Behind the Scenes

The origins of A Lust for Time can be traced back to a late-night rabbit hole, binging screenplays on the Produce My Script sub-Reddit. The screenplay by Scott Nelson hooked Daryl with the structure. The film begins in grounded reality: a recognizable dinner party, ordinary relationship tensions, familiar social discomfort. Then it swerves violently into time travel and moral rot. That sharp tonal pivot was exactly the sort of thing he had always loved in science fiction, especially as a lifelong devotee of Back to the Future.

More importantly, the script’s central perversity made him laugh.

Here was a romantic comedy concept flipped inside out: a man using time travel not for heroism, but for manipulation, lust, and the engineering of false intimacy. It was dark, funny, and just nasty enough to feel alive.

Mitchell Martin was the only real choice for Cal.

Daryl had to once again carefully convince Michael that Mitch should lead the film, arguing that the character’s swagger, vanity, and playboy energy aligned almost too perfectly with that particular moment in Mitch’s life. Better to document it now, before age and responsibility inevitably sanded off the edges.

The original plan for the foil role of Paul was even more significant. Daryl had wanted Chris Cairo back. There was a genuine desire to pull him back into the fold in a substantial role and re-establish that earlier creative chemistry. When that ultimately fell through, the casting pivot opened the team up to someone right under their noses: Chris’s sister Brittany Cairo. Funny, sharp, and instantly sympathetic, she brought warmth and exasperation to the role of Cassie while also preserving a Cairo connection inside the production. She became the emotional ballast the film needed.

For Paul then, Ray Revello was cast aggressively against type. Rather than his usual bravado, he was asked to embody the precise sort of Bay Area tech-bro mediocrity the crew had encountered far too often in real life. Ray delivered brilliantly, even if he still despises the character.

Kayla Emerson entered the Dollars & Donuts orbit here as well. Remembered from Kirsten’s Los Angeles years at R&D Kitchen, where she worked while also moonlighting as a princess at Disneyland, Kayla was brought up to San Francisco for the shoot and instantly proved herself a natural fit for the ensemble. In hindsight, this now reads as one of the most important casting moments of the modern era.

The script itself evolved significantly during production. Writer and actress Meghan Golovinova, whom Michael had met through other creative circles, came in and did a substantial rewrite as a favor. Her pass modernized the character names and sharpened the dialogue so it felt unmistakably of its moment. The original script, while structurally strong, lacked the distinctly millennial rhythm Daryl wanted for the dinner party scenes and the social dynamics between the couples.

This was a slight departure from the usual Dollars & Donuts instinct to romanticize time and blur the boundaries between eras. Much of the company’s work intentionally exists in a sort of retro-present haze, where decades bleed together and the world feels suspended between old Hollywood memory and modern life. Here, Daryl felt the opposite was necessary. For a time travel story to land, the “present” needed to feel rooted in a very specific now.

Ironically, that choice has only deepened the film’s charm with time. Just a few years later, the once-contemporary dialogue and social textures already play like a period piece, preserving a precise slice of late-2010s millennial Bay Area life in amber.

Production returned to South San Francisco, despite Daryl’s move to Texas, as a kind of final love letter to the city and the people still rooted there. The opening montage, inspired by Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, drifts along El Camino Real, capturing See’s Candies, Little Lucca, and other landmarks from Daryl’s childhood geography. Over it, his own voice drifts through the opening strains of “September Song,” turning the film into romantic farewell to the place that raised him.

On set, Becker Von Felsburg served double duty, helping feed both cast and crew while preparing the beautifully photographed dinner itself. The meal had to look delicious enough for camera and convincing enough to anchor the first half of the film in domestic realism.

Behind the camera, several future collaborators made early appearances. Torian Allen appears in a cameo role, while Rich Schaeffer constructed the practical prop time machine, a crucial piece of design that helped ground the film’s high-concept premise in something tactile and real. The soundscape and music were equally important. Daryl’s sister-in-law Jennifer Sterling provided the voice of the time machine’s AI, making elegant use of her growing voiceover work in the romance audiobook world. Rob Ruiz created the machine’s theme, while Robert Ruby contributed a Huey Lewis-inspired song for the film itself, giving the whole piece an appropriately slick, ironic sci-fi sheen.

Even the special effects carried small moments of pride. One of Daryl’s favorite invisible effects in the film is the CGI pipe used as the murder weapon in Cal’s altered timeline, precisely the kind of effect no one notices because it works.

The main interiors were shot in a rented Airbnb in Redwood City, dressed and redressed to serve as the same home across multiple timelines. It was also where one of the final major ruptures between Daryl and Michael occurred.

The now-infamous picture frame incident began as a trivial disagreement over how to mount a small decoration for a shot. Daryl suggested gaff tape. Michael insisted it wouldn’t hold. When the frame eventually fell during a take, Michael replaced it with industrial adhesive so aggressive that it later tore a section of drywall clean off the wall during clean-up.

The resulting repair penalty, quietly inserted into the middle of the budget sheet alongside disputes over Sasha’s airfare for promotional materials, became one of the ugliest money fights of the period and one of the clearest signs that the partnership was approaching its end.

Yet for all the behind-the-scenes friction, the production is also haunted by something far more profound.

While back in California for the shoot, Daryl was urged by his cousin Crystal to visit his grandmother, with whom relations had grown strained following Hank’s death and the sale of the family Tahoe house. Frail and near the end, she offered a final reconciliation.“I love you.” Daryl told her he loved her too.

She died the next day.

Which, for a film about the temptation to go back and alter the past, feels almost unbearably apt.