If you took Minority Report, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, threw them into CERN’s Hadron Collider, and hit the ON switch, you’d get director Caden Butera‘s feature debut—Recollection.
Written by the director and his brother, Rylan Butera, the film takes place in a future where humans regularly delete unpleasant memories thanks to technological advancements put forth by the shady Vitality corporation. Kate Parker (Rosslyn Luke), a young employee for the company enjoys taking advantage of the erasure process a little too much, having become reliant on stifling all negative feelings since a profoundly traumatic loss years before.
Director Caden Butera on his Minority Report-esque movie, Recollection
“Our mother was a mental health therapist,” Caden recently told SYFY Wire in an exclusive interview over Zoom. “We grew up in environment where we were always talking about mental health and psychology. Our father was a huge sci-fi nerd who raised us on Star Wars and Star Trek. Our sensibilities molded between those two worlds and I don’t think it’s a coincidence we ended up writing a mental health-driven sci-fi movie.”
Rylan—also the film’s composer—went on to add that they wanted “to tackle a more serious narrative” after making John Thick, a short parody film about an overweight version of Keanu Reeves‘ John Wick. “We put our heads together, just started throwing ideas out,” he explained during the call, “and came up with an interesting moral question about the idea of deleting things you didn’t like. We led with that and hopefully made an emotional story from it.”
Kate’s existence of perpetually renewed ignorant bliss is suddenly upended when a seemingly impossible glitch brings back recollections of a life she hoped to never remember.
“By no means are we trying to celebrate trauma, but boy, can it give you resilience and strength, turning you into someone arguably stronger the day after,” Caden said. “As someone who likes to compartmentalize a little more than I’d like to admit, I felt like it was an important story to tell.”
“So many Hollywood movies are about learning to move on, learning to forget, and that’s an important thing too,” the filmmaker continued. “But with this movie, I really wanted to write a story about the importance of remembering.”
Kate becomes a target of Vitality, which cannot have its perfect system questioned on the verge of legislation that will make memory deletion mandatory in workplaces across the nation. Hoping to get to the bottom of the mystery, she goes on the run with Teddy (Falk Hentschel), a man who believes the answer to his wife’s murder is hidden somewhere inside Kate’s head.
“Minority Report is one of my favorite examples of a movie where it has an interesting moral question specifically tackling free will,” Caden shared. “Does it exist? Is it something tangible? Can you predict your fate? Then they take that theme, personify it in the world of sci-fi, and then add all these spinning rims and whistles to make it sing. But at the end of the day, they took a philosophical idea and just of characterized it into a sci-fi thriller. That was our goal [with Recollection].”
Specifically, that goal was to “let the theme and the characters” to push the labyrinthian, mind-bending journey along. “You get some exciting twists in there and—without spoiling it—I like to think there are a few big ones,” he said, “But they’re not twists for the sake of twists. They’re twists that are good and surprising, but hopefully driven by character and theme.”
From top to bottom, the film was an independent production, mostly filmed on location in the siblings’ hometown of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Despite a smaller budget and crew, Recollection benefitted from the kind of creative leeway not necessarily found on any large-scale studio endeavor.
“There’s a lot more freedom for everybody to play and have fun,” Rylan noted. “You’re not forced to follow the vision of somebody who’s in an office 1,000 miles away. I think that the vision can be more cohesive and you can all work together in a more freeing process.”
Added Caden: “There are many people who are maybe a little burnt out on the big Hollywood system. They’re coming to us and saying, ‘This is some of the most fulfilling experience we’ve had on a film because we actually get to walk straight up to department head, ask them questions, and they give us the time of day.’ Unfortunately, the bigger your machine is, the less that’s happening.”
Perhaps the biggest coup for the entire affair was the casting of Eric Roberts, who has starred in over 800 film and television projects—from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. In Recollection, he plays a delightfully scene-chewing slime-ball by the name of Sid Dyas.
“I’d like to think his role in this is different than some of his typical quick cameo roles,” Caden said. “Our goal was, ‘If we’re going to bring someone like Eric Roberts into our movie, we really want to give him something to do, give him some meat on those pages.’ We really tried to utilize the talents that he’s got to offer. Obviously, we’re biased, but we think that he really gives a different kind of powerhouse performance in this movie.”
And there could be more where that came from. While the siblings are waiting to see how the public embraces Recollection, they aren’t opposed to building out the universe.
“As we were writing this one, we actually wrote three other movies that could fit in this world,” Rylan concluded. “And we’d have to be like, ‘Alright, that’s too much. Let’s put that aside and hone in more on this one right now.’ But I think there’s more stories to be told if people were actually interested.”
Recollection is now available to buy and/or rent on digital platforms.