Robert Kojder chats with Eternity screenwriter Patrick Cunnane and producer Trevor White…
Selected as the official closing night film for the Chicago International Film Festival, Eternity is a high-concept blend of genres (romantic comedy and drama) that primarily takes place in a bureaucratically imagined afterlife.
The story centers on Larry (Miles Teller), who is sent to the afterlife after his 80-something-year-old counterpart in the real world dies. Sporting a younger appearance (when people die, they revert to the happiest versions of themselves in the afterlife), he is initially thrilled to find and be reunited with his wife, Joan (Elizabeth Olsen), with whom he had a large family. The only complication is that Joan’s first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in war, has also been waiting for her arrival for several decades now. Also in this afterlife are “eternities”, which are paradise worlds of great imagination that one chooses to live in forever. However, there is no hopping between them. Considering Larry and Luke don’t get along, this effectively puts Joan in the position of choosing one of them, with an eternity in the afterlife.
Joining the festivities were screenwriter Patrick Cunnane and producer Trevor White, who worked closely together on the film. And while I will be up front that parts of the film, quite frankly, annoyed me (especially the incessant bickering between Larry and Luke), there is some merit in the sheer imagination that went into the world-building of the afterlife and the film’s ambitious concept. It is also appreciated that romances for adults are brought back to theaters.
While I can’t say I enjoyed the movie, I do recommend giving it a shot (especially over Thanksgiving weekend while waiting for that turkey to cook). The other bit of irony is that this conversation not only gave me more appreciation for the film’s goals, but also turned out to be one of my favorite interviews of the year. Enjoy my talk with Patrick and Trevor as we dive into the tantalizing story hook, the details of creating the afterlife and eternities, their inspirations, and putting together an irresistible ensemble:
Congratulations on the movie and bringing it to so many festivals. How does it feel to be selected as the official closing night film for the Chicago International Film Festival?
Trevor White: It’s an honor. This festival has such amazing films every year and such a great list of talent that come out for it. Chicago is one of the great cities. So yeah, it’s special.
About the love triangle… what drew me into that aspect is the idea of someone being reunited, potentially getting to live out the life they never had with their husband who died in war. I think that’s a common trope in movies across all genres, but here you get to flip that on its head, and something that’s moving just as an idea. So, can you talk about how that plot point came to be?
Patrick Cunnane: It’s funny, it’s an idea I’ve had for a long time before I got into the entertainment industry at all. I always thought to myself, and I think everybody thinks about it, what does the afterlife look like? Does it exist? And I just thought to myself, if the afterlife exists, I think human problems would exist there too. This would seem to be a unique problem to that place. I called Trevor and his brother and producing partner Tim, and pitched very plainly exactly what you said, that one liner, a woman who was in love twice, once very briefly, and once for a long time, gets to the afterlife, and both of her husbands are waiting. What does she do? We just had such fun really diving into, well, what would we do? What questions would we ask ourselves? It really stemmed from that one-line idea that’s been in the back of my head for ten years.
TW: Pat, Tim, and I love the great rom-coms of the ’90s and late ’80s and early 2000s, the Richard Curtis, Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner, and Jim Brooks movies. That was what we were looking to make here. We had felt, for whatever reason, movies like that weren’t being made today. And we were really hoping this movie could feel like that, with a lightness and warmth. It still says something, hopefully meaningful, to the majority of the audience who want to see it. That was our North Star the whole time, not trying to do something overly abstract.
PC: We didn’t want to take ourselves too seriously. We just wanted to set up a question that’s hopefully fun and also thought-provoking. To Trevor’s point, right from the jump, we started talking about how we love romantic comedies. Let’s try to make one that people will want to see in a theater. So, we feel so lucky to have partnered with A24 on it.
I definitely felt some Richard Curtis while watching this. Can you talk about your influences on the afterlife?
PC: The world of politics and bureaucracy has just always been funny to me, and frustrating. I wanted to have that in there right from the jump. Then, really, our co-writer/director, David Freyne, had this vision for what it all really looked like. He was brilliant and went wild with all the different versions and permutations of what these are, what these Eternities are, and what the junction actually looks like. He lists Master of Life as a big influence.
TW: For David, his big influences for it were A Matter of Life and Death and Billy Wilder. We talked about Broadcast News, then a bit of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as we got into the third act. It also wants to be its own thing. When we were taking the script out to filmmakers, we wanted to go with one that lacked a lot of specificity about what the afterlife looked like. We had the big picture of it being a train station and the bureaucracy, but in terms of the way it looked, like this old brutalist train station with the various booths that capture a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque era, all came from David. After that first meeting with him, he said, “This is my vision for what the afterlife is in this movie.” We just thought that was so fun
Speaking of the afterlife, one of my favorite tidbits is paying attention to the different advertisements for Eternities in the background. There’s one that said you can finally be free of men, which is funny. Talk more about the fun you had coming up with these Eternities.
PC: I would watch different cuts with my family, and we would all keep catching different things as we went. It’s fun in the sense that if you watch this movie more than once, you’re probably going to catch something you didn’t see. To the point we were making before about David, all the credit goes to him on those worlds.
TW: Only a few of the worlds were written into the script. In our production office during pre-production, there was a big board outside David’s office, and every day, new Eternity ideas would go up with different tagline options. I’m telling you, there were hundreds of ideas, maybe. Every day, he would put two or three ideas up, and he would look at them, and he would walk by, and he would stare at them, and pull one down. He didn’t like it anymore. And I’m telling you, some of these were so creative, so ridiculous. Some were just inappropriate for our movie. Then the taglines are so fun, like Space World. I don’t know if you noticed the tagline in the quick wide shot, but it’s Space World, “finally, you can touch your anus!”
