‘Time Travel is Dangerous’ full feature Interview

Writer and director Chris Reading has been specialising in comedy and stylised genre movies for a number of years most notably with his 2016 retro space thriller SOMNUS and his official A L I E N short film A L I E N: CONTAINMENT which he made to to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the 1979 classic.

His latest Sci-Fi comedy Time Travel is Dangerous, starring Johnny Vegas, Jane Horrocks, Brian Bovell and Tom Lenk among others as well as narration from Stephen Fry, is set for a cinema release on March 28th with a special gala screening at The Everyman Cinema Musswell Hill the day before.

When Chris isn’t making Sci-Fi films he is ranking and rating them on the Science Fiction Rating System podcast, which he features on alongside Sam Draper and Love Horror’s very own Alex Humphrey.

Sam and Alex recently grilled their long time friend and co-host Chris about his movie and a whole lot more and you can read the results below.

Sam Draper: So if you a long time listener of the Science Fiction Rating System podcast, you’ve probably heard about Chris making this film for a while now.

Alex Humphrey: Probably the whole length and age of the podcast..

Chris Reading: Maybe.

Sam Draper: It was going on lockdown when you first started wasn’t it?

Chris Reading: Yes it was an out of control lockdown project.

Sam Draper: Well it’s come to fruition in a big way and it’s in cinemas soon, March 28th, is that right?

Chris Reading: Yes the 28th of March, we are in cinemas up and down the country. If you live in or near any city in the UK, there’s a very good chance it’s going to be on quite close to you. Also if anyone is in London, we are doing a special gala screening in Muswell Hill, where the film is set on the 27th of March at The Everyman Cinema. Anyone who wants to come we’d really love to have you there.

Alex Humphrey: I’ll be there.

Chris Reading: It’s going to be a proper red carpet experience. We’ve got the cast there. We’ll do some Q&A’s and there’ll be a little goody bag. If you go on the Everyman website for Muswell Hill you’ll see our screening details there.

Sam Draper: Nice, get your tickets now. So let’s talk about Time Travel is Dangerous a bit then, so people know what to expect. Chris, just start by giving us a little synopsis. What’s the film about?

Chris Reading: So the film is about my two friends, Ruth and Megan, who are two middle-aged women who own a vintage shop in North London in Muswell Hill.

Sam Draper: They really do own that shop don’t they.

Chris Reading: Yes they really do. You can actually go to Muswell Hill and visit them. And yeah, they’re into vintage. And in the film, they find a time machine and they go back in time to steal things from the past to sell stuff in their vintage shop.

Alex Humphrey: You made this idea as a short film first didn’t you?

Chris Reading: That’s right. We made a short back in, maybe 2017, it was a long time ago. We had 48 hours to make it over a weekend as part of the Sci-Fi London competition.

Sam Draper: The finished version of Time Travel is Dangerous is a pretty star-studded affair. You’ve got Stephen Fry narrating it. You’ve got Johnny Vegas, who is fantastic in it.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Alex Humphrey: You’ve got Brian Blessed.

Sam Draper: I haven’t seen his involvement.

Chris Reading: He’s… I won’t spoil it, but he’s in it towards the end.

Sam Draper: You also have Mark Heap and Jane Horrocks making appearances.

Alex Humphrey: I watched it last night and I loved it. It make me laugh out loud quite a few times. You’ve got a lot of people who just pop up in smaller roles, but they’re really, really good. Like, Tony Way as one of the inventors.

Chris Reading: Tony Way is great.

Alex Humphrey: The casting of the whole film is great. I remember reading the script a long time ago and those characters are all there, on the page, but how the cast bring them to life works really, really well.

Chris Reading: Well, we’re lucky in the UK because we’ve actually got tons of really solid comedy actors, ready to go. And, we were really lucky in the sense of, when we started to distribute the script, we got good feedback and we managed to sign up, some people that I didn’t think we’d get. Johnny Vegas was a bit of a linchpin because actually everyone wants to work with Johnny Vegas for some reason. He is a lovely guy, so it’s not really a surprise. But, yeah, that opened a lot of doors actually, Johnny, coming on board.

Alex Humphrey: Talking about Johnny Vegas I thought it was interesting because he plays, he plays Botty a robot that is part of Future Today an old Science TV series you have within the film. But you came up with Botty during lockdown, didn’t you for a bunch of shorts you did.

Sam Draper: Yes that was one of my questions. Which came first? Was Botty bolted onto Time Travel is Dangerous after you did the shorts with the character in lockdown, or did Botty already exist?

