‘Aporia’ Director Jared Moshé on Casting Judy Greer, Crafting a Time Machine, & Growing Up on Westerns:

It’s not every day that you come across a sci-fi thriller that feels like it can actually happen. A film so grounded in reality, despite having a premise that deals with time travel and reversing one’s fate. That’s exactly what writer-director Jared Moshé crafted in Aporia, a film that explores grief and the moral and ethical lines one will cross to protect those that they love. Judy Greer plays Sophie, a woman whose husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) was killed by a drunk driver eight months earlier. Devastated by the loss and struggling to connect with her young daughter, Riley (Faithe Herbert), Sophie has never felt more alone.

Enter Mal’s best friend Jabir (Payman Maadi), an Uber driver who clings to the life he had in his home country, where he was a physicist. He’s spent his last 10 years building a time machine in the hopes of saving his family, who was murdered by the National Guard. Through trial and error, his time machine has the ability to locate and murder one person at a specific time and place in their life. Unable to save his entire family, he offers the time machine to Sophie to bring back Mal, a decision that’ll not only bring her husband back but will flood her with guilt and impact others in ways she could never have predicted.

During our 1-on-1 conversation, Moshé talked about his love for Westerns that inspired him to make The Ballad of Lefty Brown and Dead Man’s Burden, how Judy Greer was the perfect person to play Sophie and all that she brought to the role, what it was like to see his time machine vision come to life, and how he got the idea for Aporia after having children.

COLLIDER: I have so many questions, and as I was watching it, it just got me thinking, “Oh, I can ask Jared about this!” Before we dive into the movie, let’s go back a little bit. Was there a writer or director or project that you kind of obsessed over growing up that made you say, “I want to do that when I grow up.”

JARED MOSHÉ: That’s a toughy. For me, I loved Westerns growing up, which is why I made two of them. You know, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, I feel like, were the two that just blew me away. The Wild Bunch, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West, and watching the way those people were able to convey this totally mythological world in a way that felt so real and so visceral and so operatic even in its violence. I was just amazed by it, and I wanted to be able to tell stories the way they told stories.

That’s a great way to put it. Jumping into the movie today, it’s about grief—obviously, that’s a big theme—moral, and ethical decisions. Basically, somebody’s going to send a bullet into the past, and for the sake of someone else, for their own benefit. So I’m curious, was there a moment in your personal life that gave you this idea? Did you grapple with grief in a certain instance that got you thinking, “What if I could do this?”

MOSHÉ: So, the idea came about more so from the experience of becoming a parent and suddenly feeling like the world is a lot scarier and more uncertain than I ever thought it would be. Everything felt more visceral and more dangerous, and I was really grappling with that. I was trying to figure out how I could try to control everything, and I didn’t really know how to do that. Then, I had this idea for a gun that could murder people in the past, that I sort of put aside for a while, and I was like, “Oh, what if I use that idea to explain, to show a character who’s trying to sort of control the uncontrollable?” Then, once I sort of put those two things together, I started to explore. I think that’s where I sort of got to someone dealing with grief because I knew if she was going to kill someone, there had to be a murder on the other side of it, a death on the other side of it. It just morally wouldn’t have worked any other way.

And, you know, I have not dealt with grief in the way Sophie [Judy Greer] deals with grief. I’ve had different types of grief. I’ve had to deal with, in my life, betrayals where people who were really close to me betrayed me in ways I never had, and I lost relationships that way. It was different, but I definitely mourned for friendships in ways that I didn’t know were possible. I’m terrified of people close to me dying, so this is also a lot of fear that sort of went into how I helped construct that character in that way as well.

Yeah, I like what you said about fearing losing a close friend or something because I feel like that could be almost worse in a way than a family member, to some extent. Like a friend that you’ve known all through your life, losing them. I can’t even think about that. I love the way you cast this movie. Especially Judy Greer, the lead. I’ve loved her for years. I don’t know if you know, but I think in March, I wrote an article on her, basically how she deserves respect, and she actually shared it on her Instagram.

MOSHÉ: I definitely saw that article. I didn’t realize you wrote it, though. That’s really cool.

I was so excited that she was leading a sci-fi drama, she deserves that. She killed it. How did this happen? Did you reach out to her specifically? How did she connect with the project?

