Stimson Snead & Sam Dunning Talk Weird Heart of Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox

Time travel is one of those story tropes that hurts your brain the more you think about it. In the case of Stimson Snead’s Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox, prepare for your brain to ooze out of your ears. The film centers on the titular Tim Travers (Sam Dunning), a self-absorbed scientist who wants to solve the time traveler’s paradox. For those unaware, the paradox is essentially what happens when a time traveler interacts with the past version of themself. In Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox, it’s not just one past self Tim has to worry about…

Writer/director Stimson Snead and star Sam Dunning sat down with Film Obsessive’s Tina Kakadelis ahead of the film’s theatrical run to discuss its short film origins, the uphill fight of indie film distribution, and if they really understand the time traveler’s paradox. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Film Obsessive: Stimson, I want to start with you and where the idea for Tim Travers came from, and then talk about the journey from idea to short to feature.

Stimson Snead: I’ve always liked real science. The last big short I did, right before the short that Tim Travers is based on, was an educational film about the Mars Spirit rover. It was based on XKCD: SPIRIT by Randall Monroe, a web comic, and the short was gifted to the Buzz Aldrin Foundation for schools. Having one foot in the world of real science has always meant a lot to me.

In the case of Tim Travers, I was at a film festival for science fiction. I watched another time-travel movie, and it made me very, very anxious because I really didn’t like it. Not just because the science was bad. All science for time travel is magic. You can put a lot of reality in it, but at a certain point, there’s going to be a step that’s just magic to get it there.

But assuming you had the real thing, I wanted characters who would react the way I would react: like a scientist who would ask questions. I would try to figure out what this means. That was the whole genesis of the Tim Travers character. I wanted a character who would belligerently refuse to have a character arc so they could ask the questions I wanted to ask.

The great irony, of course, is that when we decided to expand this into a feature film, the very first thing that needed to change was that this character with no arc now needed to have an arc. Not only that, I think the arc we found and that Sam portrayed so beautifully on camera really becomes the core of this movie, which is quite a few steps removed from where it started.

Sam, you’ve been there since the beginning. What made you excited about the short film, and then what made you also want to join the feature?

Sam Dunning: As an actor who is trying their best to become a household name but isn’t yet, you want as much work as possible, and as much opportunity to showcase what you can do. When Stimson approached me with the short, it was like an actor’s wet dream.

It’s just like, ‘Oh, you get to play all the characters, and the whole story revolves around believing that you can have these conversations with yourself’. The short went so well, and was just so much fun to make. I mean, it was a lot of work, don’t get me wrong, but it was so much fun to make and such a fun, tough exercise for myself.

When Stimson came back with the idea for the feature, who am I to say no to that experience, but now bigger? I think one of the funniest things is, while we were shooting, a friend of mine texted me and she was like, ‘you’re just having the best time right now, aren’t you’?

And I was like, ‘No, I am extremely, extremely overworked and exhausted. I’m so grateful, but I’m literally just getting through every day and not thinking about anything other than ‘all right, do I have the lines? Is Stimson going to move on’? Because if he moves on, then we’re good’.

I’m so grateful for the whole experience, but (laughs) I kind of blacked out and our movie came out and it’s almost true.

It does seem very overwhelming to shoot. Can you talk a little about that on an indie-budget scale and what that whole experience was like?

Stimson Snead: A lot. It was a lot. A film should be done in 30 days. A film like this where, functionally, every shot of the film has to be filmed between two to a dozen times, should have been a 40-50 day shoot. We did it in 17 days.

We were very fortunate that we got to work with the same team we worked with on the short film. Northwest Passage was also the studio behind the sci-fi show Z Nation and a couple Pure Flix shows, so these are folks who are really seasoned with TV-style shooting, where they know how to make stuff look good, but more importantly, they know how to shoot very, very fast.

We were in a position where every single day was under the gun, time-wise, more than any other shoot I’ve ever been on. I think we were three, maybe four days in, when myself and the cinematographer, Bryan Gosline, we just threw out the shot list after a few days. We had the whole film pretty meticulously shot-listed. Normally, I like to do storyboards, but every single day was becoming battlefield decision after battlefield decision, to the point where we weren’t using any of the shot lists.

We got into this rhythm where Bryan, Cheyenne Smith, the assistant director, and myself would spend 15 minutes before every scene, just the two of us. We would basically send the crew out, give everybody a break. Sam would go somewhere to have a coffee and let his brain drizzle out of his ears for a couple of minutes while we walked the set and decided in that 15 minutes where every shot was going to be for that scene.

We would plan the entire scene in a 15-minute chunk among the three of us. Figuring out exactly what we had time to do, where to put the camera for it, and then we would bring in the crew and go. Cheyenne and Bryan would take over the crew, setting up those shots, while Sam and I would go through and start rehearsing the scene together before we would get into the actual rolling, which typically would be less than 15 to 20 minutes later.

I don’t think there’s a single shot in this film in which Sam had more than maybe 20 minutes to work with me before we rolled the camera.