Chris Reading: Botty was always in the film. I think it was more that I was interested in the Botty backstory. Also I knew that sooner or later I was going to have to make this Botty prop. So I thought the lockdown is really perfect for me to make this robot in my back garden, and everyone thought I’d lost the plot. We made a little series of shorts using Botty, about a washed up science presenter who still has the robot that he was inhabiting in the show. He is still living as if he was doing the show like Alan Partridge sort of…

Alex Humphrey: Sort of increasingly unhinged?

Chris Reading: Yeah, losing the plot really. I actually really like those shorts.

Sam Draper: Yeah, they’re really funny.

Chris Reading: One of the key themes of the film is about a people who are not cool, they’re not seen as important. There is a group of inventors in the film who are a Secret Society, because I’m quite into the idea of these clubs, it’s quite a British thing. There was that whole Jackie Weaver committee meeting meltdown going on at the time in lockdown as well, which I kind of found quite funny. Remember that?

Sam Draper: Oh yeah, I do.,

Chris Reading: Also because everyone was having committee meetings on Zoom it kind of brought to light local government and how local governments actually doesn’t work in a lot of ways. Or they run by quite dictatory type people. Local politics is like if you join a band or if you join a club or some sort of appreciation society and within those there is always one or two people who are running it. And that is kind of a uniquely British thing, I think.

Alex Humphrey: Definitely and the bureaucracy as well. The rules and regulations you get of these clubs. You show it in the movie with that brilliant PowerPoint, overhead projector presentation which looks great and is so interestingly done. And within the club you have the Martin character played by Guy Henry who is a frustrated kind of idiot but leads everything. Everyone just follows him but there’s no actual real reason. I think another character says he’s just turned up one day and took over and they never told him to stop.

Sam Draper: You’re definitely capturing something very British there.

Chris Reading: Yes because in America the club would be hiring out some massive hall and it would be a very professional thing. In England it’s at a school and they can’t use it on a certain day because Cubs is in or something. Going back to Time Travel is Dangerous so in Muswell Hill the secret scientist society made the time machine.They want to gain control of the time machine back from Ruth and Megan because they see them as just normal people, well kind of stupid but normal.

Alex Humphrey: It reminded me a bit of Bill and Ted, and I loved how they just use the time machine without questioning anything. The concept of them finding this powerful thing that they don’t really understand at all and using it to steal real things from history and then just flogging them, its so funny to watch. There’s a great line when we see Ruth and Megan in their huge stock room and one of them says there was something at the back someone wanted and because they couldn’t be bothered to get to it they just went back in time to get another one.

Chris Reading: Yeah, it’s just like that kind of ridiculous idea, that you would just abuse something so powerful and get so used to it for such a silly reason.

Alex Humphrey: I was going to say in a weird way, you are actually making quite a big point that we all use very technologically advanced devices every day and we have no idea how they work or what they’re even doing to us.

Chris Reading: Yeah, and we’re using them for stupid things.

Alex Humphrey: Our phones or computers or electric cars could be poisoning us and we wouldn’t know it. If we don’t listen to some scientists who say, you shouldn’t probably bloody do that, then we could just kill ourselves. We’re all just like Ruth and Megan, really.

Chris Reading: Yes we don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re using a multi-trillion dollar GPS system to meet up with mates in the pub. Another thing with the characters is they are all middle-aged as I really like that age group to work with because I think they’re kind of overlooked now, in a lot of TV and movies, especially in Sci-Fi and genre stuff. I mean if this film was made in America right, everyone would be young, everyone would be hip.

Alex Humphrey: Or they’d be very old, wouldn’t they? They’d be young or they’d be old aged experts.

Sam Draper: Yeah, like a Marigold Hotel kind of thing. Michael Caine, Maggie Smith and that, yeah.

Chris Reading: At the end of the day, it’s really about the antagonists who are obviously this science group who are pedants, they are the bureaucrats, they’re not cool. They’ve got this whole artillery of inventions, all different types of inventions. What do you think of the inventions?

Alex Humphrey: No, I loved them. I like how they simultaneously look crap, but then you see them in action and its amazing. Things like the invisibility coat thing, that’s great because it looks just like a homemade cobbled together coat of mirrors, but you’ve obviously put some effects on it as it actually works.

Chris Reading: That was a complicated shot, actually.

Alex Humphrey: My favourite invention is the a spinning fork. There is a great gag around that when we first meet Johnny Vegas properly at his flat. It’s so stupid.

