The Vast of Night (2020)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

#92. The Vast of Night (2020)

 

 

This film opens in a sunlit room, with the camera slowly closing in on an antique TV. The program playing is one that never existed, but all will recognize what real program is being referenced:

 

“You are entering a world between the clandestine and the forgotten, a slipstream between channels, a secret museum of mankind, a private library of shadows. All taking place on a stage forged from mystery, found only on the frequency caught between logic and myth. You are entering Paradox Theatre …”

 

The narrator (an uncredited Mark Silverman) perfectly mimics to vocal stylings of the late Rod Serling, Writer/Producer/Host of “The Twilight Zone” (TV series first aired in 1958). This quite effectively sets us up for the setting and type of story we are about to experience, but after this short sequence, an interesting choice was made by Andrew Patterson, the Writer (using the pseudonym James Montague and collaborating with Craig W. Sanger)/Director (which he gave himself no on-screen credit for)/Editor (using the pseudonym Junius Tully)/Producer (again using the Montague pseudonym and sharing that role with Marcus Ross, Melissa Kirkendall and Adam Dietrich); he made the intro almost his only indulgence in the mannerisms of SF,F&H film-making, instead, to make this old story new again, Patterson took his ques from Writers and Directors without strong association with these genres.

 

Patterson said in an interview, “We knew we were working in a genre that was shop-worn, nothing new. We wanted to let people know, ‘OK this is an abduction in New Mexico—we know this story, you know this story. How can we find a way in and do something special, to make something new?' I wanted to make it like the films I enjoy, which are usually about people learning about each other, their dynamics and relationships. So, OK, I want to start this like it’s a Richard Linklater movie… then we get side-swiped into something extraordinary.”

 

Linklater achieved fame with his second feature, “Slacker” (1990). His Writing/Directorial out-put rarely touched on the genres of SF,F&H, he’s known instead for eccentricity and keenly observed characterization. In almost all of Linklater’s films have a pacing that is deceptively relaxed, deliberately down-playing that a great deal is going on almost all the time. Key to capturing that Linklater feel, and distinguishing “The Vast of ….” from the bulk of SF filmmaking, was Patterson’s choice to build the setting and the relationships first, long before making the SF plot central. This is becoming more common in the best low-budget genre films, like how “Wolf Creek” (2005) had us follow our protagonists on their lovely vacation for about 40-minutes before introducing the Horror elements, or how “The Kovack Box” (2006) similarly allowed its characters to enjoy their vacation before the fantastical Conspiracy is unleased, but “The Vast of …” keeps its cards to its chest even longer.

 

Andrew Patterson was unknown and not-yet 40-years-old when he made “The Vast of the Night,” his first feature. It’s remarkably self-assured, extraordinarily low-budget ($700,000), and displays a powerful command of the technical aspects of film-making. It relied heavily on exterior, night shooting, and recreated a time-period that was decades before Patterson’s birth. Anne Thompson put it well, “Not since Sam Raimi's ‘Evil Dead’ [1981] or the Coens' ‘Blood Simple’ [1984] has a rookie director devised such clever shots.”

 

So, he’s got there unusually good movie, but he’s rejected by eighteen film festivals. Finally, premiers at Utah’s Slamdance and, quite suddenly, he showered with critical praise and offered a deal by the Amazon streaming service.

 

Patterson is Oklahoma-based and, as he describes it, “Nobody invests in movies in Oklahoma.” The film was completely self-financed, Patterson owns his own production company and used the profits from commercials and short promotional films he made for sports-teams, so, though the film was actually made out-of-state, Patterson might represent a renaissance of Regional Filmmaking, which has been in decline since the end of the 1970s. 

 

The story was inspired by Urban Legends, or really, actual incidents that became Urban Legends: the 1965 Kecksburg UFO Incident, in which numerous witnesses saw an unexplained fireball, first in Pennsylvania and then across five other states and part of Canada; and the unrelated 1970 Foss Lake Disappearances in Oklahoma, a mystery that was solved tragically, but non-fantastically, only a few years before this film was made.

 

Patterson moved the dates back to 1957, and the setting to the fictional town of Cayuga, New Mexico (though he actually filmed in Texas). He told a story full of enigma, but relied little on surprise; akin to “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), it draws one into a mystery and then defiantly chooses to leave it largely unsolved. (Note: some hated the ending, but then, some the ending of “The Blair Witch…” as well.)

