WORTH WATCHING

Watch: Exclusive 'I Origins' Featurette + Details on a Potential Sequel

by Ethan Anderton
July 29, 2014

After seeing the film at Sundance earlier this year, we hosted our own screening of Mike Cahill's sci-fi drama I Origins starring Michael Pitt, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey & Brit Marling, and the film is now playing in theaters for you to see immediately. The film tells the stirring tale of a scientist (Pitt) who finds love by following a pair of stunning eyes belonging to a spiritual woman (Bergès-Frisbey). And their love eventually helps him unearth a scientific discovery that could change the way we view the evolution of our species and the world around us. Now we have our own exclusive featurette looking at the proposed connectedness of our lives, more specifically through our eyes, and what that might mean. Watch below!

Here's our exclusive featurette for Mike Cahill's I Origins direct embed from our YouTube:

If you haven't seen Mike Cahill's I Origins yet (Alex's Sundance review here), it's absolutely worth your time, and just might spark some interesting conversation amongst your friends and family (see where the film is playing right here). Now if you haven't seen the film, this is where you should stop reading, because we're going to dive into some spoiler territory about where a hopeful sequel could go following the events and discoveries of the first film. So if you don't want any spoilers, stop reading! You've been warned…

At the end of I Origins, the love story at the core of the film leads to the discovery that there are some people who share the exact same eye patterns with people of the past. Contrary to what was known about iris biometrics and how no two people have the same eyes, this seems to imply that the more recent population may be full of people who have been reincarnated from past lives. And just like a Marvel movie, the film has a scene in the credits that takes this concept to the next level and hints at how this discovery might be utilized in the future.

There are a group of scientists who begin to examine the iris' of some of the most famous people in history like Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, along with the less than favorable figures like Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein. It shows that most of the figures who had a positive influence on mankind have some kind of iris match in the new iris registration system, implying that they've been reincarnated, while certain despicable figures have yet to have an iris match. So what would the implications of this discovery mean?

Well, this is actually the original idea that Mike Cahill wanted in a movie simply called I, but the scope was considered too big, leading him to I Origins to set up the world in which this concept might already exist. Speaking with SlashFilm, Cahill explains how this discovery would change the world in which we live, and we begin to get flares of a sci-fi film akin to something like Another Earth. The writer and director explains:

When a baby is born in this world. Once this discovery sort of gets out into the world, here are the implications. Number one, very wealthy people start leaving their fortunes to their future selves. Not just their kids.

So you can inherit… you can grow up in the middle of like poverty stricken wherever, scan your eyes and find out you were, you know, this dot com millionaire who left this fortune to you. Also there are people who find out they that were not so good and have to deal with that. And that’s where emotionally it’s interesting to me. 'Cause it's like I like sci-fi for the purpose of getting at something human. And if you find out you were a bad dude, what do you do? And that’s a metaphor for our own suppressed pasts that we don’t wanna deal with, right?

However, there's no telling when or if we might see this film take off. Cahill cautions, "I’ve got a lot further to cracking it right now. And so Searchlight’s really excited about it. So we just kind of have to, you know, if people like this movie…" Then that means they'll make the film. This has the potential to turn into a provoking little indie sci-fi series, and Cahill has some really interesting ideas (to explore even furhter) with a great way of incorporating them into personal stories. I Origins is in theaters now, so make sure you figure out where you can see it, and see if we can get Fox Searchlight to get this sequel off the ground.

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