When people think about Anthony Mackie, they generally associate him with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and with good reason. The actor has had quite an impact on the mega-franchise with his roles in Captain America: Winter Soldier, Ant-Man, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, on top of recently wrapping work on Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
As well as dominating the big screen with Marvel, the actor has been showing how far his acting chops stretch with roles in Black Mirror and Altered Carbon.
Luckily for fans that enjoy his layered performances, Mackie recently knocked it out of the park with his leading role in a thrilling new horror/sci-fi film called Synchronic. The movie handles time travel in interesting ways, so we wanted to pick the directors' brains to learn a bit more.
Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are no stranger to creating time-bending films with odd concepts, with The Endless and Resolution both existing in the same cinematic universe as Mackie's Synchronic. The premise is exciting enough on its own. Still, the directors revealed to us that the actor was recommended to work with them not only by Point Blank's Joe Lynch but also Avengers directing duo Joe and Anthony Russo (Community).
To listen to our chat with directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, click the podcast player below. Horror lovers can also find our exclusive interviews with legendary Freddy Krueger actor Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and Tremors' Burt Gummer actor Michael Gross (Family Ties) embedded along with the transcript.
Literary Joe: Do you guys often look on the internet to see how people react or comprehend and perceive your films?
Aaron Moorhead: Shamefully, yes. It's weird, but you just got to know, you know?
Literary Joe: Did you write the characters in Synchronic with any of your own characteristics in mind?
Aaron Moorhead: Little pieces, but not the pieces that you'd think. Like, I'm very happy in my relationship and stuff like that. There's always the little perceptions and things that thread into their worldview. It's not even characteristics of the characters; many of the things that come out of us are the places that the characters lead to, the conclusions and emotional resolutions they are led to. We don't pretend to know anything more than anybody else does about how to live one's life. But there are things that we're constantly exploring, like contentedness in the present moment and finding out many problems in relationships are actually problems with yourself. Like the themes that we explore in it, things like that are probably more of our personality than the actual characters' personalities.
Justin Benson: It's funny when I think where these characters often come from. In the case of Resolution, Chis was based on my mom. That was what I was thinking when I was writing it. This is a problem she has, and this is the emotion she goes through. It's weird to think about it. One part of Steve, that when we were in the script development, I thought what was interesting about him as a character is he is the quote-unquote ladies-man. I was the only single friend of all my friends, and they would look at me and go, dude, you have so much fun in your life, but what I felt was terrible. I thought it was an interesting perspective to see the differences and to map out what things look like from the outside in those situations.
Literary Joe: Do you know exactly what it was about Synchronic that spoke to Anthony Mackie and got him to sign on with the project initially?
Aaron Moorhead: I think it was the 80 million dollars we gave him. (Laughs) I'm totally kidding.
Justin Benson (2m 52s): Mackie is so good. I have no idea why he did it. First off, he is the nicest human being on the planet. He is insanely talented. It was like having Gandalf tell you about life. He said that the Russo brothers had said, "Hey, if these dudes ever hit you up, you should take it. I hope that's true.
Aaron Moorhead: I realize there is one more thing. One of our friends, a director named Joe Lynch, worked with Mackie on Point Blank, a Netflix movie. And when we'd found out he was working with Mackie, we were like, and this is super weird because you're not supposed to ask your friends for their celebrity friends, but we were like; we're just going to take a swing, man. Like, you are right there with Mackie. Do you think he'd like to work with us? And he was like, dude, I want to talk to him right now, and he just did it. And then a few days later, we got Mackie. It was amazing.
Literary Joe: What would you classify the subgenre of horror that you guys work in?
Aaron Moorhead: It's tough because we typically don't talk about genre when we're making a film at any stage. There are many discussions on how we make a scene or the movie; how do we make it scary? But then you get into this definition of what do you mean by scary? I think for us, it's how do we make this unsettling? How do we make this feel continuously full of dread? Like the way that you feel when you watched The Exorcist for the first time.
Literary Joe: Like more of a psychological horror than gory?
Aaron Moorhead: In a way, yeah. There's a piece of cosmic in there. For me, There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men; those movies weirdly scare me. I'm not going to say those are horror movies. But, if you allow the Gates of the definition of horror to open a little bit, I get a terror from those movies about the nature of evil. I don't think it's fair to say every movie's a horror movie that has made me unsettled. That is not true either, but you can't say that there aren't elements of terror in there.
When New Orleans paramedics and longtime best friends Steve and Dennis are called to a series of bizarre and gruesome accidents, they chalk it up to a mysterious new drug found at the scene. But after Dennis' oldest daughter disappears, Steve stumbles upon a terrifying truth about the supposed psychedelic that will challenge everything he knows about reality -- and the flow of time itself.
Synchronic is in theaters now.