MOSHÉ: So I’ve always been so impressed by Judy as an actor. She’s always sort of been the sidekick or secondary character. I don’t know, maybe if The Ballad of Lefty Brown is any truth, I actually like sidekicks and side characters and stuff, and that sort of was Judy to a T. But she also is just like one of the most emotive actors we have today who can do things and express things with a look, with her face, with a movement that is undeniably powerful and so unique. I think about that scene in The Descendants – the end when she comes in to see George Clooney and his wife in a coma, and she has to go from, like, this moment filled with pathos and truth and catharsis that then becomes kind of funny and awkward at the same time. I don’t think any other living actor could do that the way Judy did that.

So, thanks to her agent at CAA, we were able to get her the script, and she totally responded to the story. Then I was, like, really nervous because I was like, “Okay, she responded to the script, and now I have to sit down with her and talk to her,” and I’m like, “Oh my god, I gotta talk to Judy career about this role, and she’d be perfect for it!” We sat down and talked, and she’s a lovely human being. She totally understood what I was trying to do with the story and had so many great ideas for her character and how she was gonna bring Sophie to life that it became a collaboration bringing this character to the screen. That’s one of my favorite parts about being a director, to be honest, is collaborating with my actors to bring the character to life.

What you were saying about the emotions, I immediately thought of the scene [in Aporia] where she’s on the phone, and she’s hearing about Riley [Faithe Herman] at school, and she just told the whole story with her face. I was just so tense for her, and I don’t know who else could do it. She was fantastic.

MOSHÉ: No one else could do that, what she does. It’s incredible. You know, she’s got this movie, she’s got the Michael Shannon movie [Eric Larue] that’s coming out that premiered at Tribeca where she gets to play a lead in a drama. I’m really hoping that Judy is gonna get more opportunities because she 100% deserves them, and the world would be a better place for it.

Yeah, for sure. So you mentioned that she was a good collaborator. Did she say anything about Sophie that you’d never thought of? Did she make you think of the character in a totally different way?

MOSHÉ: I don’t think it was anything that big. It was in the detail. It was in little moments here and there. One of my things that’s really important to me is to sit down with my actors and go through the script, line by line, not rehearsing, not doing readings, just talking and being like, “Okay, what’s true to you? What feels right? Does this line feel right? This is how I wrote it to feel, how does it feel to you?” And really thinking through. She had so many little ideas as we were going to that, little lines, ways to cut down on things, the unsaid.

One space where this was, really, was the big reunion scene where there was a ton more dialogue that was in there about just her talking and memories and realizing, like, wait, she doesn’t remember stuff. And she was like, “I just don’t feel like I could say that,” like, “I’m seeing this guy who I’ve lost, and he’s in front of me, and I don’t think I’m gonna be able to speak in this moment.” So we did takes. We just cut down all the dialect, literally on the day of. We were shooting it, and I just went chop chop chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop with her. And we talked to Edi Gathegi, who played Mal, and he was also a very collaborative and a really giving actor as much as she is, and we just pulled it all out. The theme came alive without that dialogue because she understood how to just show the feelings and what she was going through.

That’s funny you say that because as I was watching it, I was like, this script is so tight, there’s no fat on the script, and I really appreciated that. It’s so easy to have characters say things that could have just been shown.

MOSHÉ: Thank you.

There are a couple of lines that really hit me when I was watching, I wrote them down. There’s one, “Maybe it’s not about who we kill but who we save,” and it’s interesting how, for Sophie, when it’s not about her and her situation, then she immediately sees how selfish it can be because it affects everybody else. Can you talk about how you wanted people to interpret Sophie? She’s kind of gray at times because right away she’s like, “I don’t see the problem. I want my husband back,” rightfully so, but then she switches, and she’s like, “Wait, we can’t just kill people.” So did you intend for her to be a gray character? Did you ever want the audience to always be on her side?

MOSHÉ: I intended her to be a gray character. I intended Sophie, Mal, and Jabir [Payman Maadi] to all be gray. You know, I think they’re all right at different times, and they’re all wrong at different times, and it’s really important for me that they are each a little selfish sometimes. I think actually Jabir is, weirdly, the least selfish of all of them.

I agree.

MOSHÉ: He’s the one who has made the moral consequence and is willing to make sacrifices in a way that the others are not. But I think Sophie, at the beginning, she doesn’t really think through the decision to use the machine, it’s just kind of like, “Alright, I’m desperate. This is the dumbest idea in the world. I’m probably gonna wait.” Then it works, and it’s like, only after it works does she start realizing, “Holy crap, I changed time. This is way more…” She’s not a physicist. She doesn’t sit around at night thinking about moral quandaries, you know? She’s not a character who understands– If you ask her what the trolley problem is, she’d be like, “What the fuck’s the trolley problem?”

