The afterlife rom-com/fantasy movie Eternity asks a fairly simple question: Which of the two husbands a 90-something woman married during her lifetime is more important to her, the man she lived with for 65 years, or the young love who died early? Which of them does she want to spend all eternity with? The answers aren’t simple, though, both because love is complicated, and because Eternity comes with a lot of rules that limit her choices.
Polygon spoke with writer-director David Freyne about Eternity’s backstory and setting — who established those rules, and who’s running the afterlife in Eternity? We also had a more spoiler-heavy conversation about how the movie ends, and how to interpret some of its more confusing elements. Freyne reveals how the movie originally ended, and what went into the final choice Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) makes about where to spend the afterlife, and who to spend it with.
[Ed. note: End spoilers ahead for Eternity.]
In the second act of Eternity, Joan initially decides not to pick either man. Instead, she plans to run off with her old friend Karen (Olga Merediz) to spend the afterlife in a recreation of France. But she changes her mind at the last second, and instead heads to an idyllic place called Mountain Eternity with her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died shortly into their marriage, when they were both in their early 20s. They hike, eat with other denizens at a ritzy ski chalet, and spend time in a beautiful lakeside mountain cabin. But Joan realizes she misses Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of 65 years, and she sneaks out of Mountain Eternity to find him.
The Eternity Cops immediately come after her, because the rules of the afterlife say that everyone has to stay in the eternity they initially picked. Anyone leaving their chosen afterlife is rounded up and hucked into something called The Void. But Joan finds Larry waiting for her in the Junction, the in-between space where the dead pick their eternities. Together, they elude the police and slip into an eternity that looks exactly like the suburb where they used to live.
What is this place? Why didn’t it come up during the extensive shopping montage where Joan explains all her anxieties to Karen, and we see a sampling of eternities on offer? And why don’t the afterlife cops know where they are? Freyne makes it clear he’s thought through all these questions.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
Polygon: At one point in the movie while Joan’s having a conversation, we get a brief glimpse of a poster for a “decommissioned” afterlife called Simple Eternity. Is that where Joan and Larry end up hiding?
David Freyne: Yeah. In my mind, that’s what we wanted it to be. It was the idea that it’s a world that very much reflects the world they opened the film with, where they lived together.
It isn’t heavily emphasized or explained — it’d be easy to miss that poster. Why be so subtle with it?
Because I liked that people would question it. And I think it is interesting that it is subtle — but it’s also interesting the amount of people who have said, “Oh, it’s that world.” So actually it’s not as subtle as I thought it was! People keep picking up on it. Even during test screenings, people kept saying, “Oh, they go to the Simple Afterlife?” We very pointedly put [that poster] there, but it was a throwaway. I didn’t want the audience to necessarily pinpoint exactly where they go. What’s most important to the ending is that they’re together, wherever they are — the point is, it’s who you’re with that matters.
I love rewarding second viewings. There’s some hidden jokes on the trade floor, and in the commercials, and even just in the announcer in the background. As a fan of comedy, it’s one of my favorite things — a detail you might not catch the first time, but will catch next time. And I don’t think getting that detail changes the emotional impact of the ending. That’s why it didn’t feel too important to me to overemphasize it.
I was expecting Joan and Larry to end up in the Void together at some point, because you advertise it as a threat for people who leave the eternities they chose. But we never even see it. Was this always what the ending looked like? Did it change in any way as you were developing the movie?
Who she ends up with was always what [co-writer Patrick Cunnane] and I had in mind when we wrote it, but how we got there changed dramatically, what the world looks like changed dramatically, and that final scene changed dramatically over time. The final act went through a huge overhaul in the writing process. But that ending always felt right to me. Larry is the right person for Joan, given who she is now, as a 90-something-year-old woman at heart.
The Void is a great thing as the threat, but this is, at its heart, a romantic comedy. I wanted it to be heartwarming by the ending. I didn’t want it to be that dystopian. It’s a nice Sword of Damocles over them, but I never contemplated actually leaving them there.
What changed about the lead-up to that ending?
There were worlds where she was going through the archive tunnel to escape and get back to the Junction, and she went through the Void to get there. For budgetary reasons, we ended up having to reuse the archive tunnel. That ended up being a great virtue, because I love the idea of going into a mirror tunnel where you get to revisit your more hidden, darker memories. That felt like a lovely thing for her to run through — it felt really dramatic and chilling.
