FREQUENCY

About The Production
Time isn't always on our side. It seems to move inexorably ahead through all kinds of tragedies and missed opportunities and terrible secrets without any room for going back and changing your choices. But what if it didn't have to be that way?

For John Sullivan in Frequency the rules have changed. After years of anger at the past, he finally has a chance to do something about it. In the middle of an intense solar storm, John Sullivan has found a rip in the space/time fabric and tapped into a parallel universe in which his deceased father has not yet died. Now John has the chance to save the father he never knew beyond childhood and create the future that might have been. It is a chance he cannot pass up, but one that will visit another terror on his family, a terror that must be fought on both sides of the time barrier.

With Frequency, Gregory Hoblit dips into cutting-edge science fiction to produce a deeply moving and exciting thriller about a father and son who use the paradoxes of time to chase a killer and come closer to one another. Hoblit, who previously directed the critically acclaimed suspense thriller Primal Fear, wanted to create a scientifically plausible yet palpably emotional story that explores the ways in which past, present and future interplay with one another in a man's life.

New Line presents Frequency starring Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Andre Braugher, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Noah Emmerich. The film is directed by multiple Emmy®, Golden Globe and Directors Guild of America Award-winner Gregory Hoblit from a debut screenplay by music industry executive Toby Emmerich. The producers are Hawk Koch, Gregory Hoblit, Bill Carraro and Toby Emmerich.

The tautly complex and deeply felt script for Frequency emerged from an unexpected place: inside the ranks of New Line Cinema´s executives, from the pen of President of Music Toby Emmerich. Emmerich had always been fascinated by the classic time travel tales of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne but wanted to take the age-old, imagination-firing concept of journeying through history in an entirely new direction - into the heart of a quintessentially American family.

"I have always loved time travel stories," states Emmerich, "but I often wondered if you could have a time travel story in which only information can travel back and forth through time, as opposed to people." Frequency presents the scientifically supported idea that time and information are not a single flowing river but a series of tributaries that have the ability to intersect, as 1969 and 1999 do for Frank and John Sullivan.

But Emmerich was not just interested in the clever implications of being able to communicate with the past; he was interested in how such a phenomenon might affect the building of relationships, the suspense of a sports game, the manipulation of the stock market, or the outcome of a heinous crime. Emmerich explains his intentions: "The notion of intersecting time was the guiding principle behind Frequency, but to that base I added several equally important other layers: my love of stories about fathers and son, cops and fireman, baseball and New York City."

Once Emmerich developed his multi-dimensional ideas for Frequency, he made a bold move. While his fellow executives were readying themselves for the Cannes Film Festival, Emmerich took a few weeks vacation, a "vacation" in which he holed himself up in a room for twelve hours a day, emerging at last from his own time compression with his first screenplay.

The fast-paced script drew the attention of veteran producer Hawk Koch, who saw it as a sophisticated look at the notion of second chances. "For me it really got to the core of the idea that there are so many issues and emotions between people, especially fathers and sons, that never really have a chance to be spoken," explains Koch. "When I read the script, I fell in love with the idea of this father and son who get a real second chance to know and love each other."

Koch had previously produced Gregory Hoblit´s Primal Fear - which was celebrated for its visceral realism - and was pleased to hear the script had already been sent to Hoblit. He was even more pleased when he heard Hoblit´s enthusiastic response. "I called Greg and realized there was a real chance we could work together on this one. Greg was perfect for it because he brings the combination of really caring about characters with a real understanding of the driving force of action. It was a rare case of everything coming together perfectly," says Koch. "You hear it all the time in this business that timing is everything. Well, in the case of Frequency, time and timing really were everything."

As Gregory Hoblit began reading Frequency, his imagination immediately lit up and he began experiencing deeply personal questions about how he might change his own past if he could.

"The story kept making me think about 'what-ifs,'" notes Hoblit, whose own father passed away just a few years ago. "I wondered what if I had a second chance to cover more ground with my father? What if I could talk to him again, what would I say? What if he were here, how many more times would I tell him I love him?"

Hoblit came to see Frequency's lead character John Sullivan as a kind of Alice in Wonderland, a man who has dropped through the looking glass into a world in which the past is as malleable as the future. Although Hoblit had seen this theme in science-fiction before, here it had a new twist to it - the intense emotions associated with a deceased parent. "I was fortunate to have covered a lot of ground with my father before he died," says Hoblit, "but I don´t think anyone is ever really prepared for losing a parent. The what-ifs are enormous, especially for a six year-old child like John Sullivan. They haunt him his whole life."

The power of these emotional what-ifs drew Hoblit magnetically to the story. But what excited him even further were the plausible scientific what-ifs Emmerich alluded to in the script for Frequency - a what-if involving a temporal intersection that allows John Sullivan the incredible opportunity to interact with and alter his own past - and possibly prevent a tragic future. Hoblit was impressed by Emmerich's well-researched scenario which seemed to carefully avoid the usual logical pitfalls of time-travel paradoxes.

"The script put a really exciting new spin on time travel with the modern physics concept of parallel universes and the ways in which information, knowledge, time and space all interconnect," comments Hoblit. "Most excitingly, the script really succeeded in melding the sci-fi concepts of time travel with a gripping, character-driven, dramatic thriller. It was that combination that made it truly unique and beyond genre."

From the beginning, Hoblit had a very clear mission: to make Frequency palpably real and intriguingly possible - the story not only of the unexplored frontiers of a man´s heart but the unexplored frontiers of cosmological possibility.

Armed with Emmerich´s script he marched into the office of Columbia University professor Brian Greene - a leading theoretical physicist known for his revolutionary ideas on string theory - and asked for an education in time, space and temporal divergences.

Greene, educated at Harvard and Oxford, is the author of the bestselling book The Elegant Universe, an examination of such cutting-edge cosmological theories as the new dimensions hidden with the fabric of space, black holes transmuting into elementary particles, rips in the space-time continuum and the quest for a Theory of Everything. Greene's mind and imagination play at the very edges of what is known or suspected about the deep inner workings of the universe - a multi-dimensional, vibrating universe of unseen energy loops which goes far beyond our limited human experience.

Hoblit hired Greene as a consultant on Frequency to help make and define the rules of time travel and parallel universes. It became Greene's job to assure that the script, actors and director never violated any of the known laws of physics. He also served as a tour guide for the potential wonders of the cosmos. (For more on time travel see THE RULES OF TIME TRAVEL at the end of the production notes).

"First and foremost, Brian was a brilliant teacher," says Hoblit. "He took the very complicated ideas of general relativity, quantum mechanics and particle theory and made them understandable. He helped us to lay the groundwork for the notion that information possibly can travel through time and space. All along, he had an incredibly open mind. He helped us to design rules for time travel that the audience can trust enough in order to suspend their disbelief and have a great time with the story. We then had to combine those rules with the language, emotion and conflict in the script."

Like many leading physicists, Greene believes there is nothing in the laws of physics that would make time travel impossible - although he doesn't necessarily believe it is likely, at least not in current times. As he notes in his book: "We have also seen that our universe may merely be one of the innumerable frothing bubbles on the surface of a vast and turbulent cosmic ocean called the multiverse. These ideas are at the current edge of speculation, but they may presage the next leap in our understanding of the universe."

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