Chris Reading: I mean, stupidity and ignorance, I think are the funniest thing. That invention is called the Fork-u-later.

Sam Draper: Have you built all this stuff, Chris? I presume you have, haven’t you?

Chris Reading: Yeah, I’ve got it all.

Sam Draper: And you’ve built the time machine as well, is that right?

Chris Reading: Yeah, so that’s a Dodgem.

Alex Humphrey: It’s a great design.

Sam Draper: Have you still got it?

Chris Reading: It’s in storage. I need a flat big enough so I can have that as like a sofa or something.

Alex Humphrey: Have you got all the Botty merch which we see in Johnny Vegas’s flat?

Chris Reading: Yeah, we have boxes of it.

Alex Humphrey: That’s amazing.

Chris Reading: I mean obviously from the film you can tell I like art department and world building. It goes along with a lot of that stuff. So that was really fun to do.

Sam Draper: You got a puppet in there as well. Actually there’s a couple of puppet.

Chris Reading: Yes we’ve got creatures in there. I thought, well, we have to do everything, like if we’re going to do this, we might as well just try every area of interest we have. There’s a bit of everything in there. It’s a mixed media film in a lot of ways.

Alex Humphrey: Yeah, definitely.

Chris Reading: There’s a lot of VFX in there. The Brewery VFX, who are based down by Leicester Square in London, they did lots of great work. And yeah, pretty, pretty thankless but we ended up with a lot of shots that they did a really, really good job on. And I think there’s some nice little memorable moments in there, like the flying van and things like that.

Alex Humphrey: I like how there’s a montage where you see all the different characters and their inventions and them demo-ing them. You kind of blast through each one but the inventions do come back towards the end when you see them in a bit more depth.

Chris Reading: What I really like is payoff. You watch movies now and they don’t pay stuff off. The main theme of the film which is how you have these people who are overlooked and not seen as cool, and they’re the enemies of Ruth and Megan who just want to have fun. The point is that they all have to work together at the end. So everyone’s diverse invention actually ends up having a use. I was trying to just ram in so many appearances of seemingly useless inventions at the beginning and they get stacked on top of each other to incredible effect at the end. Also in terms of the way the film is shot we start off and it’s The Office or Spinal Tap or What we do in the Shadows so it’s a very familiar type of mock doc thing. Everyone understands those rules so for me I could start from a place everyone gets and a place that adds realism to the world and then put on the Sci-Fi stuff and it’s just accepted. That style of mockumentry is really useful for that but then I wanted to go into a Terry Gilliam mental, more cinematic thing at the end. The aim was that audience come out of the film and go, “I’m not quite sure what that was”.

Sam Draper: And I think you definitely do that.

Alex Humphrey: There’s so many ideas packed in the film, but none of them feel thrown away or just gimmicky. In fact I could have watched a whole film about just Megan and Ruth going back in time and stealing stuff and selling it or a whole film about the Future Today show and the relationship between the guys presenting it. You could watch a whole film about the secret science society.

Chris Reading: These are all going to have there own spin-off TV series’s by the way.

Sam Draper: You know, just going back to that third act, when it goes into the other world, when I read the script way back when, I was like, I just couldn’t understand that part and I couldn’t work out how you were going to do it. If I am honest I just felt like this is a mistake. I couldn’t visualise it at all. But watching it in the film you do go with it. I think you’re right that the framing of the mockumentary really helps sell it because you’re sort of willing to go anywhere because you feel like you’re in there. When you were making it, when you were writing it, how confident were you in that third act? Did you know how you were going to bring that to life or were you concerned that you weren’t going to be able to do it?

Chris Reading: Yeah, that third bit was like always the iceberg on the horizon. We shot in three blocks, really. One, just mucking around with Ruth and Megan. One where it was with all of our main cast. And then one in this bonkers sort of other dimension, which is a studio shoot. So I knew that it had to be a more foggy environment. The point of it was that it needed to be so different from the beginning of the film ultimately it really didn’t matter how we did it as long as it was different.

Sam Draper: I think you’re right about the space, it just feels so dense, doesn’t it?

Chris Reading: It was an experience doing it. It was supposed to represent another dimension where lost people from time and space have ended up. It’s like the exit point to the Bermuda Triangle, and everyone there is just playing this mental board game. Again that’s another area of culture, which I find quite interesting, board game people.

Alex Humphrey: Yeah and it has its own bureaucracy.

Chris Reading: It’s a different bureaucracy, yeah, you’re right, but it actually mirrors the bureaucracy of the science group? For me I can’t keep all the rules of these things in my head when I’m playing them. So it’s totally bamboozling to me.

