The Idea For Coherence Ironically Came From A Craving For 'Simplicity'

Though "Coherence" sounds like the title of a movie about achieving clarity or unity of some sort, viewers of James Ward Byrkit's 2013 directorial debut may have found the film's increasingly complex sci-fi plot anything but clear. The title refers to the concept of quantum decoherence, which is mentioned in the movie as the main character, Em (Emily Baldoni), reads from a book on physics. "Quantum decoherence," the book says, "assures that no possibilities have interaction with one another."

This is the opposite of what we see happening in "Coherence" as Em and seven other guests at a dinner party find themselves interacting with other possible versions of themselves from a seemingly infinite web of alternate realities. The movie is a mind-bender, and of course, quantum physics is heady stuff, but according to Byrkit, the idea for "Coherence" was born from a desire to scale back what he was doing and work within a simpler movie framework. 

Byrkit and co-writer Alex Manugian, who plays Amir in "Coherence," didn't even have a script for the film, just an outline of plot points and character arcs with diagrams charting the different versions of each party guest. These were handed off to the actors, who then used them to improvise their own naturalistic dialogue.

In a 2014 interview with Yahoo, Byrkit explained the genesis of "Coherence," saying: "[Alex Manugian and I] were standing in my living room with no money and thinking, 'How do we make a movie that's about something besides the obvious relationship troubles that a million indie movies do?' And that led to this cosmic fractured-reality idea. But then it took a year of planning and charting and figuring out all the puzzle pieces and the character arcs and just making it all thematically cohesive."

After serving as a storyboard artist on the first two "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels along with "Pirates" director Gore Verbinski's 2011 animated film "Rango" (the latter of which he also helped conceive the story for), Byrkit was ready to take a break from big studio productions and go back to basics. With "Coherence," he was also limited by practical budgetary concerns, which meant that the film couldn't afford to be done on a huge scale.

It's ultimately the ideas of "Coherence" that are big, while the actual film was made with a skeleton crew for $50,000 and is mostly confined to one suburban setting (Byrkit's own house). This earned it a spot on our list of the best low-budget, single-location movies.

From a production standpoint, then, "Coherence" really was simple compared to the kind of tentpoles Byrkit had been working on with Verbinski. It turns out that was precisely the appeal for him. "I'd been craving that," he told Yahoo. "When I was storyboarding for these huge movies, I was just doing that so I could fund my crazy independent experimental film projects. Especially after [the 'Pirates' films] and 'Rango,' I was just craving getting back to simplicity and purity."

Ironically, thanks to the sci-fi involved, the plot of "Coherence" grew much more complicated than your usual 89-minute indie film. In 2021, Byrkit wound up participating in a Vimeo documentary with Patton Oswalt, "Coherence Explained by Director," which ran 43 minutes, as if it takes almost half as long to explain the movie as it does to watch it.