Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a wacky time-travel romp that suddenly features a school shooting midway through proceedings – here, director Gore Verbinski exclusively explains why he included such a shocking scene.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die stars Sam Rockwell as a time-traveller endeavouring to prevent society’s collapse due to the terrifying progress of AI in the future.
The movie had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest, where we wrote in our Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die review that it’s “a film with lofty ambitions, to deliver blockbuster thrills through a time travel adventure, while making distressing statements about the predicament the planet finds itself.”
One sequence is particularly distressing, and the morning after that debut screening, we spoke to Verbinski about placing such a scene in the center of a broad comedy. Mild SPOILERS ahead…
Gore Verbinski on school shooting in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
Midway through Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, there’s a school shooting that comes out of nowhere. The film doesn’t actually depict the atrocity. Instead we’re with Susan (Juno Tempo), the mother of one of the victims, as she learns about the event while outside the building.
It’s a shocking shift in tone for what’s been a pretty light movie until that point, while Susan’s storyline quickly turns into a jet-black comedy about cloning. But it’s brave to stick such a controversial topic in the midst of a mainstream crowd-pleaser, so we asked Verbinski how it came about.
“It was on the page,” came the reply. “I knew I didn’t want to show it – I wanted to see Juno’s character realize before she even gets out of the car what’s happening.”
Verbinski added that the scene is there to ignite discussion. “I think we’re sort of driving down the road and we’re changing tyres, but we’re not realizing that the road’s full of nails,” he explained. “We’re not addressing the issue, right? I think that’s kind of pointing out the absurdity of the fact that we’re not even having a conversation about it.
“If the film is criticized, it’s welcome because you’re criticizing the thing that’s trying to talk about the thing. Again, it’s another layer of absurdity.”
As for that violent change in tone, Verbinski said: “I think the trick fundamentally, with pulling it off, and seeing last night’s audience move from genuinely disturbed to into slowly into laughter – quite a bit of laughter is – is really Juno’s performance. She keeps it real. She is honest, and human in an increasingly inhumane world.
“I think that’s the sort of Franz Kafka, The Trial, ‘what is what’s happening to me?’ – that character is making sense, but the world isn’t. And her want is true – her kid back.”
But while it’s a brutal hand-break turn in the movie, Gerbinski believes modern-day audiences have been programmed to accept such shifts.
“It’s an interesting time because forever we’ve said you couldn’t mix genres,” he added. “Now all we do is mix genres. You can’t mix tones, and now we’re starting to mix tones. I think that it’s a pretty infinite canvas… I think that’s what independent film can do.”
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