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Canadian VR experience The Passengers is headed to Tribeca film festival

Filmmaker Ziad Touma says the train-based experience owes its genesis to a real train ride five years ago

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Quebec filmmaker Ziad Touma says the inspiration for his virtual reality experience The Passengers came very much from actual reality.

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Five years ago, two of his colleagues were taking a train to a festival in Geneva that had a VR showcase. They got to talking about what their fellow passengers were thinking about. From that simple conversation, The Passengers was born.

It’s an immersive, slightly unnerving experience, as VR tends to be. The user, wearing a headset, is placed in the body of one of four train passengers – a young woman thinking about motherhood; a man rueful at not being more romantically outgoing; an old woman whose memories are fading; or a little boy whose parents have split up.

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During the course of 10 minutes, each character delivers an internal monologue and experiences flashes of memories. For users, these can be tailored by where they choose to focus their gaze.

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At the end of the journey, you can repeat the ride from a different point of view – an odd experience to be sure, since you’re now in a different body, looking at the person “you” just were. And your vision changes – the woman’s world is depicted in watercolours, the man’s in oils, while the old woman sees in black and white, and the child in a riot of felt markers.

Touma says a lot of thought went into creating the four characters, and not just from a technological standpoint, though that was part of it. A team of three writers was headed up by Nicolas Peufaillit, co-writer of Jacques Audiard’s award-winning 2009 film A Prophet.

“We had to think a lot about how people think in their own heads,” says Touma. “Like, do you speak to yourself in the first person or the third person?” He realized that, for himself at least, it depends on his mood. “When I’m hard on myself I detach. ‘You shouldn’t have done that!’ And when it’s good I think, ‘I did great!’ ”

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Because VR does not allow for subtitles, the creators had their actors record their parts in both English and French. (Quebec actress Maxim Roy is one of the Canadian talents in this Canada-France co-production, providing the voice of the woman.) To simplify things, some of the flashbacks are free of dialogue. In the case of the child, his parents speak to each other in Creole, replicating (unless you’re fluent) the feeling of not quite knowing what your parents are saying.

Quebec actress Maxim Roy wears a motion-capture suit for her performance as Her.
Quebec actress Maxim Roy wears a motion-capture suit for her performance as Her.

The initial idea was to present The Passengers in a mockup of a train car, with four seats arranged as they are in the experience, and four users participating simultaneously. COVID-19 distancing requirements put the kibosh on that plan, requiring Touma to — he grimaces as he says the pandemic buzzword — “pivot.”

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The Passengers is therefore, at least for now, a single-user experience. The first two components, dubbed The Passengers: Her and Him, premiered at the NewImages Festival in Paris in September. The Kid will be seen publicly for the first time at New York’s Tribeca Festival, which runs from June 9 through June 20. The final portion will be held back for another festival, probably in the fall.

“The dream is to play it on trains as onboard entertainment,” says Touma. “We spoke with Via Rail at the beginning. We’ll try to get it on a Canadian train at some point.” But he says it could also be installed in an airport lounge or an art gallery such as the PHI Centre in Montreal. “Wherever people are crossing and have time to stop and do an experience.”

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He also plans to figure out a way to make the VR file small enough to sell for use with an Oculus or other standard consumer VR headset. Sales of virtual reality hardware took off during the pandemic, with people stuck at home and yearning for a way to experience the outside world as immersively as possible. The Quest and other VR systems, while still a fairly major purchase at several hundred dollars, are no longer so expensive as to be an unthinkable entertainment add-on.

“It’s best when you play more than one, for sure,” he says of the Passengers experience.

Touma hails from the film world originally but considers himself a multi-disciplinarian. He wrote and directed a comedic feature, Saved by the Belles, in 2003. He recently produced Ghost Town Anthology with director Denis Côté, and the documentary City Dreamers, about four pioneering female architects. And he was the creative force behind Le Judas, an alternate reality game or ARG that combines online and real-world components into a murder-mystery, and which debuted in 2012 through Radio-Canada.

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You could get up from your seat and wander down the aisle!

“For me, storytelling is the most important,” he says. “To give back some agency to the user is the beginning of a storytelling perspective that is more open. I love cinema, the theatrical experience for sure, but it’s one experience. Sometimes you want to get up and be like, ‘No, you should do this! Why? What happens next?’ Well, now maybe you can.”

VR productions, he notes, attract people from a variety of fields, including “spatial” arts like dance, theatre and improv. (He tells me, too late for me to try it out in The Passengers, that the train car has been rendered in 6DOF, or six degrees of freedom. You could get up from your seat and wander down the aisle!)

He’s also enraptured by the newness of the medium – remember, The Passengers was born en route to one of the first festivals to feature VR, whereas traditional film fests like Venice and Cannes have been around longer than most of us have been alive.

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“It’s such a young medium that you can actually watch a lot of it,” he says. “If you’re a film buff at my age, growing up in the ’80s, I had to watch a lot of films. How can you be up to speed with all the great works of art in the medium that you’re practicing in?”

And while a quick Google dive turns up The Sword of Damocles, an early head-mounted VR system, as far back as the 1960s, consumer applications have really gathered momentum only in the last five to 10 years. Touma has been there for it all.

“You start to see currents, but it’s all really different,” he says. “And they all open a little window or a little door to something that you’re like: ‘Whoa, if it was like that and more, then you can project storytelling into the future.’ And I find that really exciting.”

In other words, the VR train is leaving the station. And The Passengers is most definitely on board.

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