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From the June 2004 issue of SCI FI Magazine
By Kathie Huddleston
"So, can you or can you not change your destiny if you know what your destiny is supposed to be?" said executive producer and writer Anthony Peckham. "If you are destined to die in a certain time and place, the universe or fate or whatever may demand that very strongly."
The fact that destiny might just be part of the equation when it comes to solving the puzzle of the SCI ;FI Channel's new miniseries, 5ive Days to Midnight, puts some intriguing twists into a story that would make Hitchcock proud:
A brilliant physics professor, J.T. Neumeyer, receives a briefcase with a police file from the future about a murder ... his own. With only five days to figure out the mystery of who wants him dead, J.T. struggles to find answers as the clock ticks and the suspects pop out of the woodwork. Not since North by Northwest has an average guy discovered so many people out to get him.
Five: Accept the Fact that You're Going to Die
For executive producer David Kirschner, 5ive Days to Midnight is about nuance. While he's done everything from writing An American Tail to creating the evil doll Chucky to executive producing the psychological thriller Frailty, this takes him into Hitchcock territory.
"It's the idea of a guy that's just leading his quiet life, raising his daughter and working at a university as a professor, and then so much more is asked of him," said Kirschner. "First of all, to accept the fact that he's going to die, that his child's going to be an orphan. Who would want to kill him? What would be the reason for that? And then as time goes on in the course of the story, little things start to happen when this briefcase arrives that begin to change people J.T. trusts and loves ... their personalities. It could mean money to some. It could mean danger to others. It could bring out relationships that were hidden, and it really plays with you."
Hitchcock and sci-fi are two elements that have always had an impact on Kirschner's work. "It's the idea of putting both of those elements together in one story with no hardware. Though I appreciate films like Star Trek and Star Wars, I've really never had a desire to make a film that has a lot of hardware. I did one and it was animated, which was Titan AE. I just feel like I've done it. To me the whole human aspects of it are much more interesting. I think it's the idea of putting something on the SCI FI Channel that is sci-fi without being sci-fi. That is the world that you and I live in, which is a world of traffic and computers that freeze and carpools and just everyday life.
"And then this sci-fi element comes screaming into this guy's life," said Kirschner.
Four: Turning a Good Guy Bad
To take on the lead as J.T. Neumeyer, Academy Award-winning actor Timothy Hutton explored who the character was as a father, a widower and a teacher before he ever thought about the fantastic events that occur in 5ive Days to Midnight.
Creating the palette for a character who is anything but a superhero appealed to Hutton. "I liked the idea of this guy whose life suddenly gets reduced to a five-day period based on this briefcase."
As the story starts, J.T.'s daughter, Jesse, is having her 10th birthday. However, like much in the series, nothing is as simple as it seems. It's Jesse's birthday and the day J.T. lost his wife. "It's kind of a melancholy day, it being the 10th anniversary of his wife's death. They go visit the gravesite and at the gravesite is a briefcase. In the briefcase is a file that has photos of him — autopsy photos, actually. In the beginning he believes it's some elaborate hoax done with computers, Photoshop," said Hutton.
Playing J.T. offered Hutton a chance to do something he's never done before: play a single parent.
"Thinking of the 10 years in this person's life, raising a baby from infancy to being a kid and trying to make sure that the life of the child is still there as much as possible," said Hutton. "Trying to develop a sense of family even though the child's mother is not around. ... And then of course with the story, these amazing things are happening, and he doesn't want to freak out his daughter and cause her too much worry and concern. And yet he has to ultimately share with her exactly what he's going through and be honest with her about what it is that's in the briefcase. He tries to keep her away from it, but it proves to be impossible and she ends up being the smartest person in the story.
"The briefcase has his name on it, and it lays out the next five days of his life quite in detail, with a suspect list, and some of his best friends are on the suspect list. At first he's trying to prove it's a hoax, but then too many things happen that were predicted in the file."
Veteran television writer Anthony Peckham sees J.T. as an incredibly sympathetic character who is trying to save his own life. "He is also making sure his daughter has what she needs every day. There isn't some sudden, convenient fairy godmother that comes along and takes away all of the domestic necessities of life. ... J.T. is no James Bond, that's for sure, even though we get him to the point where he is prepared to kill someone in cold blood to save his own life."
Exploring those dark shades of personality throughout the characters in the series added depth to the story for Peckham. One of the characters "realizes that this thing is indeed from the future. A number of events prove that it is and that it predicts the future. He begins to use that knowledge to his own advantage and take advantage of the situation in a way that turns him from being a good guy into a bad guy."
