But to call "Another Earth" a science-fiction flick would be wrong. Sci-fi is just the hook to get audiences to consider larger questions. Not only are the traditional dramatic struggles of man vs. man and man vs. self touched upon in the script, but so too are issues of free will vs. predestination."Do we have free will or is everything fated?" mused Cahill, a Catholic who went to Xavier High School in Middletown, Conn., before going to Georgetown."It's fascinating, because a story about guilt is so tied up in that question. If you have free will, you are responsible for your guilt," he said. "If you do not have free will, then you are not responsible for your guilt. The movie doesn't answer any of those questions necessarily, it just poses the questions. It lets the audience sort that out for themselves.""Mike and I struggle with that. That's one of the big questions of being alive and being human," Marling said. "Is there some kind of perfect design that we are unable to know and only able to intuit at certain moments? Or is it chaos, are we just bumping into each other in the night? ... I don't know the answer to that. If we did, we wouldn't have the need to make movies."Marling added, "In this film, nothing is concrete. Everything's a best guess.""Another Earth" was made "as an art piece to share with 10 friends," Cahill said during a July 11 interview at a posh Georgetown hotel. It was made for less than $100,000, a pittance compared with the blockbuster movies with blockbuster budgets invading multiplex screens this summer."And then we went to Sundance," the mammoth independent film festival held each winter in Utah, Cahill told Catholic News Service. The duo said they received "a standing ovation, won two awards and sold it to Fox Searchlight. Unbelievable!""Another Earth" premieres July 29, although not on as many screens as the latest installments of the "Harry Potter" and "Transformers" epics.Growing up in Orlando, Fla., Marling, who is not Catholic, applied to Georgetown early in her senior year of high school because Georgetown was accepting early applications. Later that year, Marling got sick — too sick to fill out other college application forms. In the meantime, Georgetown accepted her.Cahill, who earned an economics degree at Georgetown, said he was initially interested in the university because of its international character and because "students work really hard and also have good social lives."But when both Cahill and Marling took the same "The Problem of God" course -- a requirement at Georgetown — "it changed things profoundly," Marling said. "It was one of the best courses I ever took. The priest who taught that class was wonderful."Cahill and Marling started dabbling in short films — and dating. They're no longer romantically linked, but they still consider themselves creative partners.Marling, who got a double major in economics and studio art, added that she, Cahill and a third Georgetown alum, Zal Batmanglij, are "artists I hope to collaborate with for the rest of my life.""I know what kind of stories I want to tell, the metaphysical, the big questions of why we're here. I like reality with a twist, to learn something more about humanity," Cahill said. —CNS{gallery width=100 height=100}gallery/2011/0729/earth/{/gallery}
