A Look At ‘Pacific Rim’ Screenwriter Travis Beacham’s Crazy Directorial Debut ‘The Curiosity’
By Jack Giroux/Sept. 13, 2016 8:00 am EST
Below, you can watch The Curiosity teaser and check out more materials from the fantasy picture.
On the film’s blog, Beacham hasn’t divulged too many plot details, but the original fantasy film is about a “peculiar young woman (Ford) who finds herself a long long way from home.” The story was influenced by some Celtic mythology, a little Teslapunk, and, as far as movies go, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Prestige, and Stardust.
Here’s the brief teaser Beacham recently shared again (and a link to another one from 2015):
Two moons. Shapeshifting mermaids. Teslapunk magicians. I’ve made nothing better than #TheCuriosity pic.twitter.com/AK5YYPVlCf
— Travis Beacham (@travisbeacham) September 12, 2016
Well, THE CURIOSITY is that movie. Without giving too much away, it’s a small-scale fantasy, somewhere in the budgetary neighborhood of indie genre fare like PAN’S LABYRINTH or DISTRICT 9. That is to say only that it’s an intimately focused, character-driven tale, nevertheless set in a world of its own (nothing as grand as Pharaonic Egypt, mind you, but still a far cry from the house next door.)
There’s a few things I learned from my experience on HIEROGLYPH. First of all, I learned that building a world doesn’t need to be as expensive as a summer blockbuster. Yeah yeah, newsflash, I know. But it was still crazy to see just how much of an ancient empire we were able to build for a small fraction of PACIFIC RIM’s budget — still a fortune by tv pilot standards, but downright restrained in film terms. Secondly, I learned that I had an appetite for production. As I’ve probably said before, television exposes writers to far more of the nitty-gritty than film does. And I loved it, more than I’d expected. But the only way a writer gets that from the film business is by directing your own material. So in short, what I ultimately realized is that it was time to direct a movie.
We’re not sure when we’ll see The Curiosity. Beacham’s film is currently without a distributor and isn’t set to premiere at any upcoming festivals, but hopefully, that’ll change soon because it looks like an ambitious debut that’s looking to accomplish a lot of worldbuilding with little recourses. You can get a taste of the worldbuilding in some of the concept art and more posted on the film’s Tumblr page.
