Jonathan Betuel, writer/director of My Science Project

Drew speaks to the scriptwriter behind “The Last Starfighter”

If you’re a hipster music fan you never prefer the huge, popular song by a great band. You like the small, cool indie work they did before they hit it big, or the subsequent less commercial material your less informed friends don’t know about.

There’s something similar at play among fans of sci-fi adventure “My Science Project”, which was first released in the US 35 years ago and across the world over the next few months.

Writer/director Jonathan Betuel was known to genre fans as the scriptwriter behind 1984’s “The Last Starfighter”, the tale of a teenager with a dead end life who gets to fight in an intergalactic war that helped usher in the modern CGI age and is now a well deserved cult favourite.

The following year belonged to movies in the genre “My Science Project” was firmly part of, but it was easy to miss among much bigger fare. “Back to the Future” and “The Goonies” were among the top ten highest grossing films of 1985, and even if you discount them there was “Weird Science”, “Real Genius” and several other teen special effects adventure extravaganzas with themes of amazing science and technology.

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