Hi, I'm Alex Proyas, the director of I, Robot.
Hi, my name is Akiva Goldsman. I'm the final screenwriter on I, Robot.
We're about to tell you a little bit about the movie.
We're recording this commentary...
...about six weeks before the film is released in the theaters.
I wanted to start the movie with Isaac Asimov's famous Three Laws.
The movie takes place in a world where...
...the robots are apparently Three Laws safe.
We talked a lot about the Three Laws...
...and whether or not we needed to sort of put them on cards.
It's funny because they're so...
...clearly a part of the collective consciousness of science-fiction fans.
I mean, anybody who's read sci-fi...
...you know, knows these laws or at least their essential meaning.
And of course, for the uninitiated, it's just a lot of, "Huh?"
So we do them twice.
We do them first here...
...and then subsequently in a scene coming up.
This is an idea of...
...moving through a positronic brain.
The robots in Asimov's stories have...
...these things called positronic brains that are hardwired with the Three Laws.
So we came up with this title sequence that kind of...
...tries to combine many elements.
This sort of mysterious journey through...
...an abstract notion of a positronic brain...
...and intercut with...
...or morphed with...
...Will's back-story flashback.
This sort of cataclysmic event in his life that sort of shaped...
...his character and also shaped much of the story.
This is a set. It looks like he's outside, but he really isn't.
We spent a lot of time trying to figure out...
...what song should go here.
Much discussion. Much running around with CDs.
And then, one day, Will's really enormous trailer...
...was rocking, literally rocking.
I don't mean "rocking out." I mean rocking...
...with the sound of the bass from this.
And we kind of all knew that was it.
I love film noir. I love detective stories.
Pretty much all of my movies have detectives in them.
To me, it's just a great way to get into a world...
...to discover things about a world as our character does.
And what better character to--?
You know, who's on a voyage of discovery than a detective...
...who's trying to understand a case?
I mean, there are parallels...
...in the construction of this story with Dark City in that--
In that extent, which is that...
...both films started in a very small way...
...with an apparently fairly mundane mystery...
...that then evolves into a much greater mystery.
And I think, you know, we discovered the world through Will's character.
I mean, I think that's kind of why, for me...
...we sort of reframed the movie through a detective's eyes...
...as opposed to telling it from, say, Susan Calvin's perspective.
Because to me-- For me, I feel that...
...Calvin is already so much a part of the world of robots.
She sort of innately understands so much about them.
And I think for a movie audience...
...it's always better to come into it from a slightly outside perspective...
...and, to a certain extent, have to have things explained to you.
Therefore, the audience understands.
I think if you deal with characters that have...
...a sort of innate understanding of a technology...
...or of a fantastic construct...
...it's often hard to make the exposition ring true.
The exposition always feels a bit forced.
Whereas, you know, from a detective's perspective, it's about asking questions.
It's asking the questions that the audience wants to ask.
And I think that's why the detective genre is such a popular one...
...in movies, in particular.
Because it just works cinematically.
- Let me get the damn-ass keys. - First of all, stop cussing.
Shia LaBeouf, his original construct in the movie, as shot...
...was that he cursed really badly.
And he had strings of utterly incomprehensible...
...compound profanities.
None of which made the final cut, but they were very funny.
Granny is a composite of...
...Will's grandmother and the woman who raised me. And, uh....
And Granny is a kind of female icon that we were both familiar with.
And she was an opportunity for Will and I to inject...
...some of the human story into the movie...
...before the detective plot began.
I felt it was very important to establish....
Establish the world and establish Will's life in the movie early on...
...and actually spend a bit of time seeing that....
Seeing the normal world. The normal world in this movie...
...is not our world, so we have to understand certain rules.
We have to see how robots function in this world.
We have to see clearly that they are servants, that they are common...
...they're walking down the streets, they're performing tasks.
They're, like, delivering packages as FedEx robots, et cetera, et cetera.
And to paint a picture of a world that is--
That is-- That functions.
It's not a dark future.
It's a functioning future.
Things seem to work well. We're saying technology works.
And we can trust technology, and it's a part of our lives.
And then for that to unravel through the story...
...to see that there is another flip side to that situation.
Hey! Move!
The trick was to not be too on the nose here.
We wanted to show...
...somebody who was just this side of irrational...
...so that as the movie progressed...
...he could ostensibly be perceived...
...as somebody who had slid over the edge into irrationality.
Yeah. This is an immediate...
...example of the Three Laws at work...
...and the potential...
...misinterpretation of them.
I mean, here Will is misinterpreting what's going on, you know, bigtime.
To him, he sees a robot running down the street...
...having stolen a handbag, you know...
...and because he distrusts robots...
...he immediately believes that the robot has stolen the handbag...
...though he lives in a world that's clearly framed...
...as one where a robot could never possibly do that.
But he's like-- He's the guy who's waiting for the end of the world.
He's waiting for the bad shit to go down, you know.
He's the guy who's, like, waiting for....
For proof that he's been right all along.
So any little incident like that that occurs...
...he immediately interprets as he's finally....
You know, people are finally seeing the truth that he's known all along.
And it's important to frame Will in that way...
...because, you know...
...he's constantly reminded, as are the audience...
...that he's living in a world where robots could not possibly do any wrong.
And, you know, he begins to doubt himself at times.
There are moments where-- I think, where he's....
He knows something wrong is happening, but he really....
You know, he has no evidence of it to prove it to others.
Will is a really smart guy, and he had a very specific take on the character...
...and on the script, and obviously contributed a great deal to both.
The character really emerged. He....
He was built up in layers. I mean, you know...
...when Will came on, you know, he had this back-story, but it was--
I think the moment that the character, for me, really took shape...
...is when the idea, which I'm pretty sure was Akiva's...
...came into being where...
...the robot who saved Will's life...
...you know, chose to save Will over the little girl...
...and thereby-- Therefore, the little girl was sacrificed.
And to me, that was a beautifully resonant idea...
...that really gave Will's character enormous scope, you know.
Because, to me, it summed up...
...you know, who that guy is.
This guy is in suspended animation, emotionally, in his life.
He cannot overcome the moment in his life where...
