THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
AS The Butterfly Effect TURNS 20, DIRECTORS ERIC BRESS AND JONATHAN MACKYE GRUBER TAKE US INSIDE THE DARKEST TIME TRAVEL MOVIE EVER MADE
fORGET SPORTS ALMANACS AND ALMOST KISSING your mum – Marty McFly’s dealings with the Doc in Back To The Future feel tame compared to The Butterfly Effect. It’s perhaps the darkest time-travel movie ever committed to celluloid, with an alternate ending so harrowing that it still keeps people up at night despite 20 years having passed since it first hit cinemas.
Released in 2004, this sci-fi drama had then-rising star Ashton Kutcher playing Evan, a young man with a very troubled past that saw him and his pals enduring a torrent of abuse. From parental violence and encounters with a paedophilic neighbour, to accidentally causing the death of a mother and her baby and witnessing the torture of the family dog, it was a grim period that all involved would rather forget.
It’s convenient, then, that when Evan reads from his old journals he discovers that he can travel back in time, inhabit the body of his younger self during blackout periods and change the way history happened. However, what starts as an inexplicable way of fixing everyone’s problems quickly descends into a recipe for disaster, as each trip to tweak the past provides an increasingly darker present, with terrible consequences for everyone involved.
“It was a philosophical journey,” explains Jonathan Mackye Gruber, one half of the film’s writing and directing team. He and fellow writer/director Eric Bress wrote The Butterfly Effect early on in their collaborative career, but it wasn’t until they found wider success by penning 2003’s Final Destination 2 that the opportunity to make it finally arrived.
“Everybody would like to play God, but should they?” ponders Gruber. “Ultimately, we’re the sum of our life experiences. There’s lots of things I’d love to change in my life, but the really great things maybe wouldn’t have happened if I did.”
This ethos certainly rang true for Bress, who had a personal connection to The Butterfly Effect that directly impacted its creation. “At around 16 years old, something really traumatic happened to me,” he tells SFX. “I spent the next five years or so thinking, ‘Oh my god, what if I could go back and not allow that thing to happen or just bypass that situation entirely?’
“That germ of an idea stuck with me, and the more distance I got between me and the event the more thought-provoking it became.
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