A lucky few were invited a few weeks ago to head on over to Disney Studios and go to the edit bay where Jonathan Mostow (one of my favorite directors) was cutting together his new action movie Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. Edit bay visits are cool because you get to see scenes that haven't been shown yet and also talk to the filmmaker about the direction he decided to go in when shooting certain scenes or just the overall tone of the movie. Here's the synopsis in case you're not up to speed:
FBI agents (Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell) investigate the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a high-tech surrogate phenomenon that allows people to purchase unflawed robotic versions of themselves—fit, good looking remotely controlled machines that ultimately assume their life roles—enabling people to experience life vicariously from the comfort and safety of their own homes. The murder spawns a quest for answers: in a world of masks, who's real and who can you trust?
I'll talk about the scenes I saw and then cap the visit off with the interview we had with Jon. Just to prepare you beforehand. Wouldn't want to shock you with some interview coming out of nowhere! Hopefully my memory doesn't fail me and I'm able to provide you guys with as much detail as I can.
We first watched the 4 minute opening credits which was a montage of clips chronicling how the surrogates came into being. 14 years ago scientists had created a device that allowed a monkey to control a robotic arm with his thoughts. Dr. Lionel Canter spoke about the technology that was being created for robots called surrogates. The Supreme Court then approved the production and use of surrogates for the general population. With surrogates now living out our daily lives while we stay at home, there was already a reduction in violent crime and it seemed as if the technology was exactly what they had hoped it would be. But there was a minority of people that opposed the surrogates, including The Prophet, played by Ving Rhames, who says, "You have been sold a lie." The credit sequence then ends.
We then watched a major action sequence where Bruce (as a surrogate) is in a helicopter fling over some cops that are chasing a suspect (the suspect they're chasing is not a surrogate) into an alleyway. The guy pulls out a strange looking weapon and fires it at the cops, effectively short circuiting them all because their surrogates and not real people. He then fires the weapon at the helicopter, which takes out the pilot and injures Bruce's surrogate. The helicopter crashes and Bruce's surrogate loses and arm, but he's still able to chase the suspect on foot into a human colony that refuses to buy into this type of technology. Bruce's surrogate chases him all over the compound, but his surrogate ends up being destroyed by a shotgun blast from one of the humans.
Mostow explains a bit more, like how to kill a surrogate:
Mostow: Like any other piece of high-functioning machine. It's like that plasma TV. There's a lot of ways to take out that plasma TV. A double-barrel shotgun would probably do it. But a lot of other things could probably [do it, too].
What is so special about the weapon?
Mostow: Oh, that zapper thing. That is the device in the movie that Bruce is trying to get to. He doesn't know what it is. No one has ever seen it before. It suddenly materialized out of nowhere, and suddenly this low-life guy seems to have it, and that's the mystery of the movie: what is that, where did it come from?
Is this the first time someone has tried to kill a person operating a surrogate?
Mostow: Yes, this has never happened before. No one has ever managed to kill an operator when they are in their chair. And I should say that the movie doesn't ask the question, 'Boy if someday we could all have surrogate robots, wouldn't we all be scared that somebody could zap us in the chair?' That's the core of the film noir narrative that runs at the center of this thing, but this movie is really about—and I think the next sequence will show this—this is a robot movie about people. This is a really a movie about what it means to live in this digital age we live in where we are all connected to all of these machines, and yet we are also so isolated from each other.
Is it anti-technology?
Mostow: No, it's not really anti-technology. I think the next sequence will illustrate what it is, which is that we are all—look, I'm the biggest technology geek in the world. I read CNET everyday; I want to see what gadgets are coming out. I like to cruise around Best Buy and see if there anything I don't already have. I love my computer. I've got the iPhone and the whole thing. But I also have this ambivalent feeling about it as well, which [is that] I know I spend too much time on email, and that it takes time away from me and my family. Anybody can reach me at all times, and I seem to now work twenty-four/seven. We all have this generalized anxiety about this technology, but we can't even articulate it for ourselves. That is really the character that Bruce Willis is playing. I should wait to show this next sequence because I think it will be more revealing.
Next we saw a scene where Bruce, who no longer has his surrogate and has been told he can't get a replacement yet, comes home from the hospital (he was injured when his surrogate got partially zapped by the strange weapon) to find his wife and friends (all surrogates, all good looking) having a party at home. He and his wife only communicate through their surrogates. She's always locked up in her room and cannot face her husband in real life. One of the drawbacks of this technology is that people are constantly hiding behind it.