Another character wrestles with the "theoretical underpinnings" of time travel. The character comes to believe "that in fact J.T. has to die when he is destined to die or the entire universe might rip apart. So he ends up, with great regret and without regard for himself, enlisting himself as someone who is prepared to kill J.T. at the right place and time in order to hold the whole universe together," said Peckham.
"As you peel back the layers in all the characters, and as you peel back the layers on J.T., you realize that these people are not just one thing. I think that is true in life, too."
Three: Tick, Tick, Tick
An impressive cast has been brought together to help pull back those layers, including Randy Quaid, Kari Matchett and Angus MacFadyen, said Kirschner. However, it's Hutton's stirring portrayal of J.T. that drives the story. "What I love are the scenes with him and his daughter," said Kirschner. "You know he just wants to scream and yet he's trying to be this amazing father with his arms wrapped around her. When Jesse gets into the briefcase and sees photos of her murdered father with a bullet hole through his head and photographs of his funeral with her at the funeral, she just says, 'This is from the future.' She doesn't understand what else it could be. That's Gage Golightly, a wonderful little actress. Isn't it a great name? You know, I've been very fortunate. I've worked with Macaulay Culkin, with Haley Joel Osment, just a ton of really great, great kid actors. And boy, she's up there with them. She's just excellent."
Director Michael W. Watkins took on the job of pulling the entire five-hour story together. One key aspect was working with cinematographer Joel Ransom (Band of Brothers, Taken) to take an ordinary world, the world we live in, and transform it into a place where something extraordinary might just happen.
"It's just elevated what's already a wonderful script to something visually spectacular," said Hutton.
"What I love is that there's almost a noir feeling to this little town in the Pacific Northwest that they have brought as far as just a visual style," said Kirschner. "And Michael has made such a point of constantly bringing in elements of time, of showing the change of time, from simple things like clocks and watches to ... in one scene, there's a guy painting in the back. When you cut back to that scene, that guy is just finishing painting, which has obviously been a matter of another day. I mean, he's done all kinds of things like that. He made sure that over the course of these five nights that he has shot different phases of the moon over five nights, so we keep cutting to those phases of the moon, to the sunsets, clouds. Just a sense of time, and I really marveled at it, 'cause that was never in any of the scripts."
Two: The Unusual Suspects
What was in the original script was an amazing story that had a fascinating journey all on its own. 5ive Days to Midnight was conceived as a two-hour feature film written by Robert Zappia. Kirschner considered making it as a feature, but SCI FI had a different idea about what to do with the story. They wanted the idea expanded, and eventually decided to do a five-hour miniseries, to air over five consecutive nights. That meant Kirschner needed to bring in additional writers to flesh out the story.
"Each of the hours had to work independent of the other hours as a piece of dramatic material. I mean, it was quite a beast to tackle," said Peckham.
The "beast" proved both fun and difficult to work on when it came to keeping all the balls in the air for Peckham. It meant "keeping all the characters viable as suspects without throwing them so far into the suspect pool that you couldn't have them in the story." Only one of the characters is treated "as an out-and-out suspect. The rest have to be part of J.T.'s life."
Besides the practical concerns of making all the parts of the script come together, Kirschner had to make sure it would work in the format SCI FI wanted. "Over the course of five nights, what could we do to keep an audience when there's so much else out there, aside from people's normal lives? What could we do to just keep them hanging on to this?" asked Kirschner. "And starting with Robert Zappia and Tony and David and Cindy, I think they did an amazing job of creating elements that just draw you back night after night, and that are shocking and really play with your mind. It's a very intelligent piece they've written."
Hutton agrees. "It certainly is a challenging story to be in the middle of. It's a very simple thing, but when you know what the script is and you're playing someone who has these incredible things happen, you have to forget that you know them. And that's a very basic thing about acting, but this has a heightened state of that all the way throughout it.... I have been blown away by what I've seen so far."
One: Getting Fitted for a Straitjacket
"One of the thematic questions is, 'Can you indeed change your destiny?'" said Peckham. "And so we never know until the last moment whether everything J.T. has done has made any difference. In fact, for a lot of the last third of the series we begin to think that much of what J.T.'s done has actually made things worse ... for all of them. Jesse is now involved. Some of his friendships have blown apart in the pressure cooker."
And what if it is Peckham's destiny to revisit the material if 5ive Days to Midnight, which premieres in June, does well and SCI FI wants to do another five-hour miniseries?
"No, no, no, no, no. ... My recurring nightmare is that someone says, 'You know what, we could do another five hours. We could send another briefcase back to someone else.' At which point, I'd go and get myself fitted for a straitjacket [laughs]."
Destiny, a straitjacket and an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation. ... Yep, Hitchcock would be proud.
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