James Ward Byrkit is writer and director from Flagstaff, Arizona, known for his work on Rango, Coherence, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. His new series, Shatter Belt, is available on Amazon and AppleTV.
For about a week, a sense of absolute confidence visited me.
The complete obviousness set in that an earthquake was going to hit, and that certain preparations were in order:
1. Extra water.
2. Matches. I don’t remember why.
3. Most importantly — setting out a pair of shorts near my bedroom door, because for some reason, I was sure the earthquake would happen at night and I didn’t want to leave my apartment in only my underwear.
The understanding that we were primed to have a major earthquake at any moment seemed so self-evident to me that I can remember feeling embarrassed to even mention it to friends. It would have been like saying, “By the way, the sun is going to go down tonight. Be ready.”
So I mostly kept the Knowing to myself.
These odd feelings come every so often, usually years apart. When I was just out of school, I managed to snag a job at an Australian production company that had ambitions of turning an early ’80s radio show into a giant science-fiction TV series. My assignment was to design robots and spacecraft and all the characters. A dream job, in a way, except for one small problem: the script was boring, obvious and outdated.
With no experience of writing a screenplay, suddenly I was overtaken by that same Knowing that accompanied the earthquake feeling again. The script … clearly needs to be rewritten… by … me. From page one. And instead of a one-hour pilot, it needs to be … two hours. The Knowing was that this would change my life.
For three very strange days, I paced my empty apartment. There were no pictures or posters on the wall. It was big enough for four people, but it had only a mattress and a table and one chair. The pacing generated ideas. The ideas generated dialogue. The dialogue generated a more complete story.
In less than a week, I had a fully formed 110-page screenplay that absolutely no one had asked for, or knew that I had been writing. The producer was surprised but intrigued when I asked what would happen if I submitted the typewritten pages to his office.
It’s beyond weird to think about now, but at the time, I had the Knowing that writing that script needed to happen. I was connected to some sort of flowing stream of movement, and therefore I needed to put all those hours in to manifest whatever lay on the other side. It was simply meant to be.
They bought the script. Not for what you hear scripts sell for, but it was by far the biggest chunk of money I had ever seen. And I instantly used it all to buy my first computer and storage and a Media100 editing system, which was a prosumer digital editor for companies that couldn’t afford an Avid.
They never made the TV show. But that computer did change everything for my career. Suddenly, I could edit my own projects. My friends and I moved into an office and built a tiny graphics company around it. My friend Scott still has that company today. I learned After Effects and Photoshop and Electric Image and was able to create a demo reel for myself as a director.
I could have never even begun to hope for a directing career without access to something like that.
Many years later, a month before my wife was due with our son, there came a new Knowing.
This film idea had been simmering for a while, the bones of a multiverse thriller called Coherence, and suddenly it was time to do it. Unemployed. My father had just passed away. A huge project had just fallen apart. And I had stepped away from working for a guaranteed paycheck on The Lone Ranger because I just didn’t connect with the script.
My wife was game, up to a point, when I explained that we needed to shoot a movie in our house. She told me it had to be done before the baby came, because after that we would have a new baby. She would allow five nights of shooting, as long as it happened right away.
There was no script. No budget. No production company. Three weeks to put together a full movie and shoot it in five days. Looking back, I don’t quite believe how insane that is, or why I thought any of that was remotely possible.
Except that I do believe it, because I had the Knowing. The entire time things were falling into place and we were scrambling to get ready, I was perfectly confident that not only was it going to work, but that some day people would look at the film as one of the best mind-benders ever made.
Not the entire time.
After the first day of shooting, it occurred to me that perhaps trying to make a movie in five nights wasn’t the smartest plan after all. That perhaps I had been completely deluding myself. This momentary attack of reason was one of the worst feelings I’ve ever experienced and luckily, it was short-lived. The next day was better, and again the Knowing was impenetrable.
Coherence did eventually travel the world and find a rather enormous fan base. The movie did everything I ever hoped, except get me more directing jobs.
So when the pandemic came and again I was seized with the Knowing, there was no other option but to follow through on an even more ambitious plan. Suddenly, I knew I had to create a science-fiction anthology called Shatter Belt if I was ever going to be able to direct anything again.
The obstacles that appear when anyone tries to make a film are well documented. It would be very strange if no disasters happened. Those war stories are entertaining, but expected. The strangest part of surviving Shatter Belt was the way it all happened anyway. How we got the truck to start after it died, how we used human shields to block a sandstorm, how I avoided jail by keeping my composure with the cops sent to shut us down, how I faked my way through a rehearsal with my cast after my back seized up from stress hours before.
Looking back on it, none of it seems remotely plausible. But we made the show.
A few months before we started shooting our first episode, a dream premiered on the free screen in my mind. A funeral for someone downstream on a great river needed our participation. But we were all on floating beds and mattresses and could only paddle with our hands. It felt tremendously awkward and inefficient to me, but as soon as I dipped my hands in the water, it all made sense to me. I could actually paddle extremely fast and maneuver the bed down the river toward a beautiful gathering of torches and lamps and other floating beds.
Whose funeral, though? And why was it so all appealing?
It would be great to say that the Knowing visits at the most crucial times. But it does not. When the earthquake happened in 1994, a week after I started preparing for it, all of the car alarms in Los Angeles went off at once. Giant cracks appeared in the streets and freeways crumbled. And sure enough, my shorts were right there so I could find them in the dark.
The extra water was helpful, but I never needed the matches.
Featured image shows James Ward Byrkit on the set of Coherence; all photographs and drawings courtesy James Ward Byrkit.
