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Like Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Jeffrey Saint Jules all about his new film, The Silent Planet. It is a sci fi film that is filmed up in Canada. Amazing landscapes and a really compelling story. Thank you so much for listening and I help you enjoy this interview. How did you even decide to become a filmmaker?
Oh gosh, I guess it's what I wanted to do since I left high school, and I think it just had to a great way to build worlds and grew up making Like I grew up in roll Nova, Scotia, and I didn't have a video camera anything, so I didn't grow up making films. But I would always talk about ideas and things I would want to make with my friends, and it just seemed like, why do people
just do this? Why don't they do this? And then once I started making it, I was like, Oh, that's why people don't do that.
But I like that spirit of.
Always asking yourself, why can't I just do this and then try so. I guess it goes back to that, and I just love being able to create a world. That's what really excites me about making a film is you get to live in this other world for a little while.
So tell me a little bit about the Silent Planet and how this project came to you.
It goes back to childhood as well. I used to fantasize about living in outer space. I used to pretend I was from outer space and that I was going to one day go back to my home planet. But I used to have kind of a hermit fantasy, which I think some people have, where I just want to leave everything behind and go live by myself in the woods or if possible, like on a distant planet. I don't believe I could have ever done it, but the sort of idea came from that impulse and that question
really of can we really leave everything behind? But if you were to go by yourself to another planet, knowing you had never returned to Earth, does anything that happened on Earth matter anymore? Does who you were matter anymore? Are you still who you were? Can you move beyond who you were? Like? Those kind of questions were interesting me in the film.
Do you always write what you direct? Yeah? I have so far.
People don't send the scripture out there.
You talked about the hermit fantasy and living on your own and everything. That definitely informs this. But where did you come up with these characters?
I just had a very simple image of this guy on a distant planet daily doing this task he didn't know what was for. And I just wrote that little image down I don't know when, many years ago in my document of little images. That sparked something, and then I just came back to it, and then I started building a story around it.
Where did you actually shoot this one?
We shot in Newfoundlands? Are you? Where are you based? Are you?
I'm just outside of Detroit, Okay, so you're You're not in Canada, but I'm almost in Canada.
I'm almost You're pretty much a wind bowler. Yeah, yeah, So shot in Newfoundland, which is kind of northeast Canadas. It's an island, and they just had some really great scenery that the place we shot, like the land where it's all orange, is this place called the table Lands in Grossmorn National Park and it's actually one of only two places in the world where the Earth's mantle is
exposed deep in the air. Somehow, a long time ago this got opened up and exposed and created this really interesting orange rock and it looks like a desert, but it's not like a dry desert. It's that way because that it's toxic. The same things can't really grow there. So yeah, just a really unique landscape. So that's that, and then other places around Newfoundland which just has tons of interesting unique scenery.
I was surprised to see some of the special effects that are in the film. How is that getting those together?
Our special effects people are Mars, a company called Mars. Then we had a couple independent guys as well who are just at a school, Francisco and Enjoy, who helped us out with some of the stuff as well. Because we're shooting in a national park, we couldn't bring our whole spaceship there. They wouldn't let us. We had to protect the land. Of course, we built the sort of spaceship in the studio for some of the exterior stuff.
But then we made it. A production designer and our team made it so the door was portable so we could just bring the door to the location so that I was coming out. It's just a door, and then the special effects team built the whole spaceship around it. Weird inspired by old We want to just have a flying saucer look old retro feel to it. But CGI and everything.
They talk about how movies are made what three times, the writing, the directing, and the editing. So what were those different phases like for you?
Once your actors come in and start inhabiting these characters, they transform. Actually, the opening of the film initially had in the script a lot of voiceover, unreliable narrator type voiceover with the O, But as we got into it and Elliot sat a certain tone with the he played the character, it just didn't feel necessary. Again in the edit, it just felt nicer to just watch this guy. He was just fascinating to watch. So that was one way I'd like to be a little bit ruthless in the
editing room and not be afraid to cut things. The general's structure of it stayed intact. There was we moved stuff around mea chop stuff Like it starts and ends pretty much how we had it, but there's some stuff that had to be adjusted or taken out or along the way, as I think there always is usually.
Yeah, so much of this movie relies on your two main characters. Can you tell me about the casting process and how you got these two?