...he was saved over a little girl.
He obviously would've preferred that he just died, and she had been saved.
The worst thing about it, from his point of view...
...is that he knows that the robot did the right thing.
Again, it's the Three Laws. It works back into the Three Laws again.
The robot was functioning in a correct, logical way...
...and could not override its function.
Also, it's a sort of...
...a nutshell of what happens in the big part of the movie too...
...which is the robots choose to sacrifice...
...a number of lives for a greater good...
...or for some good that they can achieve, you know.
And it's really the way-- It's a nutshell version of the big story, that incident.
Why did you call me?
I trust your judgment.
Normally, this wouldn't require a homicide detective.
But then, our interactions have never been entirely normal, agreed?
This was an interesting sort of rebuild...
...because this scene used to take place, um....
In the original scripts of Jeff's and of Hillary Seitz...
...this script used to....
This scene used to take place in Lanning's lab.
And it was really quite different.
And we sort of anthropomorphized the hologram...
...and created a deeper relationship here.
I believe, in Jeff's scripts, there was no relationship...
...between the Lanning--
The Hogan Miller/Lanning character and Del Spooner.
And again, as part of the construction or the weaving...
...of an emotional tapestry that you could relate to as an audience member...
...we wanted connectedness between these two people...
...some history that let you identify with the human need...
...to solve a mystery or find the truth.
There's the Lanning back-story, right, which is to be fully articulated.
He's working for a while...
...and he realizes, as he's sitting in his lab, you know...
...speculating on the evolution of the positronic brain...
...that what will happen, essentially, is that...
...this construct will lead...
...to a single, inevitable conclusion, which is...
...that man can't take care of himself.
And Lanning realizes that...
...not only is this going to be a hard sell...
...but that he is essentially trapped by V.I.K.I...
...that V.I.K.I. runs his life, both inside and outside of USR.
And if he tries to get this word out, V.I.K.I. will kill him.
She controls his air, his doors, his water, his food.
So he creates a set of clues, and then...
...he has Sonny kill him...
...in order to trigger the first in, for lack of a better word...
...the series of dominoes falling.
It was, though-- As they say at the end of the movie...
...it's the one thing V.I.K.I. couldn't control. It just happened too fast.
"Sonny, throw me out the window."
- It's on the table. - Thank you.
This is Bruce Greenwood...
...who plays the role of Robertson in the movie.
You know, ostensibly painted as the bad guy.
Obviously...
...it turns out that he isn't, but...
...you know, to me, he's kind of the red herring in the film, you know.
Will instantly believes that this guy's the bad guy.
He comes into his office...
...sort of wanting to pin it on him, you know.
Because, for him, Robertson represents...
...the guy who has made the robots. I mean, he is really the....
As far as Will's character is concerned, the ultimate villain in his world.
So he's looking for the thing to pin this thing on him.
Somehow, he wants to believe...
...that Robertson is implicated in this somehow.
One of your robots comes in and makes a better chair twice as fast.
Will, Alex and I have the same orientation towards this...
...which is darker than not.
Not grim, and, in fact, ultimately hopeful...
...but a kind of rooted--
A kind of world that is reality-based, so humor can come out of character...
...and Del Spooner is a guy who has a sense of humor...
...although, quite frankly, he uses it to defend against connectedness...
...and as an interrogation tool.
But humor for humor's sake...
...we felt was incompatible with the material.
We wanted to make a serious sci-fi movie.
You know, those can be fun...
...and they can be exciting and they can be funny...
...but the tone of this movie is more serious than not.
Lawrence told me to accommodate you in any way possible.
Really?
Okay.
There's a pedigree of science-fiction literature about robots...
...and R.U.R. is obviously one of them.
To me, in a way, I, Robot and Asimov is the absolute core center of this film...
...but, look, honestly, I set out to make the definitive robot movie.
I don't know whether I've done that, but that was the intention.
And we didn't ignore...
...any aspects of robots in science fiction.
We tried to-- We read everything we'd get our hands on...
...in terms of literature and in terms of...
...factual concepts about robotics.
We obviously looked at all the movies in the past that had robots in them.
You know, tried to avoid certain things...
...avoid certain stereotypes, but also to embrace some things...
...that we liked, you know, some influences.
You can't sort of make something like this in a vacuum.
You sort of need to look at what else has been done before you...
...and try and build upon it and move it into a new direction.
It's harder and harder to make...
...straight-ahead sci-fi and straight-ahead comic-book movies.
Chris Nolan's doing one now, and I can't wait.
Generally, what's happened is a veering away from emotional truth...
...in this kind of material, short of showing it through a comedic lens.
That's unfortunate. You can show emotional truth through comedy...
...but there are a lot of other ways, and science fiction was very often...
...a way of using novelty to tell dramatic stories, not comedic stories.
She? That's a she? I definitely need to get out more.
Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence.
V.I.K.I.
I think V.I.K.I. was Victor.
Then there were a bunch of other names.
Then we finally figured out that you can get V.I.K.I. to stand for something.
That's how she became V.I.K.I. We liked her more as a woman too.
Um, it's a little too sinister, potentially, as a man. I was using sexual stereotypes...
...to deflect any possible identification of V.I.K.I. as villain.
Making her a woman, you know, relied on stereotypes...
...in order to make her less likely a suspect.
I imagined the movie as a kind of like "early days at USR"…
...a kind of prequel, if you like, to the Asimov stories.
And that sort of gave us a little bit of liberty to make Calvin...
...a more youthful character.
She's much older in the books.
I mean, look, I think, for me, this is probably the most contentious concept...
...in terms of, you know, the fans of the book...
...that we've made Calvin a apparently attractive-looking woman...
...as played by Bridget Moynahan, and someone much younger.
But I think we've stayed very true to the spirit of the character.
I think she's a very cold, emotionless person...
...who's shut down her emotional life...
...and spends her time trying to make robots better than we are.
I think she honestly believes...
...that, you know, robots can be better than human beings...
...and she spends her time trying to make them so.
Again, we gave her a back-story, which I think helps...
...and I think is in keeping with Calvin from the Asimov stories...