The surrogates get pleasure from a sort of drug they inject into each other, sending pleasure signals to the person operating their surrogate. These surrogates give Bruce a hard time, especially one guy who seems a bit too friendly with his surrogate wife. So he beats the crap out of the surrogate. He then tells his surrogate wife that he doesn't want to talk to her, he wants to talk to his real wife, that he misses talking to his real wife. It wa a really cool scene and showed the emotional impact the technology could have o a couple. We then see his real wife, who is still locked in her room, unplug herself from her surrogate as tears roll down her face.
After the scenes we had a few minutes to ask Jonathan more questions about the film.
Why can they feel the good pleasures of sex and not the bad pain that occurs?
Mostow: Because you just tune it out. You can adjust your surrogate. We don't address this in the movie because there just wasn't time to get to all these things. You could theoretically just tune your surrogate not to smell unpleasant smells, and only to smell pleasant smells. That's what so fantastic about this technology: it filters out whatever you don't like.
Is it global, or is it just the United States?
Mostow: We're saying it's global. But we don't get overly-specific with the census report of Botswana [laughs]. It's one of the tricky things about taking a great idea—I don't know if anyone has seen the graphic novel, but the graphic novel tells the story and then stops every fifteen pages or so with these several pages of interstitial material that dives down very deeply into all the minutiae, like how the courts were affected, and how this changed and that changed. Of course you can only fit so much fertilizer in the five-pound bag when you're making a movie. We got about eight to nine pounds, but we couldn't get the fifty. The number one thing is to keep the story moving and keep the audience engaged. We hint at a lot of these things, and sometimes we go into more deeply than others. We try to suggest all the implications that would arise from this technology. We can't get to all of them in one movie. The idea of the movie is to have this detective narrative that then takes you through the different worlds. You see, 'How does the military fight wars?' We go into that. What does it mean to go buy a surrogate? We have a scene that shows that. We get to all this kind of stuff. Let me get to the next part because I think that will help illuminate [my point].
Question: Are there surrogate kids?
Mostow: That is touched on in the movie. We don't actually see any children in the movie until he goes to the reservation, and then sees kids playing baseball.
Can the surrogates tell when you're not a surrogate?
Mostow: No. In fact that becomes a plot point later in the movie, that there is some deception involved. There are a key couple pieces of deception in the movie that involve people not realizing they are dealing with a surrogate when in fact it is a surrogate. The reason I want to show this scene is that it's being sold as an action/thriller and it's a totally an entertainment-oriented movie. I like to say that it's sort of a summer-ish movie in the fall. But it's not a summer movie as such. It's got this component to it that's really very character-based. Bruce plays a role that's not the wise-cracking Bruce that you think about when you think about Bruce. This is not 'Die Hard' Bruce. This is more maybe 'Sixth Sense' Bruce, which actually may be his biggest hit of all time. I think you can look at the wonderful performance in this movie as this guy who is, at the beginning of the movie, stuck in this sort of existential stasis that he himself doesn't really quite understand how to get himself out of, or that he's not even fully aware of how engulfed he is by all this technology. Over the course of the movie, by having to go out in the world without the crutch of this surrogate technology, [he] sort of makes realizations about himself and about how he feels about technology. We track his arc right up to the end of the climax.
Is it also about aging as well?
Mostow: You might call it aging; I would call it obsession with physical beauty. I think that definitely one of the big subthemes in the movie is—look, you go to any book store or magazine rack and the largest category of magazines are things about looking great, beauty and all these kinds of things.
Was it fun to cast?