 

The story unfolds entirely during a single evening as the small town preoccupied with a High School Basketball game. It centers on two teenagers, a local Radio DJ, Everett Sloan (Jake Horowitz), and Telephone Switchboard Operator Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick), who start focused on the game like everyone else, but soon begin to recognize clues of something strange. They spend the rest of the film running around town on foot or by car, interviewing people in person or by telephone, and playing tricks with the primitive technology available to them, as they plumb a mystery that might have cosmic proportions.

 

As our Heroes are essentially amateur Journalists, so for guidance Patterson also turned Alan J. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” (1976) and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007 and strongly influenced by Pakula) are both fact-based tales of Journalists who find themselves sucked into stories far larger than themselves, and both films found dynamic ways to demonstrate people talking on the phone a lot. Patterson was especially impressed with when, in “Zodiac,” Melvin Bell (Brian Cox) takes a phone call in the middle of the movie, and even though you never see the person on the other side of the call; Patterson said, “I thought that was brilliant. I remember texting one of the writers. I said, ‘Why don’t we stop the movie in the middle act and just have a phone call?’ And I said, ‘If we could pull this off, this movie might be special.’”

 

Keeping all the action within a single night kept the pacing close to the narrative device of “real time,” a demanding but effective mannerism that cinema borrows from stage-plays and generally, but not always, relies heavily on long takes (Patterson takes pride in saying “The Vast of …” could’ve easily been a stage or radio play). It’s extremely rare in SF, but commonly associated with other Suspense genres. Alfred Hitchcock was once enamored of the devise, his most famous example being “Rope” (1948) which created the illusion that the entire feature was shot in a single-take. Other famous examples of this include “High Noon” (1951), “12 Angry Men” (1957), and “United 93” (2006). All those films were building their suspense by creating time-pressure, and this film does share their sense of a slowly tightening rope, but it also relied heavily on the impression that we were experiencing a slice-of-life as much as a life-changing crisis, and therefore wasn’t as rigorously within real-time trope as the others cited, even though it conveyed the same feeling. “The Vast of …” was more along the lines of Director George Lucas’ first feature, “American Graffiti” (1973), which was set only a few years later, also unfolded over the course of a single-night, with teenagers wandering about a not-dissimilar town, part aimlessly, part trying to capture purpose.

The script went through a number of mutations, mostly regarding the dynamic with the two lead characters. The evolution involved repeated gender-swaps regarding which one would serve what narrative purpose, sometimes Everett was introverted and shy while Fay was extremely vivacious, while in the final product Fay starts out quiet but she progressively takes charge of the decision-making. Fay also became the one with, in context, the kookier ideas, she reads SF and was the first to bring up the possibility of Extraterrestrial Visitation, while Everett is grounded in the then-contemporary paranoias that the Russians were behind it.

 

This film wouldn’t have worked without the chemistry between Actors Horowitz and McCormick, this allowed Patterson to pull-off scenes like the camera following behind them as they walked down a street, we hear their voices but don’t see their faces, just the back of Everette’s head and Fay’s pony tail ponytail bouncing as she jogs after him, struggling with her new reel-to-reel tape recorder. In another scene, as Everett brags about leaving the small town behind, and the camera focuses of Fay – her smile wavers. Though she’s probably smarter than Everett, and through SF dreams of impossible worlds, she really can’t see a real life beyond the place she’s already in, working a job that the audience knows will soon cease to exist.

 

Both are excellent, though McCormick received somewhat more attention with the film’s release. Patterson was committed to these casting choices and moved the production dates back twice because McCormick was so in demand for TV. McCormick said of her role, “Characters like Fay for actresses just don’t come along all that often … [a] nuanced, real, kind of female character that … has this wonderful arc throughout the movie …”

 

Other than the introduction scene and Fay amusingly gushing about future technologies (she looks forward to self-driving cars, travel through vacuum tubes, and new communication technologies) there’s little sentimentality or nostalgia in the film’s tone. 1950’s slang peppers the dialogue, but there’s no poodle skirts or Fonzi-style leather jackets -- that was by-the-command of Costume Designer and Supervisor Jamie Reed (who was also the sister of Producer Ross). Reed didn’t go to classic films or TV shows for research, "I went to yearbooks. I'm from a small town, and I knew this was set in a small town. So, my idea was to try to find 'what would people in a small town in New Mexico be wearing at this time?' They weren't going to be the [then] latest trends and things like that.” One scene required 400 extras and among them was family that spent $500 renting their own costumes, which would’ve been perfect if they’d been guests of a ‘50s TV show, but not in service of the look Reed was trying to achieve, Reed made them change.

