Gareth Carrivick was sent the script for FAQ ABOUT TIME TRAVEL by his agent, whom he shares with the writer Jamie Mathieson. Carrivick, an award winning television director, was looking to make his directorial debut, and Mathieson, a successful stand-up comic, had written a script which seemed ideally suited to Carrivick’s strengths, with his knowledge and experience of directing acclaimed
comedy.

As Gareth Carrivick says, “I love making comedy, I have spent the best part of 20 years doing so, and it is in my opinion the most difficult genre to get right and the easiest to get wrong, but at the same time it is also fantastically rewarding to hear an audience laugh and to know that you have been a part of that process. It’s why I direct and it why I wanted to make this film.”

Jamie Mathieson, himself a self-confessed geek with a love of all things sci-fi, from comics and books, to television and films, initial idea was if you had a guy who was obsessed with time travel, and he was visited by someone from the future, that no one would believe him. This idea formed the starting point of the original screenplay.

FAQ ABOUT TIME TRAVEL with it’s many subtle references to other time travel films and books will appeal to aficionado’s who will enjoy spotting the references, it has the geek element as Mathieson says. But these images and icons within the film are sophisticated and understated, in the background, and not designed to distract or interrupt the enjoyment for the regular audience goer, but will give added interest to the geek amongst them.

Neil Peplow and Justin Smith, with their successful track record of producing British films, read the script and were instantly attracted to the humour within the material.

Together with Carrivick and Mathieson, they spent a year developing the script. Neil Peplow summarises the basic premise of the sci-fi comedy, with all its complicated twists and turns, as “A story about three guys who go to their local pub and find there is a slip in the space time continuum in the gent’s toilet, and they can travel backwards and forwards in time but only to the same toilet, and it is about how they
react to this ridiculous situation they find themselves in.”

FAQ ABOUT TIME TRAVEL is set apart from other time travel movies in so much as there is no visible future technology, and no fancy visuals to indicate time travel. And most of the events of the film take place in the same building in a limited number of areas; the main bar of the pub, the snug and the toilets. Taking this in to consideration the film asks of the audience exactly how far can you fold the same sequence of events before losing narrative coherence? The answer, it turns out, is surprisingly far.

To bring this story to life on the big screen, Peplow, Smith, Carrivick and Mathieson needed to find their perfect trio. This led to a further six months of intensive casting to find the actors to play Ray, Toby and Pete.

As Justin Smith says, “We knew who the characters were as they were clearly defined in the script, and we wanted to find the right actors, so we did an exhaustive search for the roles, and we were lucky enough to find exactly the right people who sparked off one another.”

After three full read throughs with actors, but never the combination that are in the film, Chris O’Dowd, Marc Wootton and Dean Lennox Kelly were brought together to see if they had the all important chemistry required to bring the script to life before a final decision could be made. As Carrivick recalls, “We spent the day in a pub and shot some key scenes from the film. They hadn’t ever worked together before, and it worked fantastically well, the chemistry you see in the final film is one that was there
from the beginning.”

It had to be the right combination for the humour to work, much of which comes from male banter, teasing back and forth, for the audience to believe the way the characters, with their individual traits, respond to the situation they are in, even though it is extraordinary. There is no tardis and no spaceship, instead our trio of mates have a toilet from which they can move backwards or forwards in time. This
presents them with the greatest challenge, that of being in one environment, the pub, for the majority of the time with multiple versions of themselves, knowing they cannot break the principal rule of time travel; never touch, speak or bump in to other versions of yourself.
To add to the chaos and confusion in the story, there was the character of Cassie to cast, the time traveller Ray falls for. This pivotal role was one which the director, writer and producers all unanimously agreed the American actress Anna Faris would be perfect for. They were delighted when Anna read the script and accepted their offer to come on board.

For Anna Faris the attraction to the project was instantaneous, as she explains, “The script is distinctly British, it is funny and witty, and encapsulates everything about popular culture and pub culture that is current right now”.