Mostow: That was the challenge, because people think that Hollywood is just full of fabulous, good looking actors and actresses. But when you get right down to it, we had to cast people that were not just handsome or beautiful, but handsome or beautiful in a very specific, underwear model kind of way. That is a very small group of people when you really get right down to it. Then take the subset of that which is people who are actually good actors. And I actually believe that we got everybody in this movie. I don't believe this is a classically great looking [cast]—don't quote me on this because people will kill me—but I really do think we were down to getting everybody we could. Even the extras, the extras we were flying them in from Miami, from Vegas—we were shooting in Boston the whole time—from all over the country to get that specific look. There is a tremendous amount of digital work in the movie to make people look younger and perfect. I joke with Kevin a lot, 'We've got to stop working on this movie.' Because when you're working on a movie that's all your thinking about, so if I just go on Saturday to see a movie and it has Brad Pitt or something in it, and I see that he's got a zit on his chin and I'm like, 'Why didn't they get rid of the zit?' It's like a dermatology convention with the visual effects we use. We're constantly getting rid of blemishes or moles, that kind of stuff. The physical beauty thing of it is definitely a big theme, and frankly also a big challenge in making the movie. One thing that I should say for anyone that's interested is the trailer that we showed you—which I don't even know if they have updated online on the Apple site (hopefully they will)–is much more the look of the movie than this footage. The whole movie is having this look treatment applied to it in the final stages of post-production, giving it a defined, interesting look to it. What you're seeing here is more flatly lit than what you'll see in theaters, and that's again that we had to light the whole movie like we were shooting Greta Garbo in a 1940's movie. It's all about as being as flattering as possible to the actors to make everyone look fantastic, and then applying this film noir, stylistic, thriller look to the movie in post-production.
Did you have the challenge of making everything else in the world not look as good?
Mostow: That's true, too. That wasn't too hard to do just by virtue of shooting on real streets. Although, ironically, Downtown Boston, I don't know if anyone's been to Boston recently, looks like a back lot. In fact, the biggest problem we had in Boston was that often times it looked like a back lot. We did a pick up shoot in the spring. We wanted to add a sequence in, and we actually went to the Paramount back lot to shoot it, and that looked more like Boston and less like a back lot. It was totally the reverse. It was very strange.
How much technology did you use? How much CGI?
Mostow: There are over 700 visual effects shots in this movie. There's more visual effects shots in this movie than I had in 'Terminator'.
I saw a billboard with Bruce that focused on the film's theme of physical beauty; what other messages will be used in the marketing of the movie?
Mostow: That wasn't Bruce. That was a model. They have these cool billboards that have just gone up in the last week. They look like underwear models that have their midsections missing, and you see the metal insides of them, and all it says is, 'Bruce Willis: Surrogates' on it. That's building the awareness of the movie. You'll have to talk to the marketing people in terms of exactly how it's being sold. I know right now they are getting the awareness out there. It's really going to be sold with TV commercials, and that will begin next month. We screened this movie a few times for test audiences, and the really fascinating thing is the focus groups we've had are unlike the focus groups anyone at the studios had ever seen for a movie, or certainly that Kevin and I have seen. The audience just immediately wants to start talking about their own experience in this digital age that we're living in. The movie becomes this jumping off point to this whole discussion about how we're all more connected to each other than ever before, and we're all sort of disconnected from each other. There is nothing preachy in the movie; there is no soapbox speech, or harried explainer speech in the movie. Just by the sheer subject matter and the accumulation of all these kind of moments that you've seen in the movie, and there's plenty more of those when you've seen the full movie, it instantly springboards into a discussion about Facebook and Twitter, email and crackberrys, the whole thing. That's been really, really interesting to watch. You never know until it's actually out in real theaters and people pay 9 bucks for it, but it seems to be the kind of movie where people want to get a cup of coffee afterwards and start talking about the ideas in it.
Do the surrogates affect people's personalities or is it just their looks?
Mostow: No, it's like a puppet. It's like if you were operating a puppet or one of those mannequins that some of us had as a kid.
So it's not like 'The Stepford Wives'?
Mostow: No, and that's the interesting thing. There has been a hundred robot movies, and I speak with some authority on this because I made one. [In] all those robot movies the robots are sentient, they are autonomous, thinking creatures. In this thing, they are just puppets. It's such a simple idea. When I read the graphic novel I instantly realized there is something—and if you know 'Second Life', that game where people go with computerized avatars on the internet, or even if you just have a presence on the internet in any form, whether you have an email address or whatever—that there is something about taking that idea and extrapolating it to the human form that suddenly just resonated with all these issues. I can't even fully articulate it myself yet, or it will take me a few years after I'm done to put some perspective on it. But that's the thing that audiences are plugging into: this idea of what it all means. It would be very different if the robots had any thoughts of their own.
[But isn't he] interacting with his wife and his wife is actually a different person?
Mostow: They have another scene in the movie where she basically says, 'Look, this is so I can go out of the house.' She gives this speech, which is the speech you can imagine a lot of women giving at some point if their husbands or boyfriends said, 'Why do you have to put make-up on to go to work? Why do you have to put on a good dress? Who cares? Just put on some freakin' jeans and go the office.' And [she'd say], 'I can't, I can't do that. This is the only way I know how to present myself.' It's speaking against all of those issues as well.