...which is, I believe, that something bad happened to her in an early stage...
...that made her distrust humans...
...just as Will had something happen bad to him that makes him distrust robots.
She's the flip side of his character.
And to me, I just think that gives her greater depth.
It gives motivation to why she's cold and emotionless.
You know, in the Asimov stories, we never really know.
We just know that she is, you know.
And we've also updated her.
Calvin, as written by Asimov, again, is like a '50s, sort of, type of gal.
We've made her a little more contemporary.
So, you know, I think, to me...
...she's pretty faithful in that respect, if not aesthetically so.
A robot cannot harm a human being. The first law of robotics.
Yes, I've seen your commercials.
This is the second time we tell the Laws...
...in case you were settling into your seat...
...annoyed by the person in front of you, eating during the credit sequence...
...and didn't read them, now we tell them.
This was actually a scene that I remember during rehearsal.
Will really sort of-- The scene itself on the page was still too stilted.
It was expositional. And Will, who has this unbelievable ability...
...to think on his feet-- I mean, the skills that make him a movie star...
...are the skills he has as a human being.
He's just a good human. He's caring and careful and considerate...
...and wildly aware of the people around him.
But he's also profoundly smart.
And he can apply that intelligence really fast, which is great fun.
He is an utter pleasure to work with, and part of that is...
...when you're sitting over a scene, he'll say something like:
"Well, what if we did this?" He basically freeform rewrote this scene...
...in the room.
And my great contribution, I think, was copying it down.
And it took something that could have been really still very clunky...
...and just made it very elegant.
I hate him for that.
We worked briefly, trying to come up with...
...what type of robot Sonny should be.
You know, for a while, I remember having a real question...
...whether his face should have expression...
...and whether he should have actual lip synch...
...because that was probably the hardest aspect of him...
...to pull off, you know.
But he's such an emotive creature...
...I wanted to see a progression. I wanted to see a kind of robot...
...that I'd never seen in a movie before, one that had full human expression.
Because there's a whole thing in the movie about him having emotion...
...and sort of being the first robot that actually kind of feels emotion.
Though he says he doesn't really understand emotion...
...he is starting to experience it.
So to me, it seemed like having a face with full flex-- Mobility...
...was an important aspect of his design.
So we very quickly decided that's what we wanted to see.
But we didn't want him to be an android, you know.
Like I've said before, I wanted this to be an honest-to-goodness robot movie...
...as opposed to movies that are supposed to be robot movies...
...where actors play robots, and you're supposed to believe...
...they have mechanical bits under their skin.
I wanted a creature that was truly a robot, you know?
A very sophisticated one.
So we looked at all the robots in past movies, et cetera...
...and really the one that we kept coming back to was Maria in Metropolis...
...just because of the-- I think that character had an elegance...
...and a fluidity that robots really have moved away from.
I think it's something to do with, like, deco design.
Everything was very elegant and quite feminine.
And so we wanted to do a very elegant creature for the NS-5...
...and we felt that that-- It was less overtly threatening...
...in terms of having this creature in your home and having it...
...you know, looking after the kids or whatever it's supposed to be able to do.
But then when they turn, there's a sort of speed and there's a....
Again, this sort of concept of fluidity and grace can also be quite scary...
...because a creature that has that quality can move really quickly.
There is a robot in this formation that does not belong.
Identify it.
- One of us. - Which one?
We wanted 10,000 robots...
...but couldn't get a big enough warehouse.
And what's great about this scene is, of course, there are no robots in it.
There are sort of two-dimensional cardboard cutouts and dots.
Well, what would you suggest?
Interview each one, cross-reference their responses to detect anomalies.
How long would that take?
This scene is a tenet of the movie...
...one of the great structural components.
It's Asimov by way of Vintar...
...you know, with a little Goldsman thrown in at the end.
But, you know, what it really is, is the use of logic...
...in order to provide revelation.
It's the taking of these cognitive constructs...
...imposing them on the robots and forcing them into...
...a kind of logician's trap.
Where, in this case, one of them...
...actually revealing programming...
...counter to the strictest Asimovian programming...
...seems to experience compassion, concern peeking out...
...from the row of robots, to see whether...
...these other robots are being destroyed...
...and that he might be, in fact, culpable. And that's enough for Will.
Gotcha. Get the hell out....
An interesting challenge because there are obviously scenes...
...where he blends in with the crowd, and he does that specifically to hide.
But there are other times when we need him to be clearly identifiable as Sonny...
...even though he's standing amongst other robots that look exactly like him.
And for a while, I was stressing out over how we would do that.
I thought, "How can you tell a difference if he's not talking? If he's just standing?
How do we know that's Sonny?"
But what became evident through the making of the movie is that...
...Alan Tudyk brought a great deal of incredible subtlety to the character.
Apart from the fact that I think he made a wonderful character...
...through his voice and his body movement and his expression...
...and everything that actors...
...usually do, he also brought subtlety...
...in the way Sonny stands, the way that he moves...
...the way that he's just in an idle mode, looking.
And it actually-- It's amazing how it makes him an individual.
It makes him stand out, even--
We can see by the way he's standing that he's different...
...because he somehow imbues this mechanical creature with emotion...
...just through his body language alone...
...which is an extraordinary skill.
This is a phrase I'm quite fond of because it speaks to...
...Del Spooner's darkness, which is:
"Does thinking you're the last sane man in the world make you crazy?
Because if it does, maybe I am."
That's really where Del is right now.
He thinks that this is all a big mistake, this reliance on robots and technology.
He sees the lack of compassion, the lack of empathy...
...is going to subvert this servitude into something quite destructive.
He just can't articulate it.
And it's happening, in fact, all around him.
I like the idea that what Del Spooner resents in part...
...is how we friendly them up.
How we create-- How we wrap them in lovely packaging...
...in order to fool ourselves into thinking they're safe.
What if I'm right?
This was a really fascinating scene.
This scene has existed in many forms...
...for quite a long time, and for me, what I wanted to do...
...was to make this scene about emotion.
To represent Sonny as somebody who was wrestling with a series...
...of cognitive patterns of emotions that he didn't understand.
