Most of us have probably had an interest in cults at one point or another. For filmmaker Mike Hayhurst, that fascination developed during a time when so many of us were also picking up new interests and hobbies – the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown.
Hayhurst’s interest in cults eventually developed into the film “And Through the Portal We Go.” The film is an interesting mix of satire and sincerity, centering on the final three members of a cult as they prepare to follow the rest of the cult’s members through a mysterious portal in the woods. They think the portal leads to “transcendence,” but every time the trio attempts to enter, they’re thrown back to the beginning of the day, “Groundhog Day” style.
“And Through the Portal We Go” is having its Georgia premiere at the Broad Street Film Festival in Sugar Hill on March 8. Ahead of the screening, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke with Hayhurst about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This is your feature debut. Where did the idea for this movie come from?
Mike Hayhurst: We had been looking for quite a while for what that first feature was going to be. We’d made a lot of shorts, we’d traveled a lot on the festival circuit with those. We landed on a couple of different stories, but as we kind of fleshed them out, they just became kind of bigger and bigger. Part of the creative development was also a kind of logistics development, if you like – what we have available, what we have resource-wise, things like that. So, as these stories were getting bigger and bigger, we just got to a point where we threw everything out, and said okay – write.
Allison [Hayhurst], our producer, had this fantastic exercise of, let’s just get a bunch of post-its and a blank wall, and everything that you like, everything you enjoy, everything that you would want this film to be about, let’s write them on post-its and cover the wall with them. We started to group these things. Certain kinds of characters that we like, they all kind of go together. All these kinds of stories, these settings, this kind of sci-fi element, that started to go together. I really enjoy creating worlds that feel very grounded, seem very real on the surface, but are just a little tilted and a little skewed.
Through that very tangible post-it process, we could then say, okay, we have a location – how could we elevate our story to not just being two people in a room talking? Not that there’s anything wrong with those stories. I mean, “Conclave,” a lot of that is just people in a room talking – gripping! [But] how can we elevate a little bit? Let’s bring in this time loop thing, and logistically that also helps us, because we can film the same thing over and over again [laughs], which helps us with our time scale. It was a very unwieldy thing initially, but we slowly pulled it together into this thread, if you like.
Talking about the cult aspect specifically. The outfits really reminded me of “Wild Wild Country” – I think those are a different color, but you get the vibes. Were you really interested in cult documentaries beforehand, or did you have to go back and study what the dynamics were like? All of that felt pretty considered, as far as what the actual rituals were and things like that.
M. Hayhurst: I definitely had gone that rabbit hole during the pandemic, during the lockdown … Working with our production designer Marcie Mars, “Wild Wild Country,” was definitely a touch point for us – this color palette, that we’re all together, but we all have a small amount of individuality still. We have a little creativity with what we’re wearing. That was definitely a touch point, and then obviously Heaven’s Gate, with the matching sneakers. That was a little nod to that, as well.
I think there is, especially at the start of the film, this element of danger. We don’t quite know what’s in the pipette. What are they consuming before they take this final journey to transcendence? It’s very, very dark in a lot of ways, but I think kind of pulling in a lot of these cults in our society, and some of those things also that may seem a little cultish without being, necessarily, determined.
Sounds Like a Cult is a wonderful podcast. Like Soul Cycle – you know, we go, there’s a leader for us, we’re doing what we’re told. Swifties are kind of their own thing, Disney Adults. We take that stuff with a grain of salt, but at what point do these things kind of tick over into maybe not the best for us? I think that’s one of the journeys that our characters go through in this film, is hey – this all started off purely innocently, purely aspirational. Now maybe it’s not working for us. So what do we do when our system of belief and our bedrock of belief is now not as solid as we once thought it was?
It’s an interesting conflict, because the portal exists – we see the portal, the portal is there. It just doesn’t do what they were led to believe it would, which is an interesting way to have your belief system deteriorate.
Hayhurst: That was one of the early things we said – what if this was real? You know, Heaven’s Gate with the Hale-Bopp comet, we could all see the comet. We knew the comet was real. Someone then just sold the idea of, and there’s a spaceship behind it and it’s coming for a couple of us. It’s very easy to dismiss everything that person says, if the foundation of it is so fantastical and ridiculous. But for me and this story, I was very interested in, what if the most fantastical thing is the most true? There is a portal. Forty-seven people have stepped through it and disappeared. So then everything else must be right, right? If that thing is true, everything must be true.
It was a really interesting exercise for us. I have a theater background. I’ve devised a lot of work. So we spent a lot of time with our three actors creating these characters, and we improvised the majority of the dialogue through the film. We spent a lot of time in rehearsals and workshops – how would you respond to this? How are these things challenging? What would that do to you if you were stuck in this looping pattern, trying something slightly different? Does that work?
How defined were the characters before casting? How did they evolve over time?
Hayhurst: Early on, I knew I wanted to work with these three actors. I’ve worked with Sarah [Goeke] on a couple of shorts before, Taylor [Dalton Curtis] on a couple of shorts. I’d never worked with Joseph [Lymous] in this capacity, but I’ve known his work and been a fan for a long time. One of our earlier ideas was kind of “A Big Chill”-esque concept, looking at that reunion through an elder millennial kind of lens. Where we are in our life, how are we dealing post-pandemic, post-great recession – how is this weighing on us, and all that kind of stuff. We started talking about different characters that could make up this reunion group.
