“I don’t know if they’re here, or have ever been here, but I definitely do believe in them.” William Eubank, director of The Signal ponders the existence of aliens and UFOs. It’s a fair question; The Signal is all about the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Earth, and Eubank’s first film, Love, was produced and scored by the rock band Angels & Airwaves, whose famous frontman, Tom Delonge, is an outspoken alien conspiracist. Eubank speaks fondly of Delonge – “I’ve sat in his backyard many a time with night vision goggles, looking at the sky. He’s a good dude.”
As a kid, Eubank was raised on science fiction shows like “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits.” “I loved stories where I thought I was sort of going on some person’s journey, but the stage that it was on was sort of bodacious or big or imaginative. So it’s like I could sort of identify with the character, but I couldn’t necessarily identify with the world that they were in. I always thought that that was fun and exploratory.” In addition to the other-worldly scenarios of anthology television, Eubank also claims that he has been influenced by everyone from Stanley Kubrick to John Hughes – in his own words, “there’s just a lot…too many influences.”
Eubank took an offbeat path to a filmmaking career. He remembers “I got rejected from UCLA film, so I started working at Panavision. I worked there for almost eight years, and I really owe everything I learned to them because they gave me the tools and the know-how, and the ability to shoot.” By day, Eubank taught cinematographers about the newest digital technologies, while on weekends, he’d shoot his own projects, which eventually got him hooked up with Angels & Airwaves. “Tom Delonge saw some of my stuff and said ‘we want you to come work for us,’ and we ended up making my first film, Love, (which) did really well with on the festival circuit. It just kept going from there.”
Between Love and The Signal, Eubank learned a lot. “Making the film Love was a very tricky endeavor because we didn’t really have all of our ducks in a row, but at the same time, I had a lot of creative freedom. And I was learning, I was learning so much, it was just my first attempt out of the gate. So, I learned a lot of things I took to The Signal in terms of making creative choices when I was forced into them, and how sometimes thinking creatively could lead you to a better answer than just having money.” Eubank has an interesting analogy when it comes to film pre-production, claiming that “it’s like studying for a test, and the test is to shoot. But if you’ve studied enough, and you know what you’re getting into, you’re going to ace that test. You draw out all the shots, and then when you get to work, you have a very close blueprint that you follow. As long as you’ve made that careful blueprint earlier on, you can always refer back to that, and you can always revisit a version of yourself that was making decisions in a more peaceful atmosphere.” That’s how William Eubanks deals with frantic shooting schedules – “Just tons and tons and tons of planning.”
Money was a big difference between the films; Love was made for a half million dollars, while the budget for The Signal was about four million. “The flow is so different when you’re working on a larger film with an actual budget because you’re communicating a lot more, you’re running the ship more like you’re just sort of constantly delegating. The bigger the movie you do, the more it gets like that, where you’re actually delegating more and more, and you’re surrounding yourself with artists, whereas, on my first film, I had to wear every single hat myself. It’s cool because it’s very personal, but it also means you can get less done. So, everything from organization, to the people you’re communicating with, to the time you’re actually having to shoot the film changes.”
One of the hats that Eubank gave up for The Signal was that of cinematographer. Although he’s an accomplished director of photography himself, Eubank had no problem turning the camera over to cinematographer David Lanzenberg. “By the time we’re shooting I pretty much give up on mostly all visual stuff. There’s a ton of prep, there’s a lot of sitting with David, there’s a lot of working things out, how we’re going to do it, what it’s going to look like, what kind of lenses we’re going to use even sometimes, because I have a lot of extensive shot maps with the actual lenses, I’ve written them down, kind of where I want them, because I have particular lenses that I like on people’s faces, so I’m a little particular about some things like that, but David is such a good dude and so accommodating that he knows what I’m looking for and what I want to use, and it becomes a real collaboration at that point. By the time we get to shooting, I’ve sacrificed even thinking about any of the visuals and, for the most part, I’m just trying to look at production design elements, or makeup, and visual elements, just mainly with where we are in the story and performances. So, it’s nice to be able to let go of that part when you actually get there, and David was a perfect collaborator in that sense.”
For the casting of the film, Eubank scored a couple of bona-fide hip genre actors in Brenton Thwaites and Olivia Cooke, fresh off of Oculus and The Quiet Ones, respectively. “I was seeing a lot of people that were really, really talented, but at the end of the day, I wanted to find kids that really embodied the characters that they were going to portray. I wanted to find people that I felt were good people, who could really be friends, and that’s what drove my decisions in the end, just finding people who really were Nic, Jonah, and Haley.” Eubank decided on Thwaites as Nic and Cooke as Haley, and rounded out the trio by casting Super 8’s Beau Knapp as Jonah. The three exude a great chemistry that transfers well to the screen. “I just knew they were all good people. You can tell when people are not going to be cool, you can just read if they’re going to be a nice person or gracious or loving. And these kids are all really great human beings, and I think that’s why they are doing so well in their careers – not only are they talented, but they’re good to work with, they’re easy to work with.” The chemistry was fostered by Eubank shooting the road trip scenes at the end of filming, after his actors had gotten to spend some time together and had gotten to know each other well. “(Brenton, Olivia, and I) drove from Cleveland to St. Louis, and we just shot B-roll stuff on our own, and I did the same thing with Beau, I went back to Arizona with him later and did some more road trip stuff. I shot all the road trip stuff at the end, so by the time we got to it, they really did know each other, and they really were friends. And that chemistry, and that familiarity, that comfort that they have with each other, really came out.”
And then there was Laurence Fishburne. “Obviously, getting Laurence was a huge thing. I never would have imagined that we could have gotten him and he just said he loved reading the script so much he wanted to come do it with us. And, so to get somebody like that, I really felt like, as a film, even before we’d begun, we were a little bit more legitimate. And I think it was inspiring, too, because we’re all coming up, we’re all newcomers, Brenton, Olivia, Beau, so to have a big powerful dude who’s such a nice guy bring his talent to set and kind of like lending us his presence was really cool.”
The Signal made its debut at Sundance, an experience that Eubank says was a dream for him. “I’d been there a lot of times (working for Panavision), but I’d never gone as a filmmaker, so to finally get to go this year was a huge thing. My granddad lives down in Salt Lake and I would take him out to dinner on Panavision’s dime, since I had a little bit of an expense account when I was up there, and he would always say ‘oh, you’ll have a film there one day!’ Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years before I got my film in finally, but I did, so I felt like that was kind of a full-circle thing for me to go back and finally get there. It’s like a merit badge for a filmmaker to go to Sundance, so it’s a real mile-marker.”
In Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last picture, and William Eubank shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. “I always tell people I have a lot of characters in my head that I’m trying to finish, and trying to get populated into other stories and hopefully, before I die, I’m able to get them all out of my head so they don’t die with me. Right now, I’ve got about three projects I’m working on, one is sort of a South African mining story about one of the world’s deepest mines. And then, the other one is sort of a Scottish Highlander story loosely based on the Norman invasion of England, but it’s not really set with any historical accuracy, it’s more like one percent fantasy. When I revisit sci-fi, I have one project, but I’m not going to make it until I’ve made two more movies. But it’s my big one. It’s awesome. It’s really awesome. It’s the one I can go to sleep at night knowing I got a really good idea in my pocket. When I get back to sci-fi, this is going to be a good one.”
So, remember the name William Eubank, keep your ear to the ground about an awesome sci-fi project after he’s made two more movies, and, in the meantime, go see The Signal on June 13th.