Um, it's why we introduce the wink here, not just as a setup...
...that we thought would work out pretty well at the end as a payoff...
...but also because this is a representation of Sonny's inability...
...to understand those things that are not explicit.
The interrogation scene is kind of what turns Spooner's character around.
I wanna see Sonny through Spooner's eyes...
...and Spooner obviously is extremely distrustful of robots...
...and now he's got one that he thinks has murdered someone.
So to me, it's like you wanna see how scary and potentially dangerous...
...the robot can be, and we see that through various scenes...
...where we see him running and jumping very quickly.
But what throws Spooner, sort of the ultimate challenge...
...is in the interrogation scene because he suddenly realizes...
...this robot is very different to any that he's ever experienced before.
And that's truly the most challenging thing to him.
That's sort of mainly what pushes him into the next part of the story, really.
Robots don't feel fear. They don't feel anything.
- They don't get hungry, they don't sleep. - I do.
Sonny is, in his own way...
...like somebody with a brain injury...
...or at least with a very differently evolving brain.
He hasn't learned yet how to process emotion...
...and that's what this scene tries to show.
It's an amazing thing that's happening here...
...and again a testament to Alex...
...and his ability to work with Alan...
...who is such an amazing actor, who wasn't going to be in the movie...
...and to fashion a performance that could be used...
...as the genesis of this robotic performance...
...and to keep Will's performance in line with what Alex knew...
...would ultimately be here, to amp Alan's performance up...
...to get the expressional references required...
...to then replace him with Sonny.
And, by the way, it's laborious.
Will's shooting this several different times, you know.
He's shooting it against-- Shooting it with Alan...
...he's shooting it with a still dummy...
...he's shooting it with a little video screen with Alan's face on it.
We didn't pay Will enough.
So we're naming you now.
I think the world serves the story.
I think that's really the most important thing.
And, you know, I think it's--
Look, I would have liked to have built a few more sets...
...and had a little bit more money to construct a bit more...
...because we were-- You know, it sounds ridiculous to be saying...
...we had a tight budget on a film this ambitious, but we really did.
It was really very difficult trying to do what we were trying to do.
This scene's a classic example because it's like...
...this is a location which was extremely problematic to shoot in.
I'd argue that it was cheaper to build a set...
...and I did argue that it was cheaper to build a set...
...and, in fact, it would have been.
You know, the problem I find is that, ahem...
...when production managers don't have any idea...
...of what you want to see, as a director, on film...
...they don't know-- They have no sense of visual imagination quite often.
And it's difficult to explain to them that the background...
...will be out of focus in a close-up and you won't really see that much...
...and therefore we could get away with murder on a sound stage.
You know, I mean....
Production designers get it because they're visual people...
...but the logistical guys...
...sort of the moneymen on the show...
...don't really understand that stuff.
So they take us to the middle of the most dangerous part of Vancouver...
...in the middle of the night and-- You know, where people...
...throw syringes down from windows in the back alleys at film crews.
Not that it happened to us, but it has been known to happen.
To do a couple of close-ups of our actors.
And to me, it seems insane to do that.
I think it's important whatever you do on a film production...
...that you've gotta sort of have some sense of visual ability.
You have to be able to see things because it's--
That's where it all ends up, it ends up focused down through this lens.
Everything goes through the lens of the camera.
Whatever machine is out there...
...constructing, building, finding locations, et cetera...
...it all ends up being funneled through that lens, you know.
Everyone's efforts do.
And so on any level on a production, you have to understand...
...what that lens is seeing.
That's what your entire existence depends on.
And, you know, I think unfortunately, a lot of the time--
I mean, the filming crew certainly gets stuff...
...but a lot of the time, the people handling the money...
...sitting in an office somewhere, dealing with the nitty-gritty of the budget...
...often don't see from that correct perspective.
--and launched the Nestor Class 1 robot....
This is another sort of great Chi/Will rapport scene.
It's also the classic, or wants to be one of those classic:
"Hmm, everything is not as it seems" scenes.
And, you know, we've also planted a little bit of setup in there...
...with the bridge on the screen.
So why the look?
What look?
- That look. - This is my face. It's not a look.
For better or worse, this movie is...
...vaguely additive.
You know, it has a lot of little, teeny setups...
...and little, teeny payoffs and larger setups and larger payoffs...
...that are almost required reading by the end of the movie.
I mean, you don't have to get it all for the movie to be fun.
And yet the more of them you get, I think the better experience it is.
Some of this stuff is nested.
A lot of people will not, arguably, remember...
...that that broken-bridge image...
...was set up in the movie before Spooner sees the sketch of Sonny.
If you did, you probably get more pleasure out of it.
Come on. To the right guy for the right job.
- What'd you say? - Now what?
Come on, I'm giving you a compliment.
We tried to do-- Which was really important to Alex, Will and I...
...was for the characters to be smart...
...and for thoughts to be moving through their minds...
...and their dialogue, you know, pretty rapidly.
Not to get stuck in that, kind of:
"Now let's stop the scene to say the important thing."
And all somehow irrationally recognize...
...it's the important thing, even though we don't know where it's going.
So, you know, we hope that works for us.
Nice shoes.
This scene is the physical representation of Lanning's back-story.
There are pieces of it we ended up throwing away, not shooting.
We used to have stacks of mail, then realized nobody would have mail.
We had this screen that said, "You have 5000 unread e-mails."
We were trying all kinds of stuff.
You know, the idea is...
...that he hasn't been here for a while.
Then as you go upstairs, you realize even when he was here...
...he was being watched.
And the construct of Lanning's hologram...
...is based on this rather elaborate idea...
...which is, he really is being watched by V.I.K.I. all the time...
...so he can't just leave a note:
"Dear world, V.I.K.I. bad. Run."
He has to actually create a way for Del...
...to come to this information organically.
In a way, this is also quite convoluted because it helps...
...the entertainment value of our movie.
Lawrence Robertson, CEO.
Lanning's environment is--
Again, it's very old-fashioned, you know. He....
He doesn't have a lot of futuristic trappings.
It's kind of very different to what you'd expect. This sort of--
The guy who is at the forefront of robotic design...
