At a time when so few get made, you’ll hear many directors talk about their dreams of making a romantic comedy – but signing on to make love triangle romcom Eternity gave Irish filmmaker David Freyne the chance to make a very different cinematic dream come true.
“I’ve always dreamed of building my own afterlife in a film”, he told Zavvi. “My favourite films are A Matter of Life and Death and The Wizard of Oz, so I’ve always been drawn to the idea of creating my own fantasy world, and I’ve always had the idea of it being a brutalist structure, as that’s my favourite kind of architecture.
“The world of this movie came to me fully formed immediately as I read the very first draft of the screenplay, I knew it would be an amalgamation of all my favourite buildings, from the Robarts Library in Toronto to the Barbican in London. I don’t know what comes next, I’m hedging my bets on if there is an afterlife, but I’d be very happy if it looked like this; I want to stay in the Junction forever.”
In Eternity, The Junction is the first place you arrive after you die, a sprawling airport terminal with endless conference stands, where you get to browse and choose the afterlife you want; from sunny beaches and snowy mountains to more niche locales like Capitalism World (slogan: “What’s the fun in being rich if someone else isn’t poor?”) and Smoker World, there’s something for everyone. However, you only have a week to choose, and your decision is final - you can't escape from your afterlife if you don’t like it, and if you manage to, you’ll get thrown into a purgatorial void as punishment.
Some people, however, choose to get jobs working there as they wait for their loved ones to pass, and this conundrum is what greets Larry (Miles Teller) as he arrives in this gateway to the next life. A senior citizen back on Earth – here, you’re reincarnated as the age you were happiest – he has the dilemma of whether to wait for his terminally ill wife Joan (played in the Junction by Elizabeth Olsen) to join; when she does, he discovers that her first husband (Callum Turner), who died over 60 years ago, has been waiting in the Junction for her to arrive this whole time.
It’s a direct choice between her husband of 65 years, who she has grown old and started a family with, and a war veteran love who was killed in action before they had the chance to have that life. The combination of rules and regulations, and the immediate rivalry between the two men, add greater stakes to Joan’s decision of where to spend eternity, and who she will spend it with - and yet, Freyne still feels cosy in the world he’s created, for all its many faults.
“I love the familiarity of this afterlife; it feels chaotic and bureaucratic like life is; there’s something strangely lovely and comforting about how much red tape there is there. I was given a bigger budget than I’ve ever had before, but it was still much lower than you’d imagine, so every penny was a pinch – we had to approach creating it with a sense of ingenuity and collaboration.
“We only had so much space in the studio, so we had to keep finding ways to reutilise every inch of our sets, so that we could give the film the sense of scale and scope that we wanted. The Archive Tunnels that the characters visit to relive old memories was stripped and reused as a train tunnel and countless other things – we were rewriting the script with what we could practically transform our few sets into in mind.
“The final act has a big chase sequence, but that was only born out of budgetary constraints – it ended up making the film better and gave it an urgency that wasn’t in previous drafts. There’s a virtue in limitations; if we had 100 million quid to play with, it just wouldn’t have been as good as it is now.
“Plus, that meant we ended up having the classic romcom chase at the end, but in its ultimate form: there’s a propulsion that wasn’t originally there in earlier drafts.”
It’s remarked upon within the film that Turner’s character – well, Turner in general – has the striking, classically handsome looks of an Old Hollywood matinee idol. However, the link to an earlier age of movies doesn’t end there, as Freyne wanted all his three leads to feel like they’d just walked out a movie from that era.
“Both Miles and Lizzie have this old school charm to them”, he explained. “I’ve always felt that Miles has an Albert Brooks feel, and that she’s the spiritual child of Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemon – there was these hints of comedy in their earlier work, but it was exciting to have them properly explore that side of themselves in a way they hadn’t before.
“They were the perfect casting; it’s hard to imagine anybody else in this. I was surprised by how incredible the dynamics between the three of them were, and how they fed off each other from the first day on set – everybody on the crew had goosebumps because we knew we had something special.”
The chemistry between the three actors helped Freyne navigate the biggest challenge: making sure both men in the love triangle were equally likeable choices for Joan, as the film would fall apart if either appeared more of a villain than the other.
“For me and my co-writer Pat, it was important that neither man is bad, just flawed – there are no stakes if the choice isn’t between two great loves, who are clearly good people, and there isn’t the threat of heartbreak for one of them at the end. We worked hard to make sure that we avoided tropes that would paint one of them as villainous, but it’s really thanks to Miles and Callum that they don’t.
“They had no ego in exposing the insecurities and flaws of these men, and are naturally charming and funny, so you do get really invested in them both. I love that the audience will be split into teams about who Joan should end up with, and I don’t think it matters who they choose so much as they’re always Team Joan.”
There is an entire world built around this central trio which Freyne wants to explore further, and his way into it could be through the “Afterlife Co-Ordinators" played by Oscar-winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph and comedian John Early, who follow the characters through their journey.
“They were written to be the Greek chorus – they were funny on the page, but they elevated them by giving them an agency that wasn’t fully there in the script. There’s now an emotionality to those characters that I wasn’t expecting, and they are more hilarious than I could have imagined; I want to do a full spin-off with them.
“It started as a joke on set, me telling them I’d love to see a spin-off of their characters – and then I started properly working out what that could look like and taking it really seriously as to how that would function in the long term. My favourite TV show of all time is MASH, which is of course a film spin-off, so the idea of making my own MASH is a lovely one; maybe someday that will happen!”
Eternity is in UK cinemas from Friday, 5th December.