Sam Dunning: Or took more than 20 minutes to sit and gather my thoughts.

Stimson Snead: Oh, I don’t think you ever got that. I think the only breaks you were getting was when we were prepping the next scene. I think you were getting those 15 minutes and that was basically it.

So how many Tims are there throughout the course of the film? I tried to keep track and then I quickly gave up.

Stimson Snead: There’s about 30. I’m one of those sticklers who likes my in-jokes to actually make sense. The credits scroll is accurate to the number of Tims in the film. I went through and counted.

In real life, there are eight people in total who donned the Tim get-up. We had three regular stand-ins. We had a hero stand-in named David Babbitt, who was actually putting on a full performance opposite of Sam. Any time Sam is physically interacting with himself, or you can see the hands, that is actually a different actor who is mirroring Sam’s performance.

During pick-up shoots and stuff like that, where nobody came back, everybody, including myself, put on the costume and the wig at some point or another in shots that do make it into the film.

The movie feels very much out of time. It feels like I’m rediscovering a movie from the ’80s that has a really sentimental, heart-on-the-sleeve feeling with science-fiction flavor, but it’s still this very beautiful, kind of weird movie about self-discovery. Can you talk a little bit about what it feels like to release this kind of optimistic, hopeful-self-love, no pun intended, story in today’s world?

Stimson Snead: Optimistic and hopeful is not a set of words I have frequently heard assigned to this movie. Self-acceptance, maybe, but it’s an interesting thing, because this is the kind of film that the industry very much does not seem to want right now. Getting distribution for this film, without going into details or naming names, has been a ceaselessly uphill battle. For every good thing that has happened on the festival circuit, for every good thing that has happened with the amazing audience turnout and critical response we’ve been given, I can tell you two bad things that have been happening behind the scenes on the industry side, and the reaction to the film.

To call it negative is an understatement. It has bordered on outright hostility for reasons that I’m not entirely sure of, because I don’t think we’re making any particularly controversial statements within the film. Maybe that’s part of the problem with a film like this. This is a film that wants to say you should accept yourself as you are, including all the bad things about yourself.

This is a story about pretty fundamentally, consistently, awful people across the board. I don’t think there’s a single character in it who is anything you would describe as a particularly good person. Tim Travers himself is the perfect example, and I think that’s part of why this resonates with audiences so much, because it’s not trying to do the Rick and Morty look-how-cool-Tim-is schtick.

Tim is not particularly cool. I think the film is pretty honest about what he is, and it still finds a way to find that love and acceptance, and it wants the audience to do the same for themselves. I think that’s why it’s resonating, and I’m really excited that it’s gotten to the point that it is and we’re finally going to be coming out.

But it’s been a brutal road getting there.

Sam Dunning: That’s honestly the case with nearly all indie films right now. I actually just wrote and directed my own feature, and we’re just starting our festival run, and also starting to dip a toe in the water as far as distribution is concerned.

Thankfully, I have people like Stimson who I can watch go through this whole process. The indie route right now is just so hard to go through. It kind of doesn’t matter if you make the best movie in the world. It’s just tough.

But I think you hit it on the head. It seems like studios, or at least distributors, aren’t really looking for heart-on-the-sleeve movies like this as much as they should be. I feel like a lot of people nowadays actually want something like this that is really earnest and lovely.

If our film has any message at all, at least it’s something that’s universal and very easy to embrace. Just the idea of self-acceptance. I think, more often than not, to get on my soapbox, modern culture makes it very easy to get wrapped up in feeling less than or finding ways to feel less positive about who you are as a person and not able to accept who you are as a person.

For a lot of people, I think this movie can be a really great reminder of that, or you can just watch a kind of stupid fun sci-fi movie. Either way, you win.

Absolutely. The loss of earnestness in studio films is what breaks my heart, because I think that’s what made so many people in my generation fall in love with movies. The earnestness of the ’80s action-adventure, sci-fi stuff. I was so happy to see that come back with you guys. 

Stimson Snead: Oh, thank you so much.

My last question for you guys…try as I might, I feel like I still don’t understand the time travel paradox. So after doing all of this, do you understand it?

Sam Dunning: Yes, more or less. I can’t give a dissertation, but I can at least be like, ‘well, yeah, I got the nuts and bolts of it’.

Stimson Snead: I find it helps to draw it. Part of how I did this film and the original short is I literally took out a piece of sketch paper and drew. In physics, they have this thing they call the arrow of time, so they represent time as a line. I actually drew the line looping back on itself, complete with plot markers to figure out how that would work. Actually just physically drawing it out sometimes helps much better than trying to write it out.

Sam Dunning: I think one of my favorite lines in the movie that often gets missed is where it’s me and me and me drunkenly discussing how it all works in a bar. At one point, the drunkest of me is trying to explain how it works and goes, ‘No, I need visual aids. Like, let’s take some beer and go back to the lab’. And I’m just like, ‘oh yeah, that’s literally how I would actually explain it to somebody’.