Former West Alexander resident writes, directs movie “Infernal Machine”
The actor Guy Pearce, left, with director Andrew Hunt on the set of "The Infernal Machine."
Director Andrew Hunt, who attended McGuffey High School in the early 1990s, on the set of "The Infernal Machine."
When a writer pens a book, a musician creates a song or a painter puts a brush to canvas, how the final work is received is totally out of the artist’s hands.
And, once it’s unleashed in the world, there’s no telling how it will be interpreted, particularly by members of the audience who are lost in the fog of their own psychosis.
That idea is front-and-center in the movie “The Infernal Machine.” Written and directed by onetime West Alexander resident Andrew Hunt, it has Guy Pearce as a shaggy, reclusive author who is pulled out of his hibernation as a result of letters he receives from a fan obsessed with the author’s magnum opus, also called “The Infernal Machine.” The movie was released in select theaters in September and is now available to stream on various outlets, including Prime Video and Apple TV.
Perhaps inevitably, “The Infernal Machine” brings to mind the 1980 murder of former Beatle John Lennon, who was gunned down by a fan who had developed an obsession with the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the most famous work by the notoriously reclusive J.D. Salinger. Three months after Lennon was killed, a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” was found in the hotel room of John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan and three others in a bizarre attempt to gain the attention of actor Jodie Foster.
“What if there was a book that was written where the author was not intending a certain outcome, but it is interpreted that way?” Hunt said in a Zoom interview shortly before the movie’s release. “I’m more interested in the relationship someone has with the work after it has caused a lot of destruction. ‘Is there something I put in the book without realizing it that is sending the signal out to the world that is causing people to react this way?'”
Hunt continued, “Ideas can be very dangerous. I think the problem, and what we’re trying to strive for in the film, is to find your own independent truth. I think that’s needed in today’s world because people don’t have a lot of time to have independent thoughts. So we rely on celebrities, or we rely on politicians, all these different people, that give us a point of view.”
Hunt attended McGuffey High School until 1992 when he moved to Dormont and attended Pittsburgh CAPA, the creative and performing arts magnet school. From there, he ventured to New York and began a peripatetic life, traveling around the country and working in television, documentaries and commercials.
“I just bounced all over America,” Hunt said.
“The Infernal Machine” is the second time Hunt has directed a feature film, following 2016’s “Miles Between Us,” about an estranged father and daughter. They get to know one another on a road trip across America. “The Infernal Machine” was made in Portugal in the summer of 2021, and, amazingly, no one in the cast or crew came down with COVID-19, even as the pandemic was still raging.
“I had no idea a cotton swab could go that far up my nose,” Hunt joked. He explained that he was “more terrified of the COVID test than anything on the set” since an illness outbreak could have shut down the whole production.
“We were so lucky that we didn’t have any positives for the entire filming,” Hunt said.
Hunt has other projects in the pipeline, and he explained that, at some point, he wouldn’t mind returning to the Pittsburgh region to make a movie.
“It’s funny, the more I go back to Pittsburgh, the more I appreciate where I’m from,” he said. “There’s something about Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is such a gorgeous town, and the same thing with Wheeling, W.Va., or Washington. I just love the architecture of downtown Washington, where the courthouse is, just the layout of that town.”