In Terrestrial, director Steve Pink ventures where he’s never traveled before – the thriller genre – with a little twist or three up his sleeve, thanks to Connor Diedrich’s and Samuel Johnson’s screenplay.
Director Steve Pink is no stranger to comedy, whether it’s tackling the outrageous (yet genius) concept of time-traveling-capable hot tubs in Hot Tub Time Machine, or embracing the romantic in High Fidelity, About Last Night, or The Wheel. However, in recent years, he has stepped outside his comedic comfort zone, first with the documentary The Last Republican. Now, he’s marking his first foray into thrillers with the genre-bending Terrestrial, which had it’s world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival.
In Terrestrial, Allen (Jermaine Fowler) is hot off a movie deal based on a book he hasn’t written yet, living in a huge home nestled in the Hollywood Hills, and living the dream life. What is meant to be a reunion for a group of friends at his home goes horribly awry when things start to feel off. Actions don’t add up, and neither do Allen’s stories. It’s not long before everything catches up to him and his life starts to fall apart.
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While attending Fantasia, we spoke with Steve Pink about the challenges of tackling an unfamiliar genre, how Fowler’s performance catapulted Allen to new places beyond the page, and sculpting the look and feel of Neptune Galaxy‘s film within a film portion of the screenplay. Most importantly, we addressed why there were no cats in Terrestrial, the joke that kept on giving until the very end.
STEVE PINK: Sarah, what are the cool lights coming out of your headphones or out of your head?
BUT WHY THO: Cat ears.
STEVE PINK: Oh, so cool. Are those actually illuminated, or is that just reflecting light from the room?
BUT WHY THO: They are illuminated and change color.
STEVE PINK: So, you’re my hero. Fine, whatever.
BUT WHY THO: I’ll have to ask where we got them and give you the deets. Speaking of, my first serious question: why were there no cats in this film?
STEVE PINK: I agree. I have two cats, and it’s an outrage. I don’t know how you even stood…Did you even get to the end of the film, knowing there would be no cats at a certain point?
BUT WHY THO: I was specifically watching all the way to the end so I could find at least one cat sighting. You let me down, man. You let me down.
STEVE PINK: That’s incredible. Either this interview is about you taking me to task on this issue, or you somehow got past it and wanted to interview me anyway.
BUT WHY THO: That would be very meta, wouldn’t it?
STEVE PINK: [laughs] I promise the next time we meet, there will be a plethora of cats in my next film.
BUT WHY THO: Yes. [fistpumps] All jokes aside, I did watch the film all the way through, not just for cats. One of the things that stood out to me was that, even though this film is being marketed as your first thriller, there are also a variety of different genres in it. Was that originally what drew you to the script? How did the script come into your hands? Basically, how did you come to be dragged into this project?
STEVE PINK: Dragged is a good word for sure. I just made a movie, a romantic drama [The Wheel] that’s now on Hulu, with these producers I’ve been working with brought me the script. They were the ones who brought me a romantic drama, and now they’re bringing me a psychological thriller. And the faith they have in me not to [mess] it up. It’s extraordinary. Some would say too extraordinary, but the script was amazing.
I’m a sci-fi nerd, so it [also] appealed to me just on that level alone, because just the idea of reality and reality inside one’s perspective. The classic like is everything that is reality created by your mind. Is there actually an external reality that you’re interacting with, and that reality is reliable, right? So, you can count on the external reality as the authentic reality. Or again, are you all just creating that reality?
So, since that was a central question in the movie, it was just the idea that I would be able to tell a story like that was daunting, I would say. The script is so great. Those writers are just crazy. They’re insane young writers. They have to be stopped.
BUT WHY THO: Why do we have to stop them? Maybe they’ll save us from multiple IP regurgitation. We can’t stop them. Not to bring in sci-fi, but they’re our only hope.
STEVE PINK: It’s true, and their new script is incredible. So, it’s very true. Their originality is to be celebrated for sure, and I tried so hard not to [mess] up their movie and make the one they gave me.
BUT WHY THO: Well, if it’s any consolation, I don’t think you messed it up. I think you did a pretty good job.
STEVE PINK: Sans cats and all.
BUT WHY THO: Sans cats and all. In terms of playing around with the genres and making sure you maintain the balance of what the writers were trying to get across, how did you approach that? Because I know, at least with the romantic comedy side of things, you were solid. There was no problem massaging that tone.
