Equals director Drake Doremus on love in a dangerous time

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      In 2011, Drake Doremus made a film, Like Crazy, which is now considered canonical to millennials who are petrified of commitment.

      In 2013, the Orange County–born-and-raised director made Breathe In, about a forbidden romance between a young traveller and a married man.

      The latest from Doremus, Equals, opening Friday (July 15), centres on two people (played by Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart) who become attracted to each other in a utopian, emotionless future where those who show feelings of any kind are sent to their deaths.

      “It’s the ultimate story that I like watching,” says Doremus, in a call to the Straight from Los Angeles. “I make movies that I want to see, I guess. To me it’s the idea of love being this fire-breathing dragon that you keep chasing and you can never tame. It’s this sort of inner-longing and the obsession with the idea of having love, losing it, finding it, maintaining it. I never find the answers to it, so I’m super-fascinated and sort of obsessed with continuing to try and examine it, I guess.”

      While it’s related to his other films by theme, Equals is a departure from anything Doremus has done genre-wise. “I’m not really a sci-fi guy at all,” he admits. “And I don’t really think of this as a sci-fi movie per se; it was just fascinating to me to try something different, to push myself. We [Doremus and screenwriter Nathan Parker] thought very clearly from day one about a sort of minimalistic world where the performances and the relationships sort of take centre stage.”

      Equals has some scary ideas that one hopes will never actually be adopted by humanity, and others that seem uncomfortably plausible, but ultimately it’s influenced by the ways we look for connection today. “The idea kinda came from just trying to think of new and exciting ways to explore love,” Doremus says. “And just thinking about the idea of a love story set in a world where love doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to exist. I was really fascinated with the idea of: ‘would it find a way’? Would it sort of organically come back to where we need to be as human beings and what’s really important to us? Especially today with the way technology is and how sort of disconnected we are from organically finding love and relationships.”

      Comments