Filmmakers with roots in classic Westerns and silent cinema are making a sci-fi Western set on a dying Earth. Wayne, sole survivor of a crashed pod, meets prospector Jeb in the desert and discovers the Infinity System selects colonists for a new planet, resetting dead characters but erasing pieces of their identity each time.
My family got their start in the film industry back during the silent days with Charlie Chaplin, and my great-uncle was the art director on a lot of the Universal horror classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. Filmmaking, specifically genre filmmaking, kind of runs in my DNA. I've always been a huge fan of the cinema of John Ford, who was the filmmaker who gave John Wayne his start. These are films that deal with exploration and the dangers of those risks, and that same pioneer spirit is so prevalent prevalent in this story.
I grew up watching John Wayne, Clint Eastwood movies with my dad, much to my mother's chagrin, and it's been a lot of fun to get those same elements, these Western elements that have meant so much to me throughout my childhood, and now incorporate them. We're not necessarily heading west, we're heading towards the stars, and it's going to give you an experience that we hope is 80% of what you know and love, but 20% of that is going to be something new that we hope you'll enjoy.
The story takes place many Many years from now in the future when our planet is dying and the only way to escape is to leave it. On Earth there's a simulation or a training program that prepares astronauts for that journey.
Enter the Infinity System. So it's a simulation that's been built to figure out who would be the best going to colonize a new planet. Infinity System opens up with our main character Wayne not knowing where he is or what he's doing there or even why. He finds himself in this crashed pod.
Wayne is the sole survivor of this doomed mission, and he quickly gets out into the desert and stumbles across this old prospector-type character named Jeb.
Jeb is one of the characters that I enjoyed writing the most. I don't know what it is, but I really enjoy writing crazy characters, crazy characters that might be a little bit off, because I feel like I can say whatever and it makes sense for that character if I've already established that this character's crazy.
The two of them spend the first half of the film really kind of coming to terms with what is Wayne doing here? How did he get here on this desert planet? How is he going to survive? How is he going to get home? There's a band of outlaws, there's some gunslinging.
And along the way, there's characters who are put in the simulation who maybe don't know that they're in a simulation, maybe they're unwilling to be in the simulation. Every time these characters die in the simulation, they're put right back in. And every time they go back in, they lose a little bit of who they are along the way.
This is a really fun environment that we've created, and I just can't wait to play in.
When I'm sitting down and writing scripts or writing novels, whatever it might be, I think of it as like a blank canvas where anything is possible. There's no rules. There's a lot of freedom in storytelling. You'll be able to see, and that'll bleed through, a sense of wonder and escape where there are no limits.
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