Producers urged Michel K. Parandi to take his time and audition as many actors as possible for the main role of Baxter in his long-gestating sci-fi “April X,” but the French-American director knew early on who his man was: Connor Storrie. What he did not know is that, a few months after wrapping production, Storrie would become one of the world’s hottest stars almost overnight following a worldwide furore over his role in Jacob Tierney’s “Heated Rivalry.” 

It took a brief moment for Parandi to come to terms with the effect Storrie’s newfound fame would have on his film, which opens this year’s edition of the Raindance Film Festival on June 17. Now, the director is grateful for the increased interest in his story, recalling how he knew from the moment he first saw Storrie that the young actor was destined for something big. 

“I remember telling everybody early on that he was going to be a movie star,” Parandi tells Variety. “It’s funny, there is a book where Ridley Scott talks about Harrison Ford in the first ‘Blade Runner.’ After the movie, someone called him and asked, ‘What was it like working with Harrison?’ And he said, ‘He’s a movie star.’ I sort of envisioned myself in that. There was something special there.”

“April X” is a near-future thriller centered around siblings Baxter and April (Lilly Krug). When April suddenly goes missing, her brother searches every dark corner of the post-Soviet city they live in, finding himself in increasingly dangerous situations as he uncovers a treacherous scheme involving cloning and sex trafficking. 

The director says they auditioned around a hundred actors for Baxter, with Storrie being the third or fourth he saw. “He was very comfortable, very natural during the audition. They wanted me to see more people, so I basically told Connor, ‘You got the part, but give me some more time.’”

Newcomer Storrie had no credits available at the time, with his upcoming work kept “secret” by his team. But Parandi trusted his instincts. “I could see [Connor] had been preparing himself for a long time, psychologically even,” he goes on. “When someone is a natural, they don’t have to work heavily to deliver something believable. It’s a good base to work with. There is also a bit of method acting with him, which I really like. He goes through his own mind, and he’s very fast. Production-wise, it was spotless. He was very easy, smooth, ready on time, always with the performance ready.”

Parandi notes how Baxter is a “challenging” part because it relies on “nuance.” “[Connor] could not break down, and I could not allow him to cry. I had to find a balance where he remains vulnerable in a believable way, while also having these crazy science fiction plots going around him. There are also layers of anger, insecurity, and rage. Moving from one aspect to the other seamlessly is not something everyone can do without a lot of work.”

“The shoot was also very difficult,” adds the filmmaker. “We shot half the movie at night, in the cold, at minus 15 degrees. So I needed someone whom I knew I could rely on, who would be solid, and Connor was the most solid performance I’ve ever had. [He] is the best thing about the movie, but it’s not by chance. It was a conscious decision to put most of my ammunition in that department because I always thought to myself, no matter the story, no matter the budget, the lead has to carry the movie. He is in almost every shot of the movie, so it has to be someone people want to see. That was very important to me.”

Asked about how he feels about Storrie’s skyrocketing projection affecting the public interest on “April X,” Parandi notes he was afraid at first that the audiences who would come looking for his film after watching “Heated Rivalry” would be vastly different, but his fears were eased by the film’s producer, Lavinia Postolache. The producer made the effort to get to know Storrie’s fans, and was there to closely check their reactions at test and festival screenings. “They were crying during the movie because of Baxter,” Parandi says now. “I was happy.”

The director faced several drawbacks in the making of his film, which took over a decade from the original idea until shooting thanks to financing difficulties. Despite having considered locations in Asia and North America, Parandi ended up shooting the film in Bucharest, which helped keep the budget down despite the travel costs for key cast and crew. 

“I didn’t want to make a clinical sci-fi, which is all clean,” the director notes when talking about location scouting. “I wanted to feel the grittiness, the urban grittiness. It’s interesting because as we go into the future, I am noticing things are not getting cleaner, everything just gets more extreme. Europe allowed me to do that. Romania was very good for textures. I came alone for scouting and I was impressed with Bucharest. I saw a lot of gray, a lot of concrete, and I thought about having Baxter lost, wandering the corridors of this lost world. I fell in love with the city. It made me think of Berlin 25 years ago.”

Shooting in Bucharest led the director to feed off his genre influences such as “The Matrix” and “Enter the Void” while building on “this idea of the synergy of the new European Union in Eastern Europe.” “It all made sense to me geopolitically,” he adds. “It’s funny because we are kind of heading there, Eastern Europe feels way more European than the West in some strange way.”

Despite regretting not having had a budget that would have allowed for his more ambitious, wider original vision, Parandi is proud of having delivered a high-octane sci-fi for under $2 million. “The first draft was very different, it was much more aggressive and the scope was even bigger,” he recalls. “We had backstories for the characters, a lot of flashbacks. The scope had to be rearranged according to the budget we had. Once I became a bit more reasonable, the movie happened.”