Alex Humphrey: How much of the game existed and how much of it did have rules or was it just a bit of a free for all?

Chris Reading: It was a prop and then we came up with some rules. Also the cast were coming up with rules when we were shooting as well, but just so their behaviours kind of made sense. Essentially we approached it visually and then figured it out. Because it’s supposed to be so complicated, you could never figure it out anyway. That was the point.

Alex Humphrey: You won’t be releasing a Time Travel is Dangerous or Unreason board game then?

Sam Draper: I mean, that would be brilliant.

Chris Reading: That would be great.

Alex Humphrey: I mean you could just go to the charity shop and buy a load of boardgames and mix all the parts up and just give people that. Like Cluedo pieces but with a Chess board and Monopoly money or something like that.

Chris Reading: Yeah I could. Basically, we ended up with this quite fantastical structure delivering the dice to the game. But I just like the idea of, if you’re in a desert, you might as well just play a board game.

Alex Humphrey: But even that has a very dark edge to it because it seems like the only way to win the game is to die, because they’re in this kind of eternal purgatory.

Chris Reading: It’s got dark bits to it.

Sam Draper: Again, a very British kind of tone, it kind of flips quite quickly in a really good way.

Chris Reading: I was going to say, it’s quite difficult to write things where it’s got some meaning in it at the end, where people do break up and make friends because you do need sort of sentimental parts. It’s very difficult when you’re doing a film filled with lots of silliness not to always put like a silly note at the end of things. You really have to resist doing that because even the sentimental parts of this film, we always wrote a silly note at the end. When they come together to save the day at the end, the tonal shift pays off. It gets less silly as it goes on. Even though the actual location gets more silly, the stakes get higher and the comedy gets less ridiculous.

Alex Humphrey: There’s quite a lot of time travel sequences in quite a lot of different time periods. How did you do some of that?

Chris Reading: We contacted re-enactment groups and historical societies. There’s a really cool place in Essex, which is like a Western town. Some guys have got a farm and they’ve just built a whole Western street.

Sam Draper: Can you stay there or is it just for filming?

Chris Reading: I think people can hire it. I think big companies in the city hire it and they just go wild in there.

Alex Humphrey: Like Westworld.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Alex Humphrey: Oh, God.

Sam Draper: There is a film in that, I think.

Chris Reading: We did a crazy day where we did three different time periods in one day. We went to some medieval place and we did the prehistoric era with the dinosaur.

Sam Draper: There’s plenty of stuff going on.

Chris Reading: We weren’t going to do dinosaurs, but then I thought, I’m going to have to do dinosaurs, really. There’s no point in doing this if you’re not going to do dinosaurs.

Sam Draper: Have you read Kim Newman’s review of your film? He’s a classic, he’s been around for what? Like 30 years Alex? Forever?

Alex Humphrey: Forever, yeah.

Sam Draper: Its a very favourable review. There’s a line from it, which I think is really good, about a declaration of interest. He says I lived in Muswell Hill for a spell in the 1980s, and probably get a lot of locality-specific jokes, and he mentions one, which won’t travel. He says, too many development execs will insist on losing this stuff, which proverbially wouldn’t play in overseas, but that’s missing the fact that it’s the heart of this movie’s character, which I think is a very good point.

Chris Reading: Yes the film has all these nuances of a real place and it has to have that because it’s like when you used to watch old films and that was what was interesting about them. It’s like, you know, Wayne’s World, you saw this part of that little town in America where they were and that’s what it’s about, really.

Sam Draper: Yeah, completely.

Chris Reading: You want to see something about a place you don’t necessarily know about. And actually, Muswell Hill is quite an interesting place.

Sam Draper: You are the creative team, aren’t you, like you and Anna and Hilary? That’s it, isn’t it, really? So you’ve not had to compromise, I’m guessing. This is the vision you want, isn’t it? There’s been very little compromise other than between yourselves, which is fine.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Sam Draper: It’s quite a unique position to be, to get this wide release for your film and you haven’t had to compromise.

Chris Reading: It’s brilliant.

Alex Humphrey: I was a bit worried because you changed the name. I remember you saying on one of the podcasts it was always the Unreason, and someone had said you need to change it. But then the line Time Travel is Dangerous is in the film in a very organic way and at quite a critical point. I was like, it makes as much sense to be called this as it did the Unreason. In fact, probably more because the Unreason is only one part of the story whereas Time Travel is Dangerous is the whole film.

