Sci-Fi & Squeam

13 Aug 2016

MIFF 2016: Interview with Xavier Samuel

Horror Films, performance, Society & Culture, TV & Film

LISTEN TO PODCAST NOW

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:30 — 10.3MB)

Sonja The Squeamer chats to rising star Xavier Samuel from the Twilight movie franchise and Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones and now Love and Friendship and this years Opening Night movie at MIFF : The Death and Life of Otto Bloom.

Xavier talks about Otto Bloom and Time Travel and his experiences as a vampire in the Twilight world of Eclipse,working with Aussie director Sean Byrne in the cult classic local horror The Loved Ones and his new role as a Jane Austen character in the period drama comedy Love and Friendship directed by Whit Stillman.

We ask him what is his favourite Horror film and what it was like working with Kristen Stewart and what comic book villain would he like to play?

What is The Death and Life of Otto Bloom:

Otto Bloom is experiencing his life in reverse, passing through time backwards while remembering the future. Is he a psychic, a time traveller, a madman or living proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity?

When neuropsychologist Dr Ada Fitzgerald was called in to examine Otto Bloom, a young man with amnesia and an uncanny ability to predict upcoming events, little did she know the experience would change her life – and upend humanity’s understanding of time itself. Bloom claimed he experienced time in reverse, with our future his past. He also seemed to know more about Ada than she knew herself.

We all know the truth now, of course, and in this MIFF Premiere Fund-supported feature debut, Melbourne director Cris Jones (short films The Funk, MIFF 2008; Excursion, MIFF 2003) assembles a who’s who of Bloom’s nearest and dearest to try to unravel the incredible mystery of the man: artistic genius, messianic visionary, madman … he may have been all these things, but more than anything, he was just a man searching for love and meaning in a bewildering world.

Featuring Rachel Ward (The Thorn Birds) as the present-day Ada Fitzgerald and her daughter Matilda Brown as her younger self, with Xavier Samuel (the Twilight series) wonderfully enigmatic as Otto Bloom, this ingenious chronicle follows in the footsteps of The Infinite Man and Predestination (both screened at MIFF in 2014) while taking Australian drama to creatively mind-bending new heights. Produced by Melanie Coombs (the Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, MIFF 2003) with Alicia Brown and Mish Armstong, The Death and Life of Otto Bloom is a magnificently brain-twisting, deeply moving and wildly inventive tale of love in the time of retrochronology.