out by… something.

“The movie is from Riya’s perspective, and the colors and the visual tone is a reflection of her headspace,” the helmer says about his movie’s evocative look. “I don’t want to spoil too much, but it corresponds to what she’s dealing with emotionally.”

“It’s purposeful,” González agrees. “The director has a visual idea, and we had measured every single part of where her fevers are coming, why they’re coming, and how the colors correlated. That became a roadmap for us to dive into the performance.” It also proved to be an expressionistic way to help the star build a character who due to having amnesia doesn’t even know herself.

“She’s sort of like a newborn baby,” González says. “It was very tender and vulnerable for me as an actress, because I felt like a little girl in many of these scenes, and I think you can see it, especially with Aaron.”

The Aaron in question is Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul, an thespian who González has been friends with for years, and whose sense of warmth and familiarity created a great wellspring to build what is ironically a much more strained dynamic onscreen.

“This [script] came to Eiza and I’s desk at the same time, so it was just nice to have each other’s back from the beginning,” Paul tells us about what is almost a two-hander aspect to the film. While Riya doesn’t know anything that is going on, Paul’s character Brion seemingly has all the answers, although he comes into the film as his own mystery.

“When he shows up, he’s been orbital monitoring around the planet, so he hasn’t been with the group for some time,” Paul says. “He’s been on a solo journey in his spaceship by himself doing God knows what. But then he gets an SOS call from [Riya] and he shows up and the entire crew is massacred. So he’s just trying to figure out what the hell happened but then, also if he can trust her.”

Much of the appeal about Ash, though, is about mystery and tone, the unknown and dread. That seeps into even the musical score, which of course is a crucial component for a filmmaker who is also a musician, producer, and the film’s composer.

“It’s funny because I had a vision for it originally, but that changed when I started cutting the movie together,” Flying Lotus says of the film’s hypnotic soundscape. “The original thing I wanted to do just wasn’t working. I had to try a bunch of different stuff. I threw different sounds at the wall, and I started [to become] really obsessed with Halloween at the time. I was watching John Carpenter‘s stuff quite a bit, and I just thought about how when he did Halloween he was up against it for time, and he had to do this soundtrack pretty much by himself. I tried to feel that spirit and thought to myself, ‘What can I do alone in New Zealand with minimal gear? How do I do that thing and still bring something new to it and make it interesting to myself?’”

Whether dealing with the visuals or the music, those types of questions matter because Ash takes advantage of the freedom offered by genre movies—as well as independent cinema.

“Independent filmmaking is challenging,” González points out. And with Ash, she says “here comes someone with a vision and an exciting story. I have been really happy to see that the independent filmmaking is taking a cool turn, because that’s how you create new styles, new visual imagery. That’s how you bring a fresh take into filmmaking.”

For Flying Lotus, he’s just happy to make a genre movie to connect with the audience in a new way. “Genre films are the movies you want to go see on Friday night. Some of them may be forgettable, but you just want to have a good time sometimes and escape the crazy world that we live in.”

With Ash, however, it seems the intent is to escape one crazy world in order to find something crazier, more bizarre, and just maybe dope as hell.

Ash premiered at SXSW on March 11 and opens in theaters on March 21.

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