This interview was originally published on Film Obsessive.

Time loops and multiverses are front of mind for filmmakers. From blockbusters like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness to Oscar winners like Everything Everywhere All at Once to indie fare like The Triangle, there is great fascination with the prospect of a do-over. Perhaps it’s a reflection of the current state of the world, where things feel as though they’ve veered off-track in an irreparable way. Whatever the case may be, all these films have their own signature means of jumping through dimensions or restarting the time loop, but none of them have a mysterious bottle of tequila like the one in Nicholas Clifford’s One More Shot. The film stars Ashley Zukerman, Sean Keenan, Emily Browning, Aisha Dee, Pallavi Sharda, Hamish Michael, Anna McGahan, and Contessa Treffone as a group of friends and new romantic partners who have come together for a party on the eve of the new millennium.

Ahead of the film’s video-on-demand release on December 12, Zukerman and Keenan sat down with Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis to talk about the unexpected parallels of Y2K and Covid, the restriction and freedom of time loop narratives, and which beverage they wish had time traveling abilities.

In an interview with Cinema Australia, director Nicholas Clifford likens the fear of what could happen during Y2K as similar to the first few months of 2020, when COVID still seemed improbable. Neither Zukerman’s nor Keenan’s character is particularly concerned with the threats of Y2K in the film, but that lack of concern might be a fear response in its own right.

“Whenever we pick up a script, some of the work is trying to personalize it as much as possible. Make things as meaningful as possible, to put yourself on the line as much as possible,” explains Zukerman. “Just as important is trying to understand the reality of that and to ground it. Whether it’s Covid or most of the horrible things we know about in the world, our human instinct is to downplay problems and to try to not think of them as big as they are. The internal push for comfort is so strong in human beings that I think the instinct is to not make a big deal of things, even in the face of horror.”

“It’s a real Australian thing as well to kind of go, sure, that won’t happen, you know?” Keenan jumps in. “The thing that’s been bred into us so many times is that we are so safe. We’re a little island down here. The big things seem to happen a lot up there and we’re not really that involved. When Covid was first hitting, it was the same attitude. I was in New Zealand on a job, but I was like, that’s not a thing, that’s not going to happen. Then it actually did it and suddenly we had our kind of Y2K moment.”

Keenan plays Joe, the on-again-off-again ex of Emily Browning’s Minnie. Minnie is in her mid-30s and doesn’t understand her place in the world. All of her friends and exes have moved on to bigger and better things while she’s sleeping on the pull-out couch of Flick (McGahan) and Max (Treffone), a couple who want to live without an adult roommate. They’ve all planned to ring in the new year with their longtime friends Rodney (Zukerman), his wife, Pia (Sharda), Rodney’s friend from work (Michael), and, unbeknownst to Minnie, Joe’s new girlfriend, Jenny (Dee).

Minnie arrives at the party armed with a bottle of tequila that Flick and Max gifted her after their trip to Mexico ten years ago. She quickly discovers that the bottle has magical properties. Each shot takes her back in time to the moment she arrives at the party and Joe greets her at the door. Minnie has a whole bottle’s worth of shots to try to win Joe back.

Part of the burden of time loops is presenting the same information over and over again in a way that feels fresh to the audience. Only Minnie and the audience are aware each time the night resets, which means that Keenan’s Joe is forced to say the same line numerous times throughout the film. “Geez, you don’t waste any time,” Joe says as he opens the door to Minnie taking a shot. For Keenan, this line became a time loop of its own.

“We shot that scene probably 100 or 120 times,” Keenan recalls. “Me at the door, just opening it again and again for each different moment, each different loop. For about a week-and-a-half, we’d start each day at the door and do that day, that door, and then repeat, repeat.”

“The job of an actor is to repeat. We’re always doing that with scenes and finding little moments. With that one, I really was like, how much more can I find? On take fifty, I was like, is there anything left to find?” laughs Keenan. “Nick and I talked about it, and I’m opening the door to Emily, who’s such a firecracker of a person and an actress. It became the safety of just going, well, you’re taking her in and experiencing her in these different states of her catastrophic night unfolding. It became quite fun to just take in what that makes my character feel and let it affect me.”

“I’m not really a theater actor where I can do the same thing over and over,” continues Keenan. “It’s just instinctively whatever happens. I did talk to Nick about the time loop to try and understand, am I going into an alternate reality? A new dimension? Nick was like, you’re overthinking it, just open the door. It worked, but my God, it sends you a bit crazy.”