She’d probably say that, too!

MOSHÉ: Yeah, exactly. So often you have in these movies, these characters who are scientists…they’re like Oppenheimer scientists except they’re not Oppenheimer, they’re Oppenheimer dreamers who are in Beverly Hills and have millions of dollars. But, you know, they’ve thought about this, they spend their time thinking and talking about this. I think Mal has, and Jabir has, but Sophie has not, so she’s reacting in real time. And sure, she uses it selfishly, and then she doesn’t want to use it, and then her belief is a little selfish, but I think that’s incredibly human. You know, you do something for yourself, and then you realize, “Wait, no, no. I’m glad I did that for myself, but this is an insane decision,” and then being asked to do it again? You’re gonna think about it again, and it’s gonna be more complicated, and there’s gonna be different feelings that develop. We are not beings that know everything at all times. We’re learning as we go. And I think Sophie is learning as she goes.

I like how she didn’t just buy into it right away. Another line, “It’s so much easier when it was theory.” This was probably my favorite line of the movie just because I feel like this could be applied to a lot of different situations. Then I was thinking of you, you also wrote this, so when you directed it, was there something on this page that when you had to direct it and capture it on camera, you were like, “Oh, this is so much easier to convey on the page than it was to direct?”

MOSHÉ: The machine intro scene was so much easier to write and explain and, like, actually go through it on the page just because I could give little clues to what Judy was thinking. Like when Jabir later was explaining, gives this whole spiel where he explains what the machine is, and I had a line in there that was like, “It’s okay if you don’t understand it because Sophie doesn’t either,” so it gave people permission. Then having to do that on screen was a little more complicated in figuring it out. So there were some scenes in [that] early machine room stuff that it was, yeah, it was much easier to write and have it in my head. Then it was like, “Alright, how am I gonna convey…?” Sophie walks in, and she thinks, “He’s insane, and your lifeline is insane!” You know, how do I convey that feeling? How do I show that feeling and then show the sympathy that she then feels? That was just such a difficult scene to get right while also introducing the idea of a machine that murders people in the past.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on. Was that always how you envisioned the machine, or did the props people take it in a totally different direction?

MOSHÉ: So I had two production designers on the movie. There was Kati Simon, who basically was my production designer on a day-to-day basis and did all the reality shifts and everything related to all the details, and then I had Ariel Vida, who was the production designer who was in charge of the machine. And I told Ariel, I gave her two pieces of direction, “One, it’s sort of based on a particle accelerator, and two, it should look like a fire hazard.” And then she kind of went with it.

I think Ariel is one of the smartest production designers out there, and she was able to really create and go free. She learned welding and was doing all these crazy things to it, and she had an entire shed full of junk from other movies she’s worked on. She just started plowing in. I was like, “It’s okay if it doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t really make sense to them either.” It’s like, they’ve probably built this thing, it’s been built, and the first time they turned it on, it probably did catch fire, right? Stuff’s catching fire, stuff’s not working, this isn’t working, that isn’t working. So, they put stuff on, and at this point, they don’t really know what part is doing anything. They just don’t want to mess with it, but they still are constantly trying to make it better because that’s who they are. So it really was like a collaboration between what I presented to Ariel and then Ariel just running with it, which is, I think, the best type of creation.

Another part that I like, towards the end, was when Sophie was going to be part of her child’s play at school, and I loved that it was Hamlet. Did you always have that in your mind from the beginning?

MOSHÉ: No, I kind of figured that out as I was going. I needed a specific thing for that moment that felt right, and I went to Hamlet. I love Hamlet. Hamlet’s one of my favorite plays, one of my favorite memories. One of my top five theatrical experiences was seeing Ralph Fiennes do Hamlet on Broadway, and it was just like, “Whoa!” I try to see every version of it, and I watch it, which is really cool.

But, you know, it’s funny—and someone brought this up at the Q&A at Fantasia Fest—that it must have been very subtextual, but Hamlet is also kind of a natural aporia. You know, this sort of idea of a logical contradiction, like what do you do when you’re paralyzed by it? And I was like, “Oh, that is also kind of true to my story.” But I’m not smart enough to claim credit for that. [Laughs] It was more just putting what I love into the story and finding what I needed, and putting what I love in.