...in this 2035 world to have.
But it seemed to ring true. I mean, it seemed like....
You know, he's got some sort of modern equipment in his house.
But he just-- He likes older stuff.
I think this also, sort of, in a way related him to Will's character...
...because Will's kind of the same.
Spooner's kind of the same in this film.
He just likes the warmth of....
Of older furniture and a sort of more familiar environment.
Here is the "ghosts in the machine" speech...
...which is, again, sort of the idea behind the movie.
Ultimately, V.I.K.I...
...is a ghost in the machine, or V.I.K.I. is the result of the ghosts in the machine.
She's the result of natural robotic evolution...
...guided by the existence of the Three Laws.
And Lanning finally makes a decision somewhere off-screen...
...that it's better for a robot to have free will...
...and empathy than it is...
...for us to try to regulate robotic behavior...
...and remove empathy from the equation.
Because ultimately, without empathy...
...the robots will never be humane.
What might be called behavior.
Unanticipated, these free radicals....
The scene in Lanning's house is actually...
...a fun combination of CG miniatures...
...on-set effects, basically every trick in the book.
And I like doing scenes like that. I mean, I've always done them.
I think it's, in a way, when the budget is tight...
...which it was on this particular sequence, it was on the entire movie...
...often you can come up with little tricks that make things actually better.
And for me, the most successful aspects in the scene...
...where the house is being demolished and Will's running down the corridors...
...is stuff we actually did live on set.
We basically constructed a long corridor on the sound stage...
...and got a jeep and dressed the jeep up with some lights...
...and a few bits of dressing...
...to resemble a portion of the demo bot.
And basically had Will run down the corridor...
...the jeep followed him, with lights blazing...
...and we just dumped a whole bunch of stuff from the roof...
...to follow in Will's path.
And, you know...
...used long lenses to sort of blur the background out a little bit.
And we got some pretty dynamic shots that intercut...
...with the CG, intercut with the wider shots where you see more of the bot.
Actually contributed to this sort of mayhem, I think, that this scene has.
And often, the best film illusion is one you can achieve on the set quickly.
It's like a real rush to get something like that to work.
Um, you know, CG takes many months to--
To get right, and it's a very analytical process.
A very sort of scientific process of getting shots...
...and looking at them and analyzing them and seeing what's wrong...
...and fixing them and improving them.
I know it's a hell of a lot more fun just to sort of...
...wobble the camera around, run around like crazy with strobing lights...
...and get something really exciting happening right in front of you.
What happened to you? Do you ever have a normal day?
Yeah, once.
Essentially, you know...
...this is a scene where two people are arguing...
...about who they are.
It's not entirely typical for a science-fiction movie.
I mean, again, you know, it ain't Proust...
...but it's at least an attempt...
...to get a real argument about real feelings in.
This is also the scene where Susan's back-story is hinted at.
Again, you have to forgive me because I have, the older I get...
...more become a believer in never fully exposing somebody's back-story...
...unless the movie really requires it...
...because I think that's an artificial construct.
I think that generally people don't tell each other their deepest, darkest secrets.
Especially when they're in the midst of saving the world from robots.
She's sort of onto Will's because he is robo-phobic.
And so that behavior represents a psychological point of view...
...an attitude, a stance, which is, "Robots bad, people good."
Hers is more covert.
He's onto it himself when he busts her for being less than connected...
...less than warm.
But my view of Susan was that she was hurt badly.
Bridget and I discussed the idea that Susan Calvin was raped...
...and that she had become very, very uncomfortable...
...with the vagaries and potential hazards of human behavior.
And as she says in this scene, what she loves about robots is they're safe.
And so this is a paradigmatic crumbling for her.
This notion that robots might not be safe...
...is kind of the end of Susan's world as she knows it.
This construct has been....
She's generated this construct in order to survive, to navigate her environment.
Now this movie's taking it away from her.
That was a lot of what we talked about in order to bring emotion to this scene.
And mystery is required. Not only the mystery...
...but the characters to be mysterious as well.
It's a notion-- It's fractals.
You know, the little pieces have to echo the big piece.
If people are just entirely on their sleeves...
...you're not interested in watching them unravel a mystery...
...because they're no mystery.
The same old why! How much money is there in robots?
All I know is that old man was in trouble...
...and I'm sick of doing this shit by myself. You're on the inside.
You are going to help me find out what's wrong with these robots.
You want something to be wrong!
This was actually a difficult scene to get to look right...
...because I wanted Susan's apartment to be all clean, white and sterile...
...with a lot of very pale walls.
It's something I avoid like the plague in movies...
...because it's so hard to light them and make them look good.
At some point, I realized most of the scenes in her apartment are at night.
I'm going, "Why did I choose to make the walls white?"
And I think it still has a sort of interesting look to it.
But, you know, this is where the DI process comes in...
...and becomes very.... Very beneficial is you can actually--
I like actors to pop out of a scene.
You know, I like them to be dominant in the frame.
And that's why I tend to prefer darker walls...
...because actors stand out in relief against a darker backdrop.
And in this instance, because everything was so white in her apartment...
...we used this windowing technique...
...which is designed to darken the scene around them...
...and focus more specifically on areas of the frame we wanted to focus on.
I think it's gonna end up looking pretty good in the finished film.
I saw Bridget Moynahan in The Recruit.
I think that's really the first time I was aware of her work.
I thought she did a terrific job in that film, and, you know--
And we met, and, you know, she was one of a very short list of people...
...that we kept coming back to. She just really stood out for me.
I think she's a great Calvin. I think there's something...
...about the way she plays the character that really works for me. It's, um....
You know, a lot of actresses would've been scared...
...to take their characters into this kind of...
...sort of cold, austere quality, but I think she--
She sort of embraced it and she went for it...
...and I think she saw the fact that she could use that element...
...as a springboard into an evolutionary aspect...
...with her role, you know.
She really changes through the movie.
I mean, not just physically, but her character opens up in many ways.
And I think it's sort of an interesting arc.
But I think partly it works because she was brave enough to....
To go with the emotionless, cold, Susan Calvin...
...as written by Isaac Asimov...
...certainly in the earlier aspects of the movie.