One of the big things we discussed, really early on, is — in the original version, Luke was much more two-dimensional. He was a bit of a cad, and it was almost Larry having to go save Joan. It was really important to me that the first act is Larry’s, but the third act is Joan’s. This film is about her decision, and it doesn’t work if it isn’t her making the decision, and her choosing to go back to the man she wants to be with and going through that dangerous journey.
So that was the big retooling we got to very quickly: It has to hinge on her at the very end. And also that it’s not about choosing the right man or the wrong man. They’re both right. They’re both good men. They have their flaws, but they’re both fleshed-out people and one of them will have to be crushed no matter what happens, as Joan says. It’s about choosing what’s right for her at that time, not choosing what is the right choice.
I like that the audience might debate that. I love that they might question what she did, or be Team Luke or Team Larry or even Team Karen. I don’t want everyone to think she made the right decision. As [long as] they’re team Joan, it doesn’t matter who they’re actually rooting for. That’s always been central to me throughout this film.
When Joan leaves Mountain Eternity, the afterlife police are onto her instantly — they seem to know somehow both that she’s left, and exactly where she is. How do she and Larry not immediately get picked up again in Simple Eternity?
You’re right, they’re onto her immediately. I think it’s that thing that Ryan [John Early] says — Ryan and Anna [Da’Vine Joy Randolph] help them escape and they know Larry and Joan will be safer in one of these disused eternities. That was the idea, that these disused eternities are places they won’t be detected. They are fugitives — there is that slight threat that maybe they’ll be on the run through eternities for the rest of their afterlives. But again, they’re together, and that’s all that matters.
This movie reminded me of several other films where the afterlife is a big bureaucratic nightmare, a place where the rules seem arbitrary and sometimes even cruel or judgmental: A Matter of Life and Death, Defending Your Life, After Life, and so forth. Any idea why the idea of a red-tape afterlife is such a draw for creators?
I don’t know why, but you’re right, it is a theme — my favorite film is A Matter of Life and Death. Even Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait is quite bureaucratic in many ways. I think because afterlife is such an unknown, there’s a familiarity in bureaucracy that we find comforting. That might be why that has been depicted so much. Certainly for our afterlife, which is full of red tape and marketing and selling and things that are very familiar to our world — I think there’s a comfort in it, even though it could be a bit depressing.
I wouldn’t have thought of it as comforting! The idea of giving people a single week to pick an eternity that will never change seems terrifying, and so does the idea of separating people into these spaces they can never leave, not even to see friends and family who maybe hate the beach or mountains or France or whatever. Do you not see this as a dystopian place?
The idea we had is that unfortunately, people dying is a never-ending resource, and if enough people don’t continue to move on, this place, the Junction, will get clogged up, and essentially, the afterlife becomes unsustainable. So we had a logic to how it works. But for me, this constant chaos felt like a really fruitful environment in which to reinforce the character’s dilemma. This chaos felt like a really great dramatic space in which Joan has to make this big choice. But yeah, if you scratch the Junction we created, it’s definitely not very heavenly.
Even while I was watching this movie, I was already thinking “What do I love enough to do it forever, to be surrounded by it forever, at the expense of any other experience?” Did you spend a lot of time talking about that question with the cast or crew?
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. A lot of the time with my actors in pre-production and rehearsal, and getting to know them before that, so much of that time talking about the characters was talking about “What is love to us? What is happiness to us?” That became the bedrock of our relationships together. That conversation was sustained throughout production. Like you said, it’s a conversation-starter. It’s discussing, “What, at the end of the day, is meaningful to me when my time comes? What would I look back on and treasure?”
That was a really lovely way for us to bond, for us to get to know each other in quite a deep way in a very short space of time, and from that, really explore and deepen these characters and their relationships. I think you can’t make this film and not make that the foundational question we all asked ourselves every day. And it’s lovely to think those are questions people will take away from this film.
Did you come to any kind of conclusion for yourself about what your chosen eternity would look like?
I don’t know — I mean, I’d love some of those. I love the idea of a Weimar Germany where the Nazis don’t exist. I think that kind of thing is pretty exciting. Or a 1940s Ireland where we didn’t happen to have a famine. We all dream of that medieval fantasy, but you don’t imagine it without modern plumbing. You don’t want to be surrounded by the smell of poo.
So we all have those eternities with revisionist viewpoints. I loved creating those worlds which are like “Your fantasy, but with a modern twist!” And I would love to explore some of those worlds where we have modern sanitation, or we don’t have the evils that existed in those periods. I dunno what my actual eternity would look like. I thought more about who I would like to spend my afterlife with, the people in my life now that I would want to be with forever. And I think that’s been more prescient than the world I would go to, because the world changes all the time.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
