Man out of time

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/04/2020 (2335 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Friday, April 3, was supposed to be a big deal for writer, actor and former Winnipegger Jonas Chernick.

Chernick’s movie James Vs. His Future Self was going to première in eight cinemas across the country, an unusually large release for a small, quirky Canadian film. Chernick, who has starred in and co-written such films as My Awkward Sexual Adventure and Lucid (both directed by Sean Garrity), says it was to be “the biggest release I’ve ever experienced in my career as a filmmaker.”

Alas, COVID-19 happened, Cineplex closed its cinemas for the foreseeable future, and the film will now debut on various video-on-demand platforms on Friday.

Nobody saw it coming. And that ping of hindsight-regret is at the centre of the film, which Chernick, 46, co-wrote with director Jeremy LaLonde. Chernick plays James, a scientist so fixated on conquering time travel, he lets his personal relationships deteriorate, until he gets a visit from Jimmy (Daniel Stern). The dishevelled madman claims to be the older James, arrived from the future to warn his younger self to correct the obsessive path he has taken.

Jimmy, apparently, knows what’s coming.

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Anyone acquainted with Chernick may be aware that he has been percolating a secret “high-concept” science-fiction project for more than a decade. This film, he acknowledges, is the fruit of his own long obsession.

“I’ve been a big time-travel junkie for the longest time,” Chernick says during a phone interview from his home in Toronto. “I was trying to figure out what my version of that story would be.”

In 2004, he was at the Toronto International Film Festival and saw Primer, the low-budget American indie film about four engineers who inadvertently create a time machine. Chernick, putting it mildly, is a fan.

“It is the smartest time-travel movie ever made, the smartest time-travel story ever told, and I walked out of the theatre, my mind reeling,” he recalls, adding that dreams of his own time-travel project almost disappeared like Doc Brown’s DeLorean hitting 88 m.p.h.

“I probably said it out loud: ‘Well, there goes that idea,’” he says. “I could never write a time-travel movie because I’ve just seen the ultimate time-travel movie.”

Chernick says it was probably a decade later when the realization came to him. “My version of a time-travel movie isn’t trying to wow the audience about how smart the time travel is. It’s about the characters,” he says. “And it has to do with the idea of time, not as a scientific phenomenon, but as a device to explore character.

“That’s when I realized that my time-travel movie was going to be much more Back to the Future and less Primer.”

Chernick’s collaborative instincts were nurtured during his days as a theatre student at the University of Manitoba, but in the realm of film, he had only worked with with Sean Garrity on scripts. That was before he was cast in the 2015 comedy How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town, written and directed by Toronto-based Jeremy LaLonde. While taking that film to the Slamdance Film Festival in Utah, LaLonde told Chernick that he dreamed of doing a science-fiction project and asked Chernick if he had any ideas.

Chernick pitched his concept, which LaLonde loved. “(He) said immediately, ‘Yeah, let’s jam on that.’ And very organically and very quickly we rushed it out into what eventually became this movie,” Chernick says. “I collaborate well with the right partner. There haven’t been too many.”

Of course, the nature of the script required Chernick to work together with another partner, actor Daniel Stern as the older iteration of Chernick’s character. Probably best known as one half of the “Wet Bandits” who terrorize Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, Stern’s appeal to Chernick went back even further, to his turn in Barry Levinson’s 1982 ensemble piece Diner.

“He was incredibly influential to me,” says Chernick. “I know that whole Diner scene off by heart where he flipped out on Ellen Barkin for messing up the alphabetized records. When you look at Diner and you watch Daniel Stern’s performance, he’s basically doing the same thing or similar things to what I do as an actor. That lovable-loser-intellectual-anxious-funny guy. He was doing that a long time ago.”

Stern too proved to be an enthusiastic creative partner, jumping right into the process with lots of ideas and suggestions via Skype.

“He actually felt his character was the most well-formed entity in the script, but he had questions and comments about the rest of the story,” Chernick says.

Those Skype sessions helped Chernick recreate his own character, in a sense.

“I got to watch him live and I got to study his mannerisms and the way he talked — his sensibilities and his temperament,” the actor says. “So when he got on set it was kind of like we knew each other, because we had been collaborating on the script for so long.

“And then actually working with him was just a dream,” Chernick says. “He knows his stuff and he’s an exciting actor because you don’t know what you’re going to get from him. So the collaboration with him which one of the highlights, not just of this movie, but of my whole career.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing