In Kevin and Matthew McManus’ Redux Redux, Irene (Michaela McManus) travels from parallel universe to parallel universe killing the man who killed her daughter over and over again. Somewhere long after she’s lost count of how many times she’s found him, she meets Mia (Stella Marcus), who’s running away from – and towards – her own demons.
Awards Buzz spoke with the McManus brothers about how they approached this subject and settled on just the right framework:
“What we loved about getting into a multiverse story was the opportunity to try and tell a more intimate version of it. We loved the idea of, if there really are an infinite amount of universes, truly infinite, then so many of them would be so similar to our own life, our own world, that the differences would be infinitely small. It would be just these tiny, I mean little tiny, details throughout, so that was a really exciting thing for us to explore. What if, instead of telling a story where every universe is so wildly different and you’re reaching your most wild goals or it’s some wild what-if scenario where the Confederates won the war or something like that, what if we just told something where it all felt so similar and so identical, and then what story can be bred from that? So I feel like there’s a million ideas that we keep throwing around of how to deal with that kind of look at the multiverse. This is the one that that really grabbed us the most, this story about a woman who lost her child and is insanely frustrated when she goes into these identical universes only to find there’s never circumstances that really change that.”
They stressed the notion of not making things complicated and ensuring that audiences wouldn’t struggle to grasp any of it:
“We were trying to think of what’s a way to simplify this the most, and what’s the way to make this really easy to process for the audience. I think, oftentimes with multiverse stories, it is like, anything’s possible and it’s almost hard to wrap your head around because it’s so expansive. The way we thought about it was, there would probably be a discoverable universe or probably the closest things to this universe are probably the easiest ones to access, which made sense to us. So you’d be going through, but if you crank that dial all the way up and you got to the wildest, biggest differences, it would probably be primordial Earth or the planet would be like every other planet. So the idea of, well, there’s a discovered universe and that is what is it pre-programmed and dialed into her machine, and she’s going from universe to universe to universe in a linear way that these machines have been constructed, that just seemed to make sense for us to keep it really simple and a process that’s felt intuitive, hopefully, for the audience.”
Watch the video above to hear about their approach to the many bloody killsfeatured and specifically to the fact that Irene isn’t meant to be a trained killer.
Redux Redux opens in theaters on Friday, February 20th.
