There is no format as fraught with potential plot holes as a time travel script. Even the blockbuster hits in the genre — your Terminators and Back to the Futures — are littered with head-scratching logical paradoxes.
Tim Travers & the Time Traveler's Paradox decides to jump headfirst into the absurdity of the situation, as the titular Tim (played by Samuel Dunning) travels back in time and kills his younger self — which should mean he no longer exists. Only he doesn't disappear. So he keeps tweaking the experiment and creating more and more versions of himself (with an ever-growing self-body count) as things spiral comedically out of control.
The Spokane-made short film — produced by North By Northwest — is the brainchild of writer/director/EWU graduate Stimson Snead and comes as a direct reaction to him viewing one too many artsy time-travel shorts.
"It was born of me watching a bunch of time travel movies at a film festival, and kind of hating all of them," says Snead. "I loathed the idea that someone could deal with something that powerful and their response would just be these very kind of film-school-y, 'Oh, but what does this mean for me, personally?' No, oh, God! I wanted to take a character and just have them dive as deep as they can get into the 'what if' of it; that the 'what if' itself is a powerful enough character motivation — it doesn't need to be a metaphor for anything else. And that quickly turned into the Tim Travers character. And right around that same time, I met Sam, and I knew almost immediately: That's Tim Travers."
Snead and Dunning met when seated for a panel at a film festival in the Washington, D.C., area, and instantly hit it off. So they were already on the same page when they convened in Spokane in March 2021 for the four-day Tim Travers shoot.
But a shoot where one actor is playing basically every character — sometimes with a half-dozen versions of himself on screen at the same time — is anything but a breeze, for both actor and director. Add in that element that the various iterations of Tim have different dominant personality traits — blowhard, passive, aggro, hungover, etc. — and it's an even more complicated stew.
"I think the big epiphany with all of it is that despite the fact that technically speaking it's all iterations of the same person, you have to think of them each individually as a different character, or else you're literally going to drive yourself insane," Dunning says.
"When I was learning the script, I wasn't thinking about how it was going to be on set," he adds. "I was just like, 'OK, I'm just gonna keep rereading the script over and over and over and over and over again until I can literally recite it cover-to-cover.' And then I got to set, and that's when I realized, 'Oh, shit. I can't just recite it end-to-end like I have it memorized in my head.' I literally have to recite one of the guy's dialogue, and then remember which other guy is butting in and with what energy, and so and so. So I very quickly started to try and color code my script to try and make it easier."
Snead used a variety of cinematic tricks to pull off the multiple Tims: split screen shooting, rotoscoping, using body doubles (so the Tims could physically interact) and CGI. But it was still a rather laborious process.
"Everything kind of worked the way I expected from a technical point. What I did not expect was just how exhausting some of those big group shots would be," Snead says. "Because every single one of those group scenes, it's usually one Tim giving like three or four paragraphs of monologue as all the other Tims listen. And what I didn't realize is that meant for every single Tim in that shot, we have to go through that entire monologue being read off screen. It was taxing for the whole crew. ... You have to fight the monotony and trust that the material is going to be funny when it comes together."
Their effort pays off in the end, as Tim Travers is easily one of the most fun offerings of SpIFF 2022. Snead plans to have Tim Travers be part of a feature-length anthology film produced by North By Northwest that involves survivors in the future going mad in a mineshaft, with Tim Travers being an episode of a Twilight Zone-esque TV show within that universe. But until then, it's a perfectly sweet, mind-scrambling treat that stands on its own. ♦
Screening at the Bing as part of the Best of the NW program on Friday, Feb. 4 at 7 pm, and available streaming