Your robot will never be...
...out of communication with USR...
...and will be the perfect companion for business or home.
I like the idea that the NS-5s are sort of superseding the 4s...
...that, you know, everyone's kind of trading in their 4s...
...and getting the latest model.
You know, it has an ominous overtone obviously...
...because we know.... We believe by this point in the movie...
...that the 5s have something wrong with them.
It turns out they don't have anything wrong.
V.I.K.I.'s the one that has something wrong.
And even V.I.K.I. is not--
You know, V.I.K.I. is just sort of a victim of her limited programming, I suppose.
Oh, baby, he beat you so bad. I think about it all the time.
You keep making these pies this good, I may have to put you to work.
So you like the pie, huh?
- Mm-hm. - You can come in now.
Hello, Detective Spooner.
I won, Del! I won the lottery!
We been cooking like crazy.
This is where we set up Hansel and Gretel.
The idea here is to use a children's story as an allegory...
...running underneath the picture.
We tried to do it in a way that wasn't too head-on...
...so this is our first reference to it.
And, you know, it will pay off later on in the movie.
You got to let the past be past.
Oh, how did I ever raise such a mess?
I could follow your trail of crumbs all the way to school.
After "bread crumbs," she'd say, "And some egg."
I liked that line. I don't know why I liked it so much.
It didn't really help the movie, though.
It means the beginning of a new way of living.
Tell me this isn't the robot case.
The whole idea, really, behind the robots having dreams is that...
...you know, Lanning was convinced that they would evolve eventually.
I mean, I think it goes back to what we were saying before...
...which is, you give an organism or you allow an organism...
...to have a level of sophistication, at a certain point...
...it won't be completely predictable.
Other aspects of it will evolve, will surprise you with their complexity.
Um.... You know, I think the closer we get to an artificial intelligence...
...the closer it becomes to a human being...
...obviously the level of predictability will diminish...
...and there will be a development in its....
Its own interpretation of the programming...
...that is being placed into it.
Sonny?
Why didn't you respond?
I was dreaming.
By the way, there was a joke in this scene...
...which Alex and I really wanted to keep in.
And we couldn't keep it in the movie...
...because we were running out of special effects money...
...but Sonny used to say:
"Do you think they'll offer me a last meal?"
And she looked at him, really startled, and he said:
"I was making a joke."
And she was absolutely blown away by it...
...because it made no sense. Later on in the movie...
...she said to him, when she was about to kill him, she said:
"I think I'd like to hear that joke now."
And he said, "I'm too frightened."
And it was a really lovely little emotional couplet.
Don't you, doctor?
- Access USR mainframe. - Connecting.
How can I be of service, Detective Spooner?
Show me the last 50 messages between Dr. Lanning and Robertson.
Did you notice Will's not talking? We totally ADR'd that.
That's a constructed scene. We made that up as a patch.
This scene right here is actually from later in the movie that we moved.
We had a lot of dancing around the plot beads...
...in order to make sure they laid out exactly right.
Because they never are exactly the way you think they're gonna be.
We actually, for a-- You know, we were lucky...
...because obviously a movie this complex, in terms of the sort of...
...plot reveals...
...you don't have that much latitude.
So we were lucky in that we seemed to be able to do what we needed to do...
...within the confines of what we had.
We didn't reshoot on this movie, which is pretty rare.
I mean, actually that's not true. We shot three hours of a smile and a wink...
...which we'll see later. It's finally in the movie.
We did no reshooting of scenes or anything...
...and, you know, that's pretty anomalous.
This scene has always been in the movie, some version of it.
It used to not have robots in it. It used to just be trucks.
You know, I had an issue....
Earlier drafts of I, Robot, all the robots were sort of remote control...
...and Victor could sort of send anything at you at any time.
And I sort of thought it might be interesting...
...to create a more specific threat.
So the NS-5s now have this uplink...
...and that's what makes them susceptible to V.I.K.I.'s influence...
...her overriding of their programming.
You know, generally, most of the other technologies are immune.
They are still safe.
Now, of course, the demo bot violates that rule.
And at one point, we had a scene of an NS-5...
...standing next to it, reprogramming it.
And you have to assume that...
...there is an NS-5 in control of this truck and the one behind it.
Alex was in love with big, spherical wheels.
I like that he loves them. It would never have occurred to me.
You have to come up with something fresh and original.
Personally, I've never seen semitrailers go sideways...
...and drive along like this.
And I felt that was a pretty original concept.
I also like that we can do anything with these robots...
...like ram them into wheels and have them go get crushed under the trucks...
...and stuff that you couldn't necessarily do with human beings...
...in a PG-13 movie.
Always the most important thing is to try and keep it within the realms of....
Right on the edge of believability.
You know, right on the edge of, you know, having the audience...
...be thrilled by something, but not go, "Well, that would be impossible."
Some people might argue that we've...
...gone beyond the realms of believability, I guess, but to me, it's--
You know, every attack in the scene...
...is reinforced by some defensive maneuver that Will's character makes.
And I love the idea that at the very end when he's like--
There's so many robots, he's not gonna be able to defend himself...
...the best he can come up with is to spin into an uncontrollable 360 spin.
And sort of he gets out...
...just by the skin of his teeth, basically.
I like this beat right here, this moment after the accident, a lot.
Because...
...this is very unlike what generally happens...
...in action movies when somebody has a car wreck...
...which is, Will looks like he just got his ass kicked, and that's nice.
You know, it looks like he's shaking off real shock...
...and he's, you know, not all there, you know.
To the point where he almost gets hit by this carcass of a car.
You know, it's attempting to root it emotionally.
Root an-- You know, an ungrounded world, to ground it.
I also like the idea that you think the whole--
The car chase is over, and then it's not over.
It's continuing.
So to me, I think this is-- I'm glad we got to do this scene...
...because at one point we weren't gonna be able to do...
...this hand-to-hand fight with the robot.
I just think it's good to see Will just in a....
You know, just in close combat with one of those things.
I think it's quite scary.
There was a discussion about not doing everything in the movie.
I mean, quite literally, at one point or another...
...every single sequence in this movie...
