On the Disney lot in one of the studio’s many edit suites, director Jonathan Mostow is racing against the clock to finish his latest film, "Surrogates", prior to its September deadline. Mostow and his team behind "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" are back this time exploring a future in which humans live in isolation while only communicating with their fellow man through robots that serve as social surrogates and are better-looking versions of their human counterparts.
Bruce Willis stars as an FBI agent who enlists the aid of his own surrogate to investigate the murder of the genius college student who invented the surrogates. As the case grows more complicated, however, the withdrawn detective discovers that in order to actually catch the killer he will have to venture outside the safety of his own home for the first time in many years, and enlists the aid of another agent (Radha Mitchell) in tracking his target down.
Jonathan Mostow directs co-screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato's adaptation of the graphic novel by author Robert Venditti and illustrator Brett Weldele. There is little doubt that this action thriller is the antithesis of typical Fall movies which, from we see from the footage he is screening, is not such a bad thing.
A small group of reporters are gathering around a monitor to see some samples of this high octane, yet imaginative thriller, and we begin by looking at the opening of the film, from the opening credits, which establishes the world, and technology evolved bringing surrogates to every home worldwide.
The opening is fascinating and establishes time, place and theme pretty early on. Of course, Surrogates is an action thriller, and after showing us the establishing sequences, the director jumps forward to screen us the first major action sequence in the film, about a half hour in. As Mostow explains:
"The idea here, if you haven’t gotten it already, is that basically most people in our society now stay at home, like, we all wouldn't be here in the surrogate – in this movie. We’d all be at home, probably in our underwear, in this fantastic sort of massage-chair-like device that’s reading our brain waves. And we would be operating this robot, which would be sort of like an idealized version of ourselves, younger, handsome, more fit. And basically, the robot’s like a puppet. It has no autonomous thinking of its own, just essentially doing what you want to do.
So if your brain waves say, “Okay, raise your hand up like this,” that’s what the robot does. It wouldn't do it by itself. And by the same token, the robot is taking all the sensory data that it’s intaking – you know, touch, feel, everything, smell – and sending it back to you. So, you’re vicariously experiencing it as if you were having the experience itself. So this leads to a couple of things. First of all, you don’t ever have to worry about how you look, because you always look great. It’s like, if you have your best suit at home, if you put it on in the morning to go out – you know, and you catch yourself in the mirror, you’re like, “Wow, I look pretty sharp.” And you just kind of carry yourself in a certain way. So it gives people just a sense of better self-confidence, well-being, that they can go out like this. You don’t have to worry about catching a cold, or the swine flu, or any kind of nasty thing. You don’t have to worry about anything getting hit by a car, because you just go out and have your surrogate replaced.
And moral boundaries are kind of erased, because – go to a club, see a sexy girl. You want to get it on? Go for it. All it is, essentially, is two pieces of metal rubbing up against each other. I mean, you’ll be experiencing a complete sexual encounter yourself at home alone. So, what moral boundaries have you violated? You know, it’s no different than if you went in an Internet chat room and had some inappropriate dialogue with somebody. So for that reason, has caught on in a very profound way, as a great convenience and just better way of living life.
Most people have subscribed to this. There’s a small minority of people, as it identifies in the main title – they’re called The Dreads. Their spiritual leader is Ving Rhames. You’ve seen the opening thing. And these are people who reject this way of life. And they essentially live on these reservations, which are these areas within cities that are sort of walled and gated, where no robots are allowed. And the people there – it’s sort of like a – kind of a Birkenstock-meet-Whole-Foods-shopping-Trader-Joe’s kind of crowd. And these are just people that don’t want anything to do with this way of life.
So what’s sort of the spine of the plot – is that suddenly this device has surfaced that somebody’s using, and they’re zapping surrogates, and it’s caused fatal brain haemorrhages for their operators, back in their stem ship. Well, this pierces the whole veil of security that the whole thing is set up to provide in the first place. So, Bruce and his partner, Radha Mitchell, are on this investigation. And by this point in the movie, they’ve located the guy who they know was doing some of this zapping, and they’re going to chase after him. And this chase is going to take them, actually, into this Dread reservation."