That’s a funny one
TW: David had a field day with it; he is so creative.
Were there any you loved that didn’t make it into the film?
TW: There definitely were. Since that whole junction was built on a sound stage in Vancouver, and, unfortunately, just the way it is, more were built than actually ended up on camera. We have brochures for all of them. I think A24 is actually going to put together a big brochure kind of thing for people to flip through. So, hopefully you’ll get to see a whole set of more eternities, then be able to pick one for yourself.
PC: That was a ton of fun in downtime on set, just wandering and looking and laughing at all of these different worlds and imagining. The infantilization world, that’s my favorite.
TW: And then His Lordship’s Eternity, that one really cracks me up. And the first time I saw the one that’s 1950s Germany without the Nazis.
That’s gold.
TW: I was like, David, how do you come up with that? That is ridiculous.
PC: It’s such a really interesting exercise to think about. I love this aspect of yeah, the past, but let’s take away all the bad stuff. That was really clever.
TW: Then Paris Land is just Paris, but everyone there speaks English. It’s pretty funny.
What is it like to write for characters who are younger on screen, but in the case of Larry, he’s already lived a whole life, and how do you account for that while writing for the character?
PC: It was so fun. Larry and Joan are in their late 80s and come back in their early 30s or so. To write them with the perspective of an entire life behind them, and then to write towards Luke, who didn’t have an entire life, who died much, much younger, and has been in this artificial place for so long… what does that do to a person? It makes you desperate. For Larry, it was so fun just to have the lingering. He’s an ordinary leading man. To write in that way was a whole lot of fun. And, Elizabeth Olsen, the way she was able to inhabit an 88-year-old woman, even just the voice…
TW: Lizzie really captured that, Miles Teller, too. They really both got in there and found ways that were not too overt, where it wasn’t distracting, but it felt believable that you wouldn’t be bothered by watching an entire movie with them doing it. There’s so much just charm in the way they each captured their older selves.
PC: Because of the Larry/Luke dynamic, they have such different perspectives because of their lived experience and now their dead experience. It really made for a lot of fun. I could have kept writing this movie forever.
TW: There was something Pat touched, the fact that Luke did live, he’s been alive for all these years, but the fact is his reality is majority in this tiny little junction station, where it warps the brain. His experiences are so different from Joan and Larry’s, which adds another facet that makes it more complex.
And this is a great cast. You have Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen, and I love Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She’s always funny. Can you talk about how you got these people on board?
TW: My brother and I had worked with Lizzie a few times before. This is our third movie with her, and David couldn’t get the idea of her out of his mind. We started with Lizzie. Then, there were a lot of great actor options, and I think we always thought Miles would be perfect. I think at first, Miles wasn’t available on our dates, and so we were thinking. Then all of a sudden, he became available, and we immediately went to him. He came on, and then once Miles and Lizzie were on, Callum came on, and then Da’Vine and John. So that’s how it all went down.
Even though this is a romance, you also have a lot of humor here with characters bickering, or even the afterlife coordinators getting invested and trying to find their purpose. So what was it like working with David, trying to strike the right tone for the film?
PC: The very first Zoom that David and I had, and I think you were on the very first one, too… we just clicked, and we both got each other, and got what we wanted this to be. I could see his vision for it, and I felt so confident in that that the tone really… it was barely a conversation. We felt our way through it. And we’re so happy to be able to pair the romance and emotion with a lot of comedy, and now to be taking it around the country and watching it in theaters with people. It’s been so amazing to hear the laughs at these, these moments that we’ve been looking at on the page for so long. It really was from the jump that we really aligned on tone.
TW: David flagged Billy Wilder early as kind of his North Star, and I think that was instantly how we felt. I’ll say that Billy Wilder is probably my favorite director ever, and he was so versatile in the kinds of films he would make. We thought this was, yes, a romantic comedy, but it also does a lot more than that. It lives in multiple genres at once. And David just had a real sense of how to be funny, how to be broad, and how to be very earnest and genuine.
Trevor, you have an excellent list of producing credits, including The Post, Wind River, and other movies I love. What makes this one more special than those other projects for you?
TW: The truth is, I do tell people, this one has a very near and dear place in my heart. The way this came together was Pat pitched this idea to Tim and me, and we instantly said, “That’s a really big idea.” Then it was early COVID, and Pat and his family, by chance, lived like a couple of blocks from my family and me, and we were in a bubble together. He was kind of the only family we would visit. We decided to go on a vacation together, two hours north, with our young kids who were the same age. The kids went to sleep, and Pat and I just started cracking the rules of the world.
So, at this point, all we had was a sentence, two husbands, and a wife. This is kind of the earliest I’ve ever come into a project and been really granular, cracking it together. Then Pat went off and did an amazing job. There’s so much I love about, yes, this movie, the script, but then it’s also, it was nothing but pluses in terms of the people. We adore David Freyne. I think he’s going to be one of the greats. I genuinely think he has everything you want in a director. He’s so funny, warm, and smart, with a point of view, but also open to compromise. As producers, we spend a lot of time with our directors. It’s not every day that you get someone like that. So there are many reasons this was so special.
Thank you so much for your time, and good luck at the Music Box tonight. I hope the screening goes over well.
TW & PC: You’re welcome, we appreciate it!
Many thanks to Patrick Cunnane and Trevor White for taking the time for this interview.
Robert Kojder