...every single action sequence was doubted...
...and shot down by the studio.
You know, at one stage, I was being asked to make the car chase...
...you know, a '67 Mustang. Will driving a '67 Mustang...
...and the robots driving old-fashioned, you know, oil tankers or something.
Some horrible thing out of, you know, Terminator or something.
I think just because there was a doubt in the--
There was an ongoing doubt on the studio's behalf...
...about the level of...
...you know, visual interest that we were gonna be able to bring to those scenes.
A lot of robots are really scary...
...but in some ways, one mutated robot is even scarier.
I love the reveal. Yeah, I mean, to me--
Look, left to my own devices...
...I would've spent a little more time...
...a couple more scenes, before we knew what that was.
I just think it's great because I believe that if you haven't seen the movie...
...and, by the way, you know the title...
...you might think, until the scene with Calvin...
...that Will is a robot too.
And I'm really okay with that. I think that's fun.
Because I think there's something great whenever you can create...
...in the audience the same experience the characters are having.
If confusion about identity is part of this movie...
...I think it's neat for the audience to spend some time wondering...
...what was human and what wasn't.
- All right, what do we got? - Ask him.
Chi McBride, great guy.
A really cool guy, a really good actor.
I think he does a great job as Bergin, who's Will's superior.
I mean, to me, what I like about the dynamic between the two...
...between Will and Chi, is that they're sort of mates, you know.
They're-- I mean, you know, Chi is the sort of...
...the lieutenant, but he's-- You know, he really likes Will.
And he just feels bad. He's trying to help the guy out.
He's trying to....
You know, he knows he's been through this bad shit with the little girl dying.
He's just trying to be his friend, you know. Trying to keep him in line.
And I think it's, you know-- It's sort of--
I think it's heartbreaking to him that Spooner is--
Well, from his point of view, is sort of going off the deep end at this point.
Give me your badge.
This is a scene with Chi which sells the depth of the relationship.
And I think Will...
...you know, really sells this idea that maybe he's going off the edge, certainly.
Not from the perspective of the audience, but those around him.
He looks like-- If you hadn't seen what we just saw...
...he'd seem crazy.
Oh, boy.
You don't have an uplink to USR....
Here is the classic example of:
"Hi, we'll throw away important exposition."
It's the thing we like to do in this movie.
I mean, "You have no uplink to USR...
...and your alloy seems denser than normal."
Those things are really important to understand the end of the movie.
We say them and we show them.
We have a monitor that's saying "no uplink" and, you know....
But if you're not paying attention, you're screwed.
And, you know, I hope that's okay. We like it.
You know, and here, this is the "Sonny has a heart," right?
Alex hates when I say that.
Um.... But, you know, it is.
Here is revealed Calvin as she has begun to transform.
Both in wardrobe, hair...
...look and affect.
Something has changed inside of her. She's explored this robot...
...and the paradigm has cracked sufficiently to let something free.
This speech used to be much longer.
And she used to talk quite a bit about...
...this secondary processing system being fluidic...
...responsive to the tides, to the moon.
It was an approximate discussion of an emotional center.
Then she described it as something that could override the Three Laws.
So here begins the notion...
...that the heart is stronger than the mind.
But the nascent feeling is still there. The speech has been reduced.
A robot not bound by those laws could do--
Anything.
All right, look, whatever's going on down at USR, that robot is the key.
And I need you to get me inside to talk to it again.
I really like this idea that, you know, Susan is such a--
Her understanding of technology in this world is so advanced...
...yet it's at the point where she doesn't know...
...how an old-fashioned CD player works.
I mean, she's just young enough in this world...
...where you would believe that she sort of missed out on CD technology.
She thinks you gotta talk to it.
There's a human comedy of errors...
...which I think is a lovely way into a relationship that's starting to get closer.
Poor Susan doesn't know how to work the thing...
...and she learns, and then behavior...
...ostensibly natural behavior...
...moves Spooner to a place of unwitting exposure...
...and she spots it.
And they begin this moment of connectedness.
And I like it because it's slightly erotic...
...but it's not really sexual.
She's...
...almost like a child.
And she can't believe what she has in front of her.
This is what she does for a living.
To see this perfectly integrated cybernetic system.
And she almost forgets...
...that he's human.
What I like is that it seems she's more interested in the mechanics of his arm...
...but then at some point she realizes she's touching his chest and--
You know, there's a moment of attraction there...
...which I find really amusing.
It's a great thing about her character.
I think this is a very telling moment that she can be so...
...you know, involved with the science of the moment...
...and realize that there's actually human emotion going on...
...be surprised by the human emotion.
To me, look, the most important thing of any movie is human emotion.
You know, it's characters and emotion...
...and you've gotta not lose sight of that. Um....
You know, if it's a big special effects movie...
...you've gotta work a little harder...
...to retain an environment where the actors feel...
...they can do what they do best, you know.
So I try and give them as much support in that as I possibly can...
...and almost ignore the fact that it's a visual effects movie.
I mean, I said that up front to all the visual effects guys on this movie...
...particularly John Nelson, our supervisor.
I kept saying, "I wanna shoot this like a regular movie.
I don't want it to be....
I don't wanna get, you know, stuck in the complexity of the on-set...
...you know, technology. I just wanna...
...for a moment believe I'm shooting a real movie...
...and I have real robots on the set that I can work with.
So anything that you can do...
...to streamline it in that respect, we should do it."
I already know everybody's dead.
Just a few more minutes before we figure it out.
An NS-4 was passing by....
I just am no good at writing normal people.
I should never do it.
I'm sure that if you were to track the drafts from...
...the beginning to the end, as you got more and more me in it...
...the characters become more and more damaged.
These stories are always...
...healing metaphors for me.
I don't know why. I'm limited in that way.
It's the story I know how to tell.
And the idea of someone stuck in trauma, you know, trapped in time...
...that's so profoundly human, you know.
And the idea that his love for something other than...
...something human liberates him, that's kind of cool.
It calculated that I had a 45 percent chance of survival.
I have an interest in movies that create illusions.
And unfortunately the-- Not unfortunately...
...but the technology that you require to do that...