Throughout our visit, we see Willis as both a youthful surrogate and the real character, more weary, obviously older and dealing with a marriage to a woman who refuses to leave her room preferring to escape through her own surrogate. At the core of the film, the plot or MacGuffin “is the device in the movie that Bruce is trying to get to, this kind of zapper. He doesn't know what it is. No one’s ever seen it before. It’s suddenly materialized out of nowhere. And suddenly, this low life guy seems to have it, and that’s the mystery of the movie. Is, what is that, where’d it come from? And that’s what he’s after. And I should say that the movie doesn't ask the question, ‘Well, if suddenly we could all have surrogate robots, wouldn't we all be scared that somebody could zap us in the chair?’ That’s sort of the core of the film noir narrative that runs at the center of this thing. What this movie is really about, is – and I think the next sequence will show this – this is – like I say, it’s a robot movie about people. So, this is really a movie about what it means to live in this digital age we live in, where we’re all sort of connected to all these machines, and yet we’re all so isolated from each other.”
I assk Mostow if he sees Surrogates as being anti-technology. “Well, no, it’s not really anti-technology. I’m the biggest technology geek in the world. I mean, I read CNET every day, I’m always seeing what gadgets are coming out. I like to cruise around Best Buy and see if there’s anything I don’t already have. And so, you know, I love my computer, I’ve got the iPhone, the whole thing. But I also have this kind of ambivalent feelings about it as well, which is that I know I spend too much time on e-mail, and it takes time away from me and my family, and anybody can reach me at all times, and I seem to now work 24-7. So, we all have this sort of generalized anxiety about this technology. But we can't really even articulate it for ourselves.”
Surrogates is set in the US, but this surrogates phenomenon is definitely global, he explains but in adapting the graphic novel, changes had to be made. “Yeah we don’t get super overly-specific with, like, ‘Here’s the Census report of Botswana, and here’s how many people have it.’ I mean it’s one of the tricky things about taking a great idea of this. And I don't know if anybody’s seen the graphic novel, but it tells the story, and then stops every 15 pages or so with these several pages of interstitial material that died down very deeply into all the minutiae of, like, how the courts were affected, and how this changed, and that changed. Unfortunately, you can only fit so much fertilizer in a five-pound bag when you’re making a movie, so, we got about eight to nine pounds, but we could get maybe to 50. So, the number one thing is to keep the story moving, and keep the audience engaged, so we hint at a lot of these things, and sometimes we go into them more deeply than others. But we try to sort of suggest all the implications that would arise from this technology. We can't solve them in one movie. But the idea of the movie is to have this detective narrative that then takes you to the different worlds. You see, like, how do the military fight wars? We go into that. What does it mean to go buy a surrogate? We have a scene that shows that. So, we get to all this kind of stuff.”
We watch a few clips that help to elucidate the themes of aging, paranoia and the growth and dangers of this kind of technology. Being a film that deals with technology, technology is used to make the film, in terms of visual effects. Mostow explains that there are over 700 visual effect shots in this movie, “which is more visual effect shots in this movie than I had in Terminator.”
Fans of the graphic novel will want to know how close the film is to the source material. “Well, again, a literary form is always going to express something different than a cinematic form, but I think that the central idea is very much intact, very much the same. I think that movies are probably better at expressing the emotional side of it, and making it have an emotional feel to it that the graphic novel doesn't have, just because graphic novels tend not to elicit emotional response in 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 and there’s different needs to tell the story, and different things we were interested in doing.”
Seeing the footage we saw, certainly gave us a taste of what lies ahead, and though a Bruce Willis movie, there is far more to Mostow’s film than meets the eye, and Disney can expect big things from what appears like an original futuristic thriller.