Body issues?
Mostow: Absolutely.
If you can turn down your senses as the surrogate, how does Bruce know he's actually dying after being shot?
Mostow: The injury that he sustained from that sequence—and you'll understand it better when you actually see the movie, because you'll understand what that device did to him—the blood coming from his nose is not from being shot, it's from the effect of that device that zapped him and made the other guy's pilots explode. He's reacting more to that. The getting shot would be meaningless. When he fell down there were girders and he fell forty feet. It had no real impact; he just kept going.
Do they just go off-line?
Mostow: In that case he just went off-line. He puts that headset back on even though he's sort of dazed from the concussion he experienced from that zapping thing, because he's trying to go after this bad guy.
No, but when the surrogate gets destroyed does it automatically go off-line for him?
Mostow: Exactly.
After the woman shoots him with a double-barreled shotgun, he hadn't sustained a head injury. Would he just simply know [that he was hurt]?
Mostow: At that point the surrogate's central processing unit in the head would be like your computer just suddenly went into stand-by mode, or your computer froze on you: you're typing the keys and nothing is happening. At that point his chair would have alerted him that there was no more connection, that he disconnected from it. Then he would go, 'Oh shoot,' and take off his headset and get up and try to figure out what happened.
How close is it to the graphic novel?
Mostow: In the core themes of the movie—and again, a literary form is always going to express something different than a cinematic form—I think that the central ideas are very much intact, very much the same. I think that movies are probably better at expressing the emotional side of it, make you have an emotional feel to it that the graphic novel doesn't have just because graphic novels tend not to illicit an emotional response from the reader. From the narrative story structure point, we had to make some divergences only because it's a fairly short graphic novel and we're a feature length movie. There's different needs to tell the story, and different things we were interested in doing. The core thing: there is a detective named Greer in the graphic novel who is on the case trying to find out what's happening with some device that's zapping people. The Prophet character, that's in the graphic novel. Some of the key elements of the graphic novel [are in the movie], but we had to adapt it to the feature form. What's also interesting about the graphic novel is a lot of this interstitial material. In a movie you can't suddenly stop the movie every fifteen minutes to go, 'Here's a really cool four minute documentary about what happened to societal laws as a result of this thing.' You have to figure out the way to weave that in, and that again requires more changing around of the story.
The plot device with that weapon, does that lead to something even bigger?
Mostow: Yes, yes it does.
At this point some dude tried to get Mostow to tell us the ending of the movie. Please don't ask me why in the fuck someone would ask the director to reveal the end of his movie that hasn't been released yet. I'm leaving this part in here so you guys understand some of the crazy crap questions that get asked in these roundtable type environments. I finally had to say I didn't want to know the ending of the movie to this guy.
The whole point of this is for us to feel like we've seen the movie, so can you tell us what happens?
Mostow: Rosebud's the sled.
I'm actually being quite serious. I don't think this can be a junket and not know exactly—
Mostow: No one has asked that question before. Part of me can't help but be the showman. I don't want to ruin the movie for you. Basically—
I don't want to know the ending.
Mostow: It's a good ending. The weird thing about this is that we are having to do this junket so crazily ahead of time—unfortunately, because of Bruce's schedule, this is the only day we could do it. That's the weird thing. Usually you would see the movie, but it would be a lot closer to the [finished product]. I've never done this before. Frankly I'm in the middle of trying to finish the movie, so every hour I'm spending in here is making the movie one hour of my time less good. Fortunately, it's on lunch break right now.
I think Surrogates is going to be one of those films that will spark a lot of discussion after you see it. How far have we gone in the virtual world? Are we that disconnected and is it ever possible this type of thing could happen? Where we never leave the house and only communicate by other means? How hooked are we on technology?
I'm not worried about the movie being bad, because everything Mostow has done has been good. At least I think so. I think the man has real intelligent eye for direction action (something I will never say about Michael Bay) and he likes to take on projects that seem to challenge him as a filmmaker. Surrogates, after the scenes I've seen, looks like a really badass movie.
We'll find out when it hits theaters on September 25th. Thanks to the guys at Disney for this really cool edit bay visit and to Jonathan for taking time out of his busy day to speak with us.