...forces you in a certain direction.
Even when I first started making movies in film school...
...I mean, I was very influenced by 1940s movies.
I'd shoot in black and white and do bad rear projection...
...because I just like that quality, you know.
So I used to-- I used to seek out the artifice...
...the stuff that I'd seen in movies and resulted in a certain look.
I used to try and reproduce that artifice...
...because I just thought it was cool.
My stylistic choices have changed.
I mean, I'm moving far closer to what I call naturalism...
...but it's my own sense of naturalism.
Because to me, the ultimate thing is to take an unreality...
...and make it feel as real as possible. I think that, to me...
...combines everything into a really interesting package.
So I'm looking for ways-- I wanna shoot a film in available light...
...but it's not gonna be a naturalistic drama of, you know...
...of people in our contemporary world.
It's probably gonna be a surrealistic story, you know.
But I love the fact that you can imbue fantasy with this kind of naturalism...
...this sense of naturalism. I think it's a really powerful combination.
I remember sort of pitching to Alex...
...that robots could draw with two hands, not one...
...and because Alex is so odd, he literally clapped and giggled and walked away.
And I wasn't sure I was ever gonna see him again.
But it is kind of fun.
This scene in the lab with Sonny, which looks quite natural...
...and the robot seems to integrate well into the scene...
...there's a complex process to get to the final result.
We go through several stages in the process.
We-- They start with...
...the actor in the situation, then they remove the actor.
They paint the actor out, but they use the actor as a guide.
So Alan's now gone from the background...
...but his spirit is still being used as a guide for the animation.
What I see is-- I see a thing that's referred to as a "blocking pass"…
...which shows me a very crude version of the animation.
Roughly how the robot's walking, where it's gonna walk...
...where it's gonna stop, et cetera. There's no detail.
I mean, it's a very simplistic, animated version of the robot.
Then we do a more sophisticated render...
...which shows me a sense of where the lighting is gonna be...
...and we refine the animation, we refine the lip synch...
...until we're happy with the way the expression, the emotion...
...the movement and the lip synch is all working together.
And then they take it into a final render...
...where they apply the very complex model...
...to create this fully translucent robot. And that's the final stage...
...and then they composite that into the final image.
So it's a multi-stepped process to get to the finished result.
We all have a purpose. Don't you think, detective?
This is the beginning of Spooner's unconscious emerging...
...in that he sort of refers to Sonny as a person...
...sort of the opposite of what Calvin just did...
...rather than an object. And there's connectedness going on here...
...and this realization that...
...Spooner preexists-- Spooner exists in Sonny's consciousness...
...so that leads all the way back to the moment in the interrogation room...
...where Spooner says, "How did you know my name?"
In fact, Sonny knows more than we might have thought.
That's right. I'm just a 6-foot-2, 200-pound civilian...
Detective! - ... here to kick another civilian's ass.
We had a really awful translite made for this sequence.
A translite is essentially a backing that's used outside of a window...
...to create the impression of a city environment...
...or some kind of landscape outside of a set.
And in this particular instance, the backdrop arrived...
...literally the day before we had to start shooting in Robertson's office...
...and it was awful. It was-- I don't know what went wrong.
We had a pretty reputable bunch of people working on it...
...but the lighting was wrong, the buildings were poorly montaged...
...and so we had to shoot this entire scene--
Years ago, this would've been a major disaster.
We probably would have had to have stopped shooting...
...or rescheduled and come back to it or just live with the poor results.
But, literally, every single shot against the windows in these scenes...
...any scene in Robertson's office, the backdrop has been removed...
...and a new scene has been inserted outside.
It's interesting that you can do that now...
...because, literally, this sequence was not shot as a VFX sequence.
You know, there was no motion-control camera...
...nothing, really, to make it practical to achieve...
...a visual effect outside the window. No green screens.
And yet somehow in every shot...
...they used what's known as a luminance key...
...to place the new scene outside the window...
...and I think it's generally pretty successful.
- Sorry, I'm allergic to bullshit. - Hey, let's be clear!
There is no conspiracy!
What this is, is one old man's one mistake.
Susan, just be logical.
There's a level of humor in the movie I think works really well...
...and I think if it comes from Will's character, it generally does.
I think it's-- You know, his character...
...uses humor as a sort of, you know, defense mechanism.
Though, obviously, moments in the movie where the studio...
...were pushing us towards humor, pushing both Will and myself...
...towards humor that we felt was wrong, was incorrect.
I'll do it myself.
- Okay. - I get it.
Somebody gets out of line around here, you just kill them.
Good day, Mr. Spooner.
The thing you don't wanna do...
...which the movie always was in danger of doing...
...was too often relying on Lanning.
You know, and by the way, Lanning even exists as an expositional technique.
I only brought him back to that hilltop very late...
...in my revising of the script. Jeff had always had him back there.
It was a factory and it was different--
But there was always a second Lanning beat.
And I kept him out of it for a very long time...
...tried to build the story without him...
...and then bring him back. I think Jeff was right, ultimately, to have him there.
But it's a temptation I found myself wanting to resist...
...because it's not deus ex machina...
...but unless you really are careful about how you got there...
...it can feel very sort of, you know, "manna from heaven."
Lake Michigan landfill. Once such a blight on our city....
I got enamored of this idea of Lake Michigan being a landfill.
Now, I know that's really unlikely, but I just thought it was a cool idea.
Authorized entry.
This scene was so much longer.
We had these really long, interesting-ish...
...discussions of human faith...
...as it exists in robotics, in the period of the movie.
You know, and sort of thrown-away references...
...to the robots who work the reactors, interplanetary mining.
It was a little bit more of a--
Sort of a world-view thrown in...
...sort of as an aside, but a little evocative.
We were just-- We were here forever in this scene.
I don't mean in the shooting of it, in the cutting of it.
And we'd sort of looked at each other and went, "Okay, less."
- Nanites. - Yes.
A safeguard should a positronic brain malfunction.
Like mine.
Yes, Sonny. Like yours.
This notion, this reprise of the "ghost in the machine" section...
...was something that I'm really happy about, and it really is...
...a testament to Alex, who fought to keep this