Ashley’s Rodney is a new father who sees this party as a way to let loose for the first time in months. His wife, Pia, has a more muted feeling about the night. She works in IT and is concerned that Y2K could be real. Rodney is more laid-back, but as the film unfolds, the audience learns there’s a massive secret that explains Rodney’s easygoing nature. Zukerman is aware of this looming secret and the audience is not, but it still informed his acting choices at the beginning of the film.

“There are two ways I approached that. One was just that the reality of living as Rodney is that this secret is in the back of his mind often, but it’s not that playable. As an actor, having this secret that isn’t expected at all isn’t very playable,” says Zukerman.

“I focused on the fact that this human being has never had to face any conflict in life. He’s never had to deal with issues, and instead chooses to hide from them. That’s a very human thing,” describes Zukerman. “I thought a lot about that. Which then also happened to also be a good red herring so it can be a great reveal. All I had to do was keep playing that guy, the guy who actually doesn’t really deal with anything. That ends up making life hard for him. His wife and his friends have a hard time connecting with him because he’s not really present, because he’s having all these feelings that he’s never had to deal with.”

“Nick and I talked about it like, how can we properly bury those things?” says Zukerman. “This is a fun film at the end of the day. You want things to be satisfying when the reveal happens, and things to make sense in retrospect. Like his wealth, success, and confidence. It’s satisfying when you finally learn it’s all built on nothing.”

Most of One More Shot unfolds in Rodney’s house over the course of their New Year’s Eve party. A few of Minnie’s attempts to rewrite the events of the night take her out of the house, but primarily, it’s these eight characters in the same clothes in the same setting for the whole film. As actors, Keenan and Zukerman are used to having a variety of props, costumes, and settings to further ground their characters, but One More Shot is unique in that things are more limited. Take the clothing for the characters, for example. Clothing is a good means of understanding a character, but One More Shot takes place at a Y2 costume party, so everyone is dressed in clothing that’s not their own.

“Nick thought that was an important part of the story. That they’re all wearing these costumes, but in life they’re all at different places with who they are. Different levels of acceptance and avoidance with who they are,” states Keenan.

“But we had it all pretty mapped out. We had different props we could play with, food and party things. Because we shot on such a tight schedule, Nick had a really good idea of how he was going to shoot these scenes, and we had a pretty solid map of what we could play with,” Keenan goes on. “In that house, we had our abstractions of what we could work with, and we had as much fun as we wanted to have within that. Nick was supportive of it because we’re shooting so many moments from different angles and points of view, depending on where Minnie’s at. We spent a lot of time partying in the background from different angles, having fun. There was a lot of freedom.”

“It was also tricky in the sense that it wasn’t typical,” Zukerman adds. “We only had five scenes to really play with. Just different variations of about five scenes. That’s so strange in a film. Usually, you get maybe a hundred scenes to explore and you get to push your character in lots of different directions. We just had five. Depending on the reality you’re in, the timeline we were in, how far we could push the characters within that reality was limited. Sometimes it was odd and difficult.”

“I think there were moments where I certainly went a little crazy trying to figure out how much we could push and pull these characters,” Zukerman continues. “When does the film fall apart if we push them too far? These characters only exist in this moment, and some things have to work immediately. They have to be friends. They have to be geared up for a party to different degrees. There are some circumstances we all need to take part in. Like Sean is saying, we could have as much fun within that, but the constraints were pretty big. It was an art.”

“Rodney’s withholding one of the biggest secrets he has in his life. Joe’s got some big changes that he hasn’t really revealed properly to the people around him,” Keenan says. “They’re carrying these things beneath the surface. I think a party is an interesting place to play and to put these characters who are all costumed up, pushing until it can’t be pushed down anymore.”

Many people have their own, non-time traveling bad nights involving tequila, making the thought of taking a shot of the spirit nauseating. When asked what beverage they wished had time-traveling properties, Zukerman and Keenan took very different paths.

“I love a beer,” smiles Keenan. “I could do a time-traveling beer.”

Funnily enough, the original conceit for One More Shot had beer in the place of the tequila. Zukerman quickly points out that there were some logistical issues with that beverage.

“You can’t shoot beer,” laughs Zukerman. “What would it be? A whole glass of beer every time? I think that was the issue, which is so funny in developing a film, like what ends up arresting different people along the way.”

“I’d pick a kombucha,” continues Zukerman. “I don’t really understand kombucha, but it’s sort of connected to that mother they talk about. It’s alive almost. I think that’s good. And it’s delicious.”

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