Vanaf 15 maar kunnen we in de Nederlandse bioscopen genieten van Chronicle, een film over een groepje tieners die door een ontdekking superheld achtige krachten krijgen. De film is deze week in Amerika gaan draaien en word er redelijk goed ontvangen. Nu had de website Fearnet.com een interview met Josh Thrank over zijn film debuut.

Where did the idea for Chronicle come from?

I have wanted to make movies my whole life. I've always pursued movie-making obsessively. It's all I have ever wanted. It's my only hobby. While other kids were playing sports, I was borrowing cameras and shooting things. I didn't shoot a lot of traditional short films; I would shoot experimental videos where I would merge real life with science fiction or fantasy elements. Going into my 20s, I built up this long list of ideas and a lot of them involved a group of kids with telekinesis who would film themselves demonstrating their powers, usually to mess with people or cause trouble. I had a little epiphany a few years ago that all of these scenes could work together for a bigger movie. So I was very excited, and it was like I saw the whole movie right in front of me. It would play as a coming-of-age drama. It would open like a documentary, raw footage cut together, and it would be about a kid who is susceptible to abuse by his peers and his father. He's an alienated kid, and his camera is his outlet. He is really just documenting what is going on in his life. This is a character who is able to hold the camera steady and has a visual eye so it would be a comfortable and interesting movie to watch - not like a traditional found-footage film which can be amateurish and hard to watch.

I knew the first 15 minutes of the film had to play out without any superpowers or fantasy. Eventually this kid would make some incredible discovery that would lead to his telekinesis and he would begin filming for a completely different reason. He would have two friends that he would share this with, and the movie would really be about the psychology of friendship and sharing an experience connects people who should be different enough that they wouldn't really hang out outside of school. Eventually they would lose that connection and that kind of friendship, which would cause that character to go back to where we started. A kid in that position with god-like powers could be very dangerous.

I ran into an old acquaintance of mine from high school, Max Landis. I told him about this idea for Chronicle and he stopped me halfway through and said he would have a screenplay in two weeks. I kind of didn't believe him, but he actually came back, two weeks later, with a screenplay. All that potential I thought [the idea] had, he delivered and exceeded.