Chris Jones grew up in Bendigo in country Victoria, Australia, and later moved to Melbourne where he now resides. He considers "The Passengers" his "first proper film", excluding some game cinematics and childhood Super 8 stop motion films he made with his brother. He also started and abandoned several projects that didn't quite make it out of the testing phase.

This was the first one to finally break through that pre-production barrier.

"'The Passenger' was originally devised as a means of getting a job. By the time I'd finished however, it had outgrown its showreel origins and become a seven minute epic extravaganza. The eight year production time (totalling about six years full time) is due in no small part to my insistence on single-handedly creating everything from initial concept through to 5.1 surround mix, with the quality bar set immovably at 'blockbuster' level.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE PASSENGER WEBSITE

Of course my aging hardware and software didn't want to give me 'blockbuster' without a fight - and a bitter fight it was, right to the end. It probably didn't help that I was too stingy to buy some more gear, but that's what happens when you fund the whole thing yourself as well! The sound and music took up about half the project, but that's a story for another time and place.

For me the mood, or the look and feel, is usually paramount for initiating a project. By this I don't mean just the visuals, but the overall sensation that I would imagine feeling when watching the finished piece. If that inspiration is not there, it can be awfully difficult to get going regardless of the quality of the story.

Unfortunately it became increasingly hard to remember how it was supposed to look and feel after being numbed down by the same thing for years on end, though if I had been able to jump into a wormhole and fast-forward to the finished project, I think I would have found the results to be reasonably close to what I'd imagined. So the film as it exists today is kind of like a snapshot of what I was thinking about more than eight years ago.

"For me the mood, or the look and feel, is usually paramount for initiating a project. By this I don't mean just the visuals, but the overall sensation..."         --Chris Jones

I knew from the start that I wanted something dark and spooky with supernatural elements in a semi-cartoon style, and having established that the film would take place on a bus during a storm, I set to work making the main character and the sets while I searched for a story. I plagiarised one of my own character designs from a 2D project that never came to fruition - everything else was designed and built from scratch.

The story didn't come out easily, and when it finally did come out, it kind of oozed out gradually, and there were lumpy bits in it. During the process of beating out the lumpy bits, more ideas came and I couldn't resist putting them in. Consequently the running time extended as did the schedule.

As for the content of the story, I'm allergic to spoilers (and this film spoils easily), but I'll just say that I never intended for the narrative to carry any deep metaphorical meaning, or social commentary or whatever. It's just some pointless fun. Nevertheless, people seem to feel the need to find a subtext in the film, and it's entertaining to me to hear their interpretations."

       --Chris Jones, FEB 2007