As we talked about, there are a lot of subtle moments, like her on the phone, but then there’s also a little bit of action partway through the movie. I think Judy rivals Tom Cruise with the running. That was a great sequence. Was there a different way you approached [directing a scene] where there’s barely any movement, or is it just the same for every scene?

MOSHÉ: No, I think every scene is different. The running scene that you’re talking about had a conundrum that we didn’t realize would happen, which was Judy had chosen very uncomfortable shoes.

[Laughs] Oh no!

MOSHÉ: You know, she had full choice, like her and her costume design, and she could have chosen– She’s a character who wears sneakers a lot in the movie, but not for that scene. She chose not to wear sneakers, I think, for a previous scene and didn’t realize it was continuous and didn’t realize it would lead into all that running. [Laughs]

To me, when I’m directing action like that, I’m always interested in the experience and the emotional experience of the actors, of the characters, and trying to convey that. So it’s about how am I gonna convey movement? What is the way to convey the sense of movement and to convey to the audience the desperation and excitement that she’s feeling? And I really, really wanted to ground it in her perspective, which is why we tried to do a lot of pushing and pulling with using wide shots when necessary to create the space. But then it was really about what she was experiencing in that moment, you know, the camera racing with her, almost struggling to keep up with her.

One of the things I love in Children of Men is how at the beginning, in the opening shot the camera is almost so bored with Clive Owen. It goes off him to go outside, to go show the explosion, and then goes back. And then, by the end of that movie, he is going so much the camera can barely keep up with him! And that dynamic of how the camera works with the actors, it’s very inspiring. So when I’m always thinking about action, I’m thinking about that dichotomy, and also how it helps convey the story and the character and the arc.

That’s neat. I was like, “Man, she’s doing a good job running.” I don’t know why that just stuck with me.

MOSHÉ: It’s funny, if you could hear what she was saying, she’d be like, “Ow! Ow!” And then she’d be cursing, cursing, cursing.

[Laughs] The shoe thing kind of brings me to another question I had, which was, was there anything unexpected that happened on set—I’m sure as a director, you have to allot time for things to go wrong—was there something that maybe didn’t go as planned that either worked out unexpectedly or that you just were like, “How am I gonna deal with this?” And how you got through it?

MOSHÉ: Well, I mean, we had 17 days to shoot 103 pages, which is insane. So we didn’t have a lot of extra time. It’s really important that I give my actors and everyone– I sort of have a role on set that you can always come tell me your ideas, and I would consider them. Then if I say no, though, you have to accept the no. So there was a lot of freedom in that, in how the actors would talk to me and come up with ideas.

One of my favorite moments, though, I think, when I watch it, is really this quiet moment where Payman is lying next to his machine, and he’s looking up at his photograph. That was, I think, the last shot we shot in the machine room. He and I were sitting there trying to figure out, like, “Okay, we’ve been in this room so much, what haven’t we seen? What can be different? What can be free?” And he and I talked through it, and actually, he came up with that idea of lying next to it, and then it became, okay, let’s shoot it in this sort of beautiful, poetic, wider shot that really captures the body in the machine and almost makes him look like part of the massive junk that takes up that room. It was an incredible moment of inspiration. But that’s Payman Maadi, you know? He’s such an actor like that who is just so smart and so clever and such a collaborator.

Oh, wow. Yeah, he’s like an extension of the machine, now that I think about it, lying on the floor. And I like that you gave three distinct rules with the machine. Was it always three? How much thought did you give to the rules before?

MOSHÉ: So before I started writing the script, really, I sort of did research on how I wanted this machine to work and thought about it and did research on, like, quantum mechanics and tried to figure out particle accelerators and abstract particles. Just enough so I could kind of understand something of it. And the thing is, I never wanted this movie to be Primer. I love Primer, Primer is a great movie. I’ll describe this movie sometimes as Primer meets Blue Valentine, but Primer requires a 30-minute YouTube explainer, and then maybe you still might be confused. I wanted to keep it simple for our characters because Sophie has to understand it, and Sophie is not a scientist.

So, I wrote down kind of a rough– what the machine does, and I set up the rules right then and there, and those rules became the rules I lived by as the writer. I never want more than three. It’s really basic, you know, very simple. You can understand them. You know, rule number one, the machine can only kill. Rule number two, you can’t un-kill someone, so there’s no undo button. Rule number three, if you use the machine, you remember the original reality, not the new one you created. And so those sort of became the touchstones for the movie, and honestly, I was kind of figuring out how, as I was working with my characters, how they would navigate those rules. I was figuring how to navigate those rules. I never really went back, like, “I gotta tweak this rule, I gotta change this rule,” or, “I gotta make this different.” I was like, “No, these are the rules, and gotta live by them.”