STEVE PINK: Yeah, it was tough actually. It was tough because the movie would take us places, even inside performance, that we didn’t expect. There were some places where we knew that the tone would shift, like the end of the first act, right? It was structured so that we’d have this hard tonal change, and that was the one we could count on, because of how it was written, and we knew how we would get there.
But a lot of the rest of it just was mind-bending. There were times when things were far more emotional than I ever thought they would be like, just Jermaine [Fowler] take on things, brought with him this struggle that I didn’t necessarily always anticipate.
I saw him, at least on paper, as someone who was trying to engineer all the things with an agenda to be seen and be accepted, and then this desire to be accepted and trying so hard to make that happen, I felt like that was a really strong intention, but there was a certain amount of tragic yearning that he brought to the role, which I didn’t expect at all really, that became a fabric of the tone.
We went from, like, quirky and funny to this really kind of heartfelt tragedy of someone who wants to be seen, basically someone who, as an artist, does not have that opportunity. So, he takes kind of drastic measures to try and make that happen. And so, that had its own kind of tonal thing. And then, of course, it bent into all these other terrifying ways. A lot of it, I have to say, wasn’t planned. It would find itself there, and we’d literally go down that road to see what was down there.
BUT WHY THO: And sometimes it’s just instinct, like trying to go with your gut and hope for the best, I imagine.
STEVE PINK: Yeah, in this case, for sure. I mean more than other times, because there was so much [that was] unpredictable. There are so many layers to the reality of the story. I didn’t always know what layer I was in, and so I was in my gut, being like, ‘Okay, I think this is the reality we’re in. Let’s explore it.’ So for sure, it was just a lot more complicated than in other movies I’ve done.
BUT WHY THO: And then, did you shoot the second film within the film? The Star Trek-esque homage, too?
STEVE PINK: Yeah, and we shot that after, which really helped, because there was so much of the movie we couldn’t mirror. It would have been much harder to make that. We just got lucky in the schedule. We ended up making it after we made the main film. So, then we were actually able to draw the kind of duality and mirror, and knew what we had.
That was, of course, just so fun. I hope someone gives me a sci-fi space movie just based on the movie within a movie. There’s so much fun to be in those wardrobes and on those crazy sets that our production designer built. It was super, super fun.
BUT WHY THO: And also tap into the particular acting style too, of that era of sci-fi.
STEVE PINK: That ultra seriousness…
BUT WHY THO: When it’s absolutely not serious at all. A very particular style of acting.
STEVE PINK: Yeah, every single word in every single line has stakes. There’s no way to say anything without having stakes in it. Always! Because! It was just the best, and also the actors were so great at it, and it was also such a fun narrative. You know that everything’s gonna work out for those people in the movie within the movie, and seeing how Allen is mirroring the adventure, the kind of Hero’s Journey of the character in the movie from the books.
So he’s emulating this person, but we know it’s going to go so well for that person, right, because of the genre. And so we can see how it’s starting to unravel for Allen as he tries to recreate that hero’s journey badly, essentially.
BUT WHY THO: Part of that hero’s dream is also the house in which he temporarily borrows. Were you involved in the locations process? And if so, what was it like trying to find like the perfect home that would embody this?
STEVE PINK: We figured that the owner is probably very wealthy, so he could afford that. That’s certainly the scale. A guy like that could be living in a modern mansion in an upscale neighborhood. It could be in Beverly Hills. It could be anywhere in the world where there’s just a nice home. So, [the house] spoke to us for a lot of reasons, because it was strange but strange almost in a throwback science fiction kind of way, or Gothic kind of way.
It was actually a French chateau design. It was designed by one of the founders of the San Gabriel Mountains in the ’20s. The word on the street is that he stole the architectural plans from an architect in France. So, apparently, there’s a chateau that looks just like that somewhere in France, but there are also other weird kinds of sci-fi elements. They built it directly on a compass point, because there’s no air conditioning, was my guess.
BUT WHY THO: That would make sense for the area and time period.
STEVE PINK: It’s built so that the front and back were due North and South. So the front of that mansion was always shaded and at least 15 degrees cooler than, literally, when you walk through the house to the other side and the southern side. And because it was Northern Exposure, the front side of the house always stayed cool, which would make sense, because that’s where the living room was, and the big, beautiful front porch. And so I was like, Oh, well, now we’re on an astral compass situation. That’s fantastic. Let’s shoot here.
BUT WHY THO: And, of course, how the set dressing and stuff all make it even more sci-fi and astrological.
STEVE PINK: On a simple level, I liked that that was his taste, like the original sci-fi author. He’s an eccentric. He’s an eccentric sci-fi author. And so he isn’t on a very simple level.