 

"I had a very small budget. ... My mom and I, she went with me and did all the Goodwill shopping. We would just fill up the car with men's sports coats and dress pants. For women, we did a lot of the pencil skirts and cardigan sweaters, things like that.” The specifics of the fidelity were impressive, the telephone switchboard was borrowed from a museum, McCormick studied YouTube videos how to mimic a proper operator, the wrist watches and eye-glasses were period correct, and everyone, including the kids, were smoked.

 

The New Mexico setting in the script was almost certainly a nod to the Urban Legends surrounding the Roswell Flying Saucer Crash of 1947, but doing the actual filming in Texas was related to the all-important setting of the High School gym. The Producers checked out about 400 gyms in two states, finally finding what they needed in Whitney, Texas. Though in most ways perfect, the decades had altered it somewhat and the production had to shell out $20,000 (nearly 3% of the total budget) to remove the three-point line, something that wasn't introduced at the High School level until the 1980s.

 

A key scene was set in a parking lot and required period- accurate cars, but there were only about 12 to 15 available, with several different owners. Said Patterson, “People think it’s going to be real fun to shoot a movie, until it gets to be 2 a.m., and you’re only halfway through your day. So as the cars disappeared, we had to block things differently.”

 

Period fidelity also effected the lighting in the exterior night scenes. Patterson again, “We couldn’t even use the practical lights because they’re the wrong color. Most city street lighting now is sodium vapor, which is orange, and mercury vapor would have been what was out there in the ’50s.”

 

In that though, they were blessed in recruiting M.I. Littin-Menz as Cinematographer. “Miguel is bigger than I should have been able to get. He got down in the mud with us. He had a sensibility about how to light things. I said, ‘Listen, I want large sources of soft light away from the characters, light cut so it’s all on walls or on furniture. I don’t want hard lights, or anyone sitting in a pool of light, no reflectors.’ It was a specific visual palette … When you shoot at night, you have to light everything. There isn’t any available opportunity for you to just turn the camera on.” Multiple setups had to be rushed through the hours between sunset and sunrise, “Anytime we had to pick up and relocate or move the shoot even just 10 or 15 feet, we lost a lot of time.”

 

Low budgets and tight shooting schedules (this film was completed in 17 days) can dictate film-making style. Patterson limited the number of set-ups per scene, and there was financial pressures behind it that decision, it seemed far more driven by Patterson’s personal aesthetic. “I was obsessed with the idea that if you do your job right, as a writer, you don’t have to cut very much. If you’re telling stories that are fascinating, you don’t actually need the assistance of editing. And I believe that cinema bears that to be true; great plays prove that. So, it was never going to be a heavily cut movie. There are around 700 shots in ‘The Vast of Night’ … The average movie sits at about 1,800 shots. So, we’re about one third of the cutting rhythm of your average movie.”

 

On this point there was an especially long scene intercutting between Everette in the radio station and Fay switchboard, and including the disembodied voices of those on the other end of the lines. Both halves of the scene were ten-minute-long single takes, things get subtly, but progressively, more claustrophobic, as the camera slowly moves in on both, especially when they are listening to a story told by an ex-Military guy known only as Billy (Bruce Davis) who is haunted by memories of Government coverups and unearthly sounds.

 

Later there’s a creepy and extended monologue provided by a homebound elderly woman, Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), who knew of mass Abduction and had some thoughts about what the Aliens’ purpose might be:

 

“I think they like people alone; they talk to people with some kind of advanced radio in their sleep… I think at the lowest level, they send people on errands, play with people’s minds. They sway people to do things, think certain ways, so we stay in conflict and focused on ourselves, so we’re always cleaning house, losing weight, or dressing up for other people. I think they get inside our heads and make us do destructive things like drink or overeat. I've seen smart people go mad and good people go bad. At the highest level, I think they make nations going to war, things that make no sense. And I think no one knows they’re being affected. We all work out other reasons to justify our actions, but free will is impossible with them up there.”