It’s probably freeing in a weird way to have constraints while you write the story because it’s like you have to check yourself with where everything’s at.

MOSHÉ: I think it’s really helpful to have constraints. I think that’s where filming on location and just knowing the reality of what you’re working with, it allows for great creative freedom in a way. But you need to have the constraints because I think otherwise you can get…everything’s possible. It just becomes too much.

The locations were great in this movie, and I think they felt so raw, and that added to the story. I know this is kind of said a lot, but the location was a character. What went into the locations? Because I just felt like they were specifically chosen.

MOSHÉ: They were. But also, it’s funny, my experience making Westerns taught me very clearly that land is a character; “place” is a character in the story. When I was writing Aporia and thinking about how we were going to bring it to the screen and direct, it was very much about like, “Okay, LA is a character in this film.” It was really important to me that LA be a character and the locations be a character, and the locations speak to our characters. I don’t love movies [where] it’s like, “Oh, look, it’s just someone got a house in West Hollywood and shot there, and it looks just like a house in West Hollywood.” You know, white walls that are blank and nothing’s going on in them, and there’s no details and no life to them. That feels very generic, and I’m sort of very against that.

I wanted this film to feel like it was taking place in an undiscovered corner of LA. A place, I would often say, that Waze cuts you through on your way to work. And in one of these nondescript buildings in this unknown area is the most powerful machine in the world, and you would have no idea on your way. So, my locations team was really trying hard, were working really hard to find the place, to find a house. They found a lot of really cool houses because we wanted something that felt like it was sort of stuck, you know, it was like sort of caught in this point of chaos. They moved into this house, they had this thought that their life would go a certain way, and it never did. It’s a rental house that they don’t want; it’s probably like they’re paying in so little they don’t want to ever ask the landlord to fix it up on the odd chance the landlord might jack up their rent because they can’t really do it. But I didn’t realize how expensive all these filming locations are in LA, and it was really, really hard to find one.

Then I was at my son’s T-ball game, actually, around the corner from my house, and I was talking to another family with a kid on his team. We were friends, and I knew their house was this house they had bought that they could live in it, but they had to fix so much up because so much was old, and there were these crazy wood details, and it just looked kind of like a mess in a great way. And they were telling me that they were going to be going to Hawaii in July, and I was like, “Oh, when in July?” And then it turned out they were gonna be gone during our dates, and we were able to make a deal where we could give them a reasonable amount of money, and they showed me their house.

What that also did, which was amazing, it meant we were filming around the corner from where I live. So suddenly, I knew the neighborhood so well, I could be like, “Alright, the reunion scene is gonna be at the rec center,” which is down the street. “We can go up this hill to shoot the rocket launch. We can go over here. Oh, there’s this great coffee shop. Oh, I know these streets, I know where she can run. I know all this area intimately.” Well, I’ve lived here for, at that point, I think, three years. In COVID, I walked every part of it, you know, multiple times. So it allowed us, really, to give that East LA—it’s El Sereno—to bring it to life to the screen in a way that I think felt very true to the story, but also captures what this area is, beautifully.

aporia-judy-greer-payman-maadiImage via Well Go USA
Yeah, very down and dirty and real, and lived in. Everything just felt lived in.

MOSHÉ: Yeah. My production designers would be doing stuff in the house, and I’d be like, “Something’s not right,” and I’d run to my house and just grab my kids’ art off the wall or, like, I’d grab my kids’ snack bin. I was like just throwing it into it. There are so many little Easter eggs of like, “Oh, that’s the LEGO thing my son built, that’s our snack bin, that’s our random piece of a thing that came home from preschool that’s sitting there.” There’s so many random little details that are just there from it. I was always all about clutter. I was always like, “More clutter! She doesn’t have time to do the dishes!” At one point, I think I directed everyone after lunch just to put their trash on set.

“Leave that sandwich there!”

MOSHÉ: Yeah, exactly!

Well, unfortunately, I have to wrap. I could talk to you forever. This movie was great, and I’m telling everybody to see it. I’m so happy Judy connected with it because she was perfect. Thank you for talking to me. This was lovely.

MOSHÉ: Thank you. This is really a fun conversation.

Aporia is in theaters August 11.

View this article at Collider.