Chris Reading: Absolutely. I just think it was always there, that title. So I got Stephen Fry (who does the narrator) to record both versions so we had it.

Alex Humphrey: You’ve made the film you wanted to make, like Sam said, and it’s very British and I think that makes it powerful in a way.

Sam Draper: You have taken Time Travel is Dangerous to festivals across the world. How has the reaction been in America and other places you screened it?

Chris Reading: We went to Boston a couple of weeks ago and I thought, I’m going to sit in just to see what goes down. And they were pissing themselves. Then we went to Italy and they liked it too. I think that in a lot of places they get the joke. There may be a couple of jokes which are in there just for me, that maybe not everyone gets.

Alex Humphrey: There’s quite a lot of visual humour in there as well.

Sam Draper: There’s a bit of everything.

Alex Humphrey: It’s not all one style either.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Alex Humphrey: It doesn’t stay as one thing like just as you get used to it being a mockumentary it becomes something else and moves on and then you get the flashback stuff and you don’t get bored because there is so much in there.

Chris Reading: As soon as you accept that Ruth and Megan are real people, that friendship at the core of it is what it’s about. And that’s a real friendship there. And they are really interesting, funny people. And yeah when I met them, I thought, well, we need to share this.

Sam Draper: Have they acted before?

Chris Reading: Ruth did a little bit before, but in general, no. But I think they could get work now.
They stand out from the community. When I met them I thought these two are really funny. And I think they’re inherently likable. So I hope everyone will like them and want to make friends with them. And you can go to Muswell Hill and meet them.

Sam Draper: You can actually just go to the shop?

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Sam Draper: That is pretty cool. You need to get the Dodgem there. Have you got ideas for a sequel?

Chris Reading: I thought if we were going to do a sequel, it’d be quite fun that like Ruth and Megan have become so popular and they don’t really like it, because what’s quite funny is they hate that they might get fans.

Sam Draper: Right.

Chris Reading: They don’t want fans and I thought it’d be quite funny if they just get overrun with people coming to see them in Muswell Hill and the second film is them going back in time to stop from ever meeting me as the director of the mockumentary.

Sam Draper: Oh, right.

Alex Humphrey: That would be good.

Sam Draper: Yeah, very meta.

Chris Reading: Whenever I would have met them their goal would be to stop that from happening. Something like that.

Sam Draper: That’s a good idea.

Alex Humphrey: And then maybe it could be a bit like Bedazzled where whatever they did, they just become famous anyway.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Alex Humphrey: So like perhaps they kill you and then they become famous for assassinating you, or that kind of thing. It would always happen.

Sam Draper: Yes like they can’t escape it and when they come back to the new reality you’re directing a true crime documentary about them trying to assassinate you instead.

Chris Reading: No, they can’t get out of it.

Sam Draper: Oh, that would be cool, because you could change the way you film it, couldn’t you? You could go to a new genre each time.

Chris Reading: There are definitely new adventures we could go on.

Sam Draper: You have the Enterprise, that’s the Dodgem.

Chris Reading: Yeah. It’s ready to go.

Sam Draper: You’ll have to do a Dodgem-B won’t you? Blow this one up and get a second one.

Chris Reading: Yeah.

Sam Draper: And do like a really slow docking shot.

Chris Reading: Like coming out of a garage.

Sam Draper: Just panning around.

Chris Reading: Star Trek The Motion Picture references there for sports fans. I have to say Anna and Hillary have been so good to collaborate with. And in a sense, there was nothing in that original script where we actually said that’s too difficult.

Sam Draper: That’s good.

Chris Reading: They were always supportive in saying we should try and do that because you can end up just watering things down and you end up with quite a boring thing.

Sam Draper: Yeah, and it comes through definitely. Like that review I read said you can see that and it’s not just us who see it, it definitely comes through that you did commit to it and stick to your vision in a way. We complain about that all the time, that things clearly aren’t sticking to the vision. It’s nice that a film has done it.

Alex Humphrey: Things with far bigger budgets or bigger names attached or bigger studios get it so wrong so often.

Sam Draper: But I think that’s the trick and I think that’s why you’re in a quite unique position because you have got some big names, haven’t you, really, and you’ve got the release, but you’ve got that knowledge of not having compromised your vision, which is, that’s the trick, I suppose, isn’t it?

Alex Humphrey: And you’ve pulled it off.

Chris Reading: Thank you.

The hilarious new British Sci-Fi comedy Time Travel is Dangerous is in UK Cinemas from 28th March. Find out more at www.timetravelisdangerous.com