Cashing in on Cube raves
By Murray Whyte

It's nearly impossible to mention Vincenzo Natali, the 35-year old Toronto director, without immediately paying lip service to his most successful filmic progeny, Cube. Made on a shoestring $350,000 budget in 1997 while Natali was studying at the Canadian Film Centre, Cube dropped a handful of strangers into an equi-proportioned room that's the cube with an exit on each of its six sides, and defied them to get out alive.

Released here to little fanfare, Cube left Canada behind and found near-instant cult status abroad. In France, it was one of 1999's biggest hits, taking in $6 million. In Japan, Cube grossed $4 million, breaking consecutive weekly box office records at a Tokyo theatre, beating out such heavyweight offerings as Jim Carrey's The Truman Show. And in the U.S., Cube improved on its poor box office showing by becoming the top video rental for the first half of 1999, according to Playback magazine.

Its commercial success was matched by its critical reception in such places as the United Kingdom, where Tim Robey, a film critic with the Daily Telegraph in London, called it "one of the best genre debuts of the past 10 years." Cube also spawned two sequels, Hypercube and Cube Zero, neither of which Natali had a hand in, and a lasting presence in cyberspace, where Cube junkies continue to trade news and scenarios in a never-ending conspiratorial spiral.

Vincenzo Natali

Heady stuff for a young aspirant looking for a way into the big leagues. With Cube, it seemed sure he had found it. Courted and flattered by Hollywood, Natali seemed to be on his way. And then, after years of unfulfilled promises, he wasn't.

"I went through what's known as development hell," Natali recalled last fall, at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I made the mistake of fixating on one thing. I had a project all lined up and ready to go, even before I finished Cube," he said. "It was a very ambitious project, and I wasn't at the point in my career that I could get it done."

Somewhat cowed, Natali went back to Canada and got back to work. The result was two films made back to back: Cypher, a dystopian sci-fi thriller about corporate complicity, and Nothing.

Nothing defies easy description, so Natali, an easy presence with an engaging laugh, takes it slowly. "Even Cube, by comparison, seems more conventional," he says carefully. "Nothing is a film that doesn't have a lot of predecessors. No question, I've been influenced by many filmmakers, but it was hard to find another film that it had a relationship, or comparison to."

As simply as possible, Nothing is this: David and Andrew, childhood friends locked in a sort of co-dependent, Odd Couple-style relationship in a house wedged between two freeway on-ramps, awake one morning to find the world is gone.

There is no ravaged landscape, stretching, desolate, to the horizon. There is, in fact, no horizon, period. Outside their front door is nothing — an endless, undefinable, glowing expanse of white, in every direction — up, down, around and otherwise.

Nothing - The Movie

Needless to say, this premise presented a number of challenges. "One of the first questions we had to ask ourselves was: `What does nothing look like?' And, well, it doesn't look like anything," Natali laughed.

It's also a shrewd bit of financial husbandry for a sci-fi thriller: An imposing blankness is a stunning visual technique, but also a frugal one in an era where mind-bending special effects are the science-fiction norm (see: the Matrix series). "And believe me, that's where the inspiration for the idea always comes from," he said. "Necessity is the mother of invention."

But one of the challenges, oddly enough, wasn't obtaining financing (Nothing was shot in Toronto for a reported $5 million budget.) In that respect, Natali was finally able to capitalize on Cube's success.

"By the time I had Nothing ready as a screenplay, the international market had decided I was valuable," he said. "So financing Nothing was incredibly easy, when in fact it should have been a nightmare, because it's an odd movie."

David Hewlett & Marie-Josée Croze in Nothing - The Movie

"Odd" is something of an understatement. After a few tentative ventures into the vast void surrounding them, David and Andrew come to realize this: The nothingness is something they themselves created. As they learn more about their new abilities to edit their reality, they bicker endlessly, willing away each other's favorite things, soon realizing that they can wish away not only physical objects, but their own negative emotions and memories.

"That's when it becomes most interesting: If you can change yourself, what will you become?" Natali said. "That was the moment I realized that this could be a feature film, when we realized they would edit themselves."

The film then becomes not a simple Castaway-style tale, in which two stranded friends look for the way home. "It became more about how we edit our reality, which is something we mentally do all the time," Natali said. "In the end, it's about their relationship to the world, and to each other."

Considering the vast number of editing changes they choose to make, the characters David and Andrew clearly didn't think much of the reality surrounding them. The result is both absurd and unsettling. If that's the only echo of Cube rattling around in Nothing, then Natali's satisfied.

At some point, Natali would like to grow beyond cult status — "I'd like to do a movie that gets released in 2,000 screens" — but he'll measure Nothing's success by other means.

"I defy anyone to walk out of the film and say `Well, I've seen that before,'" Natali said. "They might hate it, but I guarantee they will never have seen anything like it." The Star - ArtsyStuff Magazine

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