Melbourne International Film Festival has announced its opening night movie, The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom, the feature debut of Melbourne writer-director Cris Jones, stars Xavier Samuel as a man who experiences time backwards.
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Otto Bloom is, Jones hastens to emphasise, different from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story adapted for the screen in 2008, in which Brad Pitt played a man who aged in reverse.
Otto ages normally, but remembers the future and knows nothing about the past. Rachel Ward and her daughter Matilda Brown play the same character at different stages of the story.
"I couldn't be happier that people are going to see the film for the first time at MIFF, and on opening night," Jones says.
The connection with the festival goes back a long way. Jones' graduation film from the Victorian College of the Arts, 2003's Excursion, screened at the festival and won the emerging Australian filmmaker award. He took part in 2004 in MIFF's Accelerator program.
The seed of The Death And Life Of Otto Bloom was his reading of Einstein's view of time. Einstein suggests, Jones says, "that the perception we are moving forward through time is an illusion. Time is just another dimension of the physical universe, and every moment is therefore simultaneously real".
"It was a fascinating idea and a powerful philosophy for me, because there's a lot of consolation that comes with it. At the time I started thinking about this, I had lost someone that I loved, and the idea gave me some hope and positivity.
"I was looking for a story in which you could take this philosophy and a positive message and tell it as a film. The idea of how to do it came several years later."
He started work on the screenplay when he had just returned from overseas – it was written in his mother's garage.
Jones wrote the title role for Samuel (Twilight, Adore), whom he didn't know, but whose work he admired. "The first time I met him," Jones says, "he was in a Lally Katz play at Belvoir Street and he was dressed as a cat."
Samuel is a versatile performer who seems to change physically from film to film; this flexibility suited the enigmatic character at the centre of the film, Jones says. It is a fictional documentary told chronologically, in eight chapters that present a different side of Bloom: as a scientific oddity, a world-famous artist and a messianic figure, for example.
There might be complex notions underpinning the movie, Jones says, "but I'm not afraid of that and I don't think audiences are either". Otto Bloom might be "different and unusual, but it's designed to entertain, to be full of ideas and with a message of hope".
MIFF runs from July 28 to August 14.