We made an offer Tellius, and luckily for us, he connected with it. It's just got so much pathos to him so much. You just really feel for this guy and you feel like he's lived a life. He's one of our great Canadian actors. So I was just really lucky that he and it meant a lot to him, like he really I like, he took it very seriously. It wasn't wasn't just a job for him. So I
was very felt very thankful for that. And Branda I wasn't familiar with before, but her name came up and then I like watched she's only had done two movies, but and like not the main characters, what sort of main character in Sharper. She's got this very nuanced way of acting that is very compelling, and she on set she was like for some of you who I had only done to films. She was so confident and so just would nail nail it the first time, take a
little direction, nail that, and just so easy. Sometimes I would just I would just think about what I wanted to change, and it seemed like she would do it. So I was like, yeah, very like very lucky to have her on I think, but no for her for the casting, we just but we didn't do an audition. I just watched her stuff and we met over zoom and talked and she seemed to really get the character. Luckily she agreed to do it as well.
Yeah, the performances are top notch, just and it's great to hear that she was almost psychic when it came to your direction.
Yeah, there were times when I like, we're maybe thinking all on the same where rave length and what to twitch out?
But yeah, with something like this too, the sound design is so important because you have some swats where there's nobody speaking. Can you talk about your mix and your sound designer?
Yeah, Bryson, I would have loved to have a lot more time with sound, but the short time we had he did a great job just capturing We really wanted to feel the planet. There's like thirty minutes of music, so it's not tons of music that a lot of times when you're just like with the two of them and it's quiet, and I really wanted to feel the creaking and groaning of it, and also that feeling of like when he's just by himself in his cozy little place,
you want to feel there's a planet out there. So there's a lot of talk about what the planet would sound like, a lot of tweaking and playing around with what the aliens would sound like. That was a big thing. But yeah, this sound was a lot of fun in this film.
Is Fantasia your World premiere?
Yeah? Yeah, it'd be really exciting to play it in front of an audience. My last film was the festival circuit during COVID, so I didn't get to go experience my film with a live audience, and the only time I did it was like nobody was coming out to films anymore. So I'm really excited to actually have an audience. I'm going to see some films here so far and their audiences seemed great, So I'm excited to.
As you're putting together the film, as you're doing your editing, are you showing up to other people and giving their opinion to making adjustments based on that.
Yeah, we did a few screenings for people we know and trust, and I wanted to only give enough information so that people could get who these characters are and where they're coming from. I didn't want to go beyond that and get muddled down and bogged down in all that. So a lot of it was like, do you understand that her mother was an alien? Do you understand that? Just making sure that people got it in that way.
But no, I feel like that's an important part of the process, not to go get a market and score market wise, but to just make sure that what your intention is coming across to an audience, because you can get you can easily lose track of that. It's like, by there's so much world building, so you want people to grasp the world without being inundated with too much information about the world.
As I was watching the film, and you've got the aliens and you've got their language and everything, did you see him sort of parallel between the aliens and some of the actual like Inuit or natives of Canada.
I wasn't thinking too much in terms of indigenous people, any group who's marginalized, and it's a little more immigration themed, so I correlated a little more to the way people are often treated when they're immigrating, just looking to have a better life somewhere. So yeah, it's definitely thinking about that.
In earlier versions of the script was a little more realistic, but I was thinking a lot about immigration and refugees and that kind of thing, which is essentially what the Oeans are, although I don't get it go into too much detail, but their refugees from their planet which was destroyed, who are misunderstood and feared.
Yeah, that's the thing I appreciate about sci fi so much is that you can have these metaphors for other stories. You can with so many genres. But that's what I like about sci fi specifically.
It's a great and kind of being at a bit of a distance from it gives you some a different perspective buy it. I think that's interesting. I agree that's what's great about good sci fi is when there's correlations to our world.
I know you haven't even had your premiere, but do you have an idea for your next one in mind already?
Yeah, I'm pushing on a few scripts now. I got a Focorps set in like nineteen oh seven, and Prince Dred Island, which is where my family is from, where I'm from, about this guy who's trying to start a fox farm. And I have two more kind of sci fi related ideas, romance sci fi. So yeah, I've got I've got a couple of things brewing. Hopefully they'll pull together some money and make them.
Is there a good place for people to keep up with you and your work online?
I have people ask me that and I don't have a good answer because I'm not great with my online presence. So I really got a I really got to create something for Pole look at. But no, I don't have Google my name.
I guess that's fair, that's fairy. I just hope more people will be able to see this once that comes out, because I had a really good time with that.
We're just premier and now we don't we have our distributors. We have distributors quick there. I will be getting it out there. We don't have release dat as of yet, but yeah, we'll get all that stuff up online.
Mister Saint Jules, thank you so much for your time. This is wonderful.
Yeah, thanks so much for having.
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