BUT WHY THO: And so when it came down to casting, what specifically were you looking for? In terms of the characters on the page and how they evolved, like you previously mentioned, what did you originally set out to do? I don’t know if I like how I phrased that question.
STEVE PINK: That’s because you’re still just harboring this resentment toward me because there’s no cats in the movies.
BUT WHY THO: Probably. [laughs]
STEVE PINK: You barely know how to form a question. You’re so mad. It’s okay, I promise next time, cats. I get it. So, there. That was my comedy callback.
First of all, we were so lucky in the cast. People who decided to come to this movie, begging goes a long way, but everyone brought so much of their own unique and interesting persona and such an interesting character to the group dynamic.
Edy Modica was this just funny, quirky person who was unbothered by the world, and very, very funny in that way. James Marcini was obviously the truth teller. He’s this skeptic. He’s kind of a cheerful skeptic, but he obviously harbors his own resentments by virtue of the group, the kind of romantic relationships and prior entanglement.
Brendan Hunt as the grouchy, kind of washed-up, bitter sci-fi author was just killer. I mean, he just brought so much. He was great. Rob Yang is the most unlikely heavy in the history of heavies. Pauline Chalamet brought so much heart to it. She is someone who wanted the best for everybody, wanted to figure out how everybody could be together and find that friendship again.
And then, of course, Jermaine, he was just such a deep well. He was striving so hard for all the acceptance he wanted in his life, and at the same time, he was obsessive to a point that was absolutely not realistic, but you loved him because there was no malice. He’s not a malicious person, but he just keeps making decisions that unravel everything around him, and then, of course, lead to tragic circumstances. But he’s such a beautifully tragic figure, and he brought so much heart to it as well as this kind of constant anxiety. It was a brilliant performance.
BUT WHY THO: Ultimately, what do you hope people take away from Terrestrial outside of a lack of cats?
STEVE PINK: Oh, well, that’s a tough one. I think, despite how it went for the protagonist, it’s actually, at its core, a really relatable idea, wanting to express yourself and wanting that expression to be validated and to be worthwhile. I don’t think it’s giving anything away to find out that he actually is talented. Despite all his doubts, despite all kinds of tragic things that occur, he wasn’t wrong, at least in that regard.
It’s hard to say what I want them to take out of it, just because there’s so many tragedies, but it is the result of being rejected that can destroy you, and so to not let that destroy you less the things that occur in this movie will befall you, perhaps, but I think that not to let the bastards get you down. When you’re striving for something, don’t doubt it.
Maybe don’t go as far as our character in trying to achieve it. That would be bad. But know that idea of wanting to express yourself and be accepted by the world is a powerful one, and we should all embrace it in ourselves.
BUT WHY THO: That is such a heartfelt takeaway. I appreciate it. I appreciate the honesty. I’m not being facetious right now. I know that’s the tone that’s coming across, but I swear I’m not being facetious.
STEVE PINK: Facetious or not, it’s funny I’m saying it given what happens in the movie, but I do just hope people take away that they like it, that they’re terrified by it, that they find it compelling and interesting and gives them some things to think about after it’s over, like any movie.
BUT WHY THO: Well, I’ll hopefully relieve you a little bit, but I did find it compelling and it was enjoyable to see which way it was going to go, because it could have gone any which way. So I appreciate you for directing the film and getting to experiment with the thriller genre. I think you did good.
STEVE PINK: I did? Okay job on my first thriller?
BUT WHY THO: I’ll even forgive the lack of cats.
STEVE PINK: Thank you. I promise you’re gonna be my first interview. You might even be the first person who screens my next thriller, because it’s gonna be a single constant frame, right? And then there’s going to be, and I don’t know how exactly, but there will be the introduction of a cat in that first opening frame, and that will drive the rest of the film. I promise you.
BUT WHY THO: [laughs] I’ll hold you to it.
Terrestrial had its world premiere at the 2025 Fantasia International Film Festival.
TERRESTRIAL Official Teaser Trailer 2025
Directed by Steve Pink Written by Samuel Johnson and Connor Diedrich Starring Jermaine Fowler, James Morosini, Pauline Chalamet, Edy Modia with Rob Yang and Brendan Hunt World Premiere at Fantasia Film Festival July 20, 2025 Tickets on Sale Now: https://boot.zonefestival.com/data/?p=272002350D1A280D44517941080A0B37051D06480972585051480A0A7678 Follow @terrestrial_movie on Instagram for more updates.
