By William Earl
According To The variety Sometimes you just need to light a guy on fire.
The first scene in “Redux Redux,” in theaters today via Saban Films, features Irene (Michaela McManus), a multiverse traveller, lighting a man tied to a chair on fire and watching him burn. We quickly learn that the man is a killer who murdered Irene’s daughter, and she has devoted her life to traveling to alternate worlds in order to repeatedly get revenge.
The indelible flaming image ended up on the film’s original poster, yet it was borne out of a scrappy indie sensibility from writing and directing duo Kevin and Matthew McManus.
“We knew we needed to grab the audience,” Matthew McManus says. “Sometimes it feels like it’s a competition between the big screen and the small screen in your hand. We need to have something that makes people put down their phones and lean in. That wasn’t even in the script, but it was just a conversation we were having. You’re trying to think of what’s going to have the biggest impact, and you’ve got a limited budget, and when you start talking about that with your stunt guys, you realize it’s actually not terribly expensive if you just do it once and get it right. So that was the strategy.” Another key part of the strategy was the duo asking their sister, who has had recurring roles on series like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “SEAL Team” and “Memory of a Killer,” to star. Given the emotional heft of the script and the role, they felt confident she would be able to carry the film on her shoulders.
“Hiring your sister, who’s our favorite actress, you can ask her to do all sorts of things you would never ask a regular actor to do,” Kevin McManus says. “The stunt guys were going through everything saying, ‘Oh, this is a stunt and this is going to get expensive.’ ‘Well, Michaela will be doing her own stunts.’ She’s like, ‘Oh, I will. All right.’ She got right in there, got her hands dirty pretty quickly.”
When the duo first started working on the film ten years ago, their sister was too young to play their protagonist. However, given the slow process of securing funding, when it came time to actually make the movie, Michaela McManus was a perfect fit, and was moved to receive the offer.
“I’ve been working now for 20 years, and Hollywood can put you in a box, and that’s where you fit — that’s where they see you,” she says. “What I love about working with my brothers is that box just goes away. I’ve known them forever, so they’ve seen me in everything, and they’ve coached me on a million auditions, so they know me as an actor better than anyone. They’ve always been my champions in that they don’t see me in that box ever. It’s so refreshing. The role of Irene is not a role that anyone would put me in. Even just getting an audition would probably be tough for my manager to get me in the door, just to get a shot. So that was hugely important to show this other side of me.”
With the emotional core of the film set, the filmmakers had to visualize how to create an effective multiverse without the big budget of the MCU. They used clever visual clues to signal the new worlds to the audience.
“Every movie we made up to this point, we never cared too much about continuity,” Kevin McManus says. “If you’re noticing the continuity, we’ve got a bigger problem, right? People aren’t paying attention to the story. With this one, the joy is in the continuity. You’re seeing that the mugs change colors, or you’re seeing that one sign changes ever so slightly. We were trying to find these small, tiny tweaks as these little easter eggs for how the multiverse changed. Our multiverse, it’s not a big Marvel multiverse where things are changing drastically between one universe and another. Instead, it’s tiny.”
This specialized canvas allowed Michaela McManus to fully explore the depths of her character’s fury.
“Dealing with this intense material was probably the most exhausting work I’ve ever done,” she says. “I was diving into it and trying to be as locked in as possible each day. My brothers being there, there’s the safety and trust that allowed me to go to those places, and I felt safe. But it was really hard. When we wrapped, I said, ‘OK, I need a beat, because having to face Irene’s reality every day was exhausting.’”
Despite the sci-fi, action and horror wrapped exterior, the filmmaking duo unwraps a contemplative outlook at the core.
“The story is about the perils of revenge, but it’s also a cautionary tale about trying to rewrite your own history and change your circumstances,” Kevin McManus says. “There’s this great saying that, ‘No man can step into the same river twice.’ It’s a different river and a different man. That’s the thesis that hopefully you’re walking away thinking about.”
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