 

The film’s most standout scene is a long, low-to-the-ground, shot racing through streets and backyards, leading to the gym; it communicates the Alien presence without giving anything away about its nature, while simultaneously giving the audience a map of the whole town. It’s a fabulous “how did they do that?” shot that the filmmakers rightfully bragged about in interviews.

 

Patterson, “It doesn’t matter what movie it is, if a left-field curveball thing is thrown at me 20 minutes or an hour into the movie, I’m at the mercy of the filmmaker. I’m trying rhythmic ways to change the pacing when people are not expecting it … It’s a long shot, a practical run-the-camera-down-a-fucking-street, around the back of houses, through backyards. We had to literally drive down on a Go Kart with a 3-1/2-foot-wide piece of gear … The camera is mounted on a gimbal with a motion-isolating piece of gear that makes it not look shaky and unwatchable. It hooks up with another pair of individuals who dovetail into the shot and cut away using bungee cords. The driver is an 18-year-old with a Go Kart deputized as a dolly grip. He then takes that short first eighth of a mile, and crashes into a green screen. We then blend two more shots from the Go Kart.” In another interview, Patterson explained, “But the shooting of it is 100-percent practical. There is not one moment where some world is invented in a computer, and we flew the camera through it ... it was mapped out months in advance.”

 

Patterson’s ability to compel the audience’s attention during unusually long takes received the most attention from Critics, but he also displayed equally compelling economy. It’s a rule-of-thumb that one page of a script is roughly one minute of film-time; allegedly, Director David Cronenberg often takes one-and-a-half minutes per page. Patterson has one scene that compressed six pages of dialogue into fifteen seconds.

 

“It’s the scene where four characters descend on the middle of town, all at once, and they all talk on top of each other — that’s six pages. I cared more about the tone of what was happening in that moment in the narrative than I did about each character getting their turn with their own close up and reverse shot which would have taken a whole night to shoot — it would have taken 12 hours. So how I got around some of the limitations that indie movies have was, ‘Okay, how do we do this? How do we prep this in a way that lets me have a one shot I want, rather than the one shot plus 10 others, so that I can form this movie and edit it out in post.’”

 

The use of over-lapping dialogue, especially with characters speaking somewhat faster than normal, is a great suspense-builder and lends the moment a naturalism greater than gleaned from realistic plotting; Director Howard Hawks taught the world how to do that when he was making films back in the ‘50s, but since then few filmmakers have mastered the gesture like Patterson has here.

 

Said Patterson, “We have a lot of dialogue, but we try to tell the story as visually as possible.”

 

 

At Slamdance, the film so impressed Director Steven Soderbergh that he’s become a friend and mentor to Patterson. Of the younger filmmaker, Soderberg says, “In my mind there are three components to directing that a filmmaker should have some grasp of. The first being narrative, the second being performance and the third being the camera. There have been very good people who’ve had very good careers knowing one of those things or two of those things. But it’s rare to see somebody that I felt had a grasp of all three, and a pretty significant, sophisticated grasp, not only in one movie but in a first film.”

 

This film was released into the worst Real-World pandemic in a century, and the benefits this brought to its purchaser Amazon can’t be over-estimated -- the company became mind-bogglingly richer through home delivery and streaming entertainment, while brick-and-mortar retails and theaters of all types were crushed -- but without marketing, no film can make a profit, and most traditional marketing was taken off the table with the theater closings. Amazon’s clever solution was to preview "The Vast of Night" at drive-in theaters around the country which could be filled to capacity without becoming “super-spreader” events. Drive-ins, of course, are remembered as a corner-stone of the popular culture of the ‘50s, but have become near-extinct in the changing media landscape in the decades since.

 

There was something nicely symbolic in that, a SF film set in the lost-past but about a crisis of the future, used marketing that evokes that lost past, because it was coping with a crisis that such a short time ago was the stuff of SF.

 

Trailer:

The Vast Of Night – Official Trailer | Prime Video - YouTube