When we shifted to “And Through the Portal We Go” – quite a shift – we continued to develop these characters, and [the actors] all created three different characters for us to audition. We knew we were going to work with the actors, but they did three self tapes, three different characters, kind of introducing themselves, where they were before they joined the cult, what happened when they met the leader, those types of things. Then it became a balancing act of, well that character is great, we like the conflict potential between those two. What do we need from a third character to create that triangle? [Add] some conflict in there, but also these opportunities – like, those two would connect very nicely.
[We] just really gave them the space to play in that space. We rolled two cameras on everything, and just a couple of takes, really. I gave them the scenario for the scene – here’s how we get into this, here’s where we need to be by the end of it. Their improv skills were fantastic.
How long was the shooting schedule, and was there any rehearsal beforehand? What was the prep like?
Hayhurst: We had nine days to shoot … The landscaper scene, that kind of recurring character, we had a half day extra with him, just to fill in a couple of little gaps that we found in the edit. We were working on this a good six months, maybe eight months, scripting – we had a 30-page outline with a lot of the rituals, just the shape of it, really. And then I guess half-a-dozen rehearsals with [the actors]. I gave them mind puzzle game things to play in character, and then after five minutes I would ruffle it all up and make the start again, just to get that frustration of trying to solve a puzzle on a ticking clock.
On set, I think we had one meeting the night before we filmed, just to look at some of the blocking of it – the ritual of the avocado toast in the morning, that’s what this is going to look like, this is what we’re going to say. Just to get them used to those things in the body, really. [Mimicking a common exchange in the movie] “To speak my truth,” “Truth is light.” To this day – we’re what, two years since we filmed this thing? We will still be saying some of these things. And there’s so much that they came up with that didn’t make the edit. I think my first cut was two and a half hours? We got down to 83 minutes. There’s stuff in there, like what happens when you sneeze? What happens when this happens? This thing was so real, when we were up in the woods in matching outfits. I mean film camp, I guess, is a little cultish anyway.
When this starts off, you’re right, there is a dark, subtle undercurrent, which then quickly becomes very funny once you get the gist of what’s going on. And then there’s another switch, probably around the scene at the fireplace, where the movie becomes incredibly earnest and very emotional, about dealing with the things that got them to the place of joining a cult in the first place. How did you go about blending those different tones and transitioning into those final moments?
Hayhurst: It’s been a really interesting balancing act. I think working with Judith Moy, our composer – love her, I’ve done so many projects with her now. We seem to have a way of working where she just knows what’s in my brain, almost? It’s incredible what she can do. We played a lot with, okay, we’re seeing the same thing, but we need to feel slightly differently. [I was] trusting her to just kind of bend the music a little, warp the music a little.
I think we do take you on a journey as an audience member. There’s always that moment in a screening of when’s the first laugh going to come? If we get that laugh early, I think people are going to be on board, they’re going to be with it, and you’ll get that emotional payoff with those characters. We played Another Hole in the Head Festival, which is a genre festival outside San Francisco – incredible festival. But it’s a genre fest, and the trailers before our screening were full of torture porn [laughs]. It’s that level of horror, there’s real hard sci-fi up there. I think that took the audience a little longer to buy into the emotional aspects of it.
That first cut, that two and a half hour cut, was not funny. At all [laughs]. And on set, we always felt like it was. We were having a great time with it. Allison [Hayhurst] really helped pare back that story – what is the story? What’s the focus of this? – and find humanity through humor, especially kind of bleaker, darker humor.
It’s not necessarily serious, but we are taking it seriously – you know, of course it’s avocado toast because we’re millennials. I think we have to kind of acknowledge that it is a little ridiculous. But then, if you think about many of the rituals that we have in our life, out of context, they’re kind of ridiculous … but it’s real for these characters in the same way that our faith is real for us. I think we can still find humor in that.
I often think about what you were just saying. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I think of something like Mormonism and how it is so often the butt of the joke, and I’m like – why is that any sillier than anything else that anyone believes?
Hayhurst: Right. I’ve always kind of said this film is very pro-faith, it’s pro-system of belief, rather than any kind of pro-religion – it’s a very personal thing, and I think we all have that, whatever it looks like. Whether that’s going to a particular place on a particular day of the week to go through the particular routines and whatever you have, or rather it’s just taking a moment in the morning with a cup of coffee and the newspaper. We all have those things that we like to have as our foundation.
You guys are on the festival circuit with this right now. Are you looking forward to what’s next, or are you just trying to get through this and worry about that later?
Hayhurst: We’ve been out in Seattle, San Francisco, some festivals in Pennsylvania, down in Atlanta – we can’t wait to get to the south. One of the first films I worked on, we shot in Atlanta a long time ago. Part of I think what we found is just how audiences respond to it, and what parts of it they do respond to. We are looking at that next step, and whether that’s a distribution, whether that’s potentially a short theatrical thing. How do we market that, how do we package this thing up? Because it’s a slightly odd film – it’s funny, but not completely fall-out comedy, if’s very earnest in points. It’s a real mix of things.
We’ve had people who it’s really hit home about some situations they’ve found themselves in in the past, which I was kind of unprepared for. But to hear that it connects with people on that level is also really powerful.
I imagine that’s kind of a strange feeling, but a good one ultimately.
Hayhurst: Yeah – oh right, this is a real thing that happens everyday, more often than we think. Sometimes, it takes something a little abstract to make you look at the thing and think – it may not be the full, “drinking the Kool-Aid” thing, but they’ve taken a little bit of my agency from me. So maybe I should pull back from that. I didn’t expect that from this film. It’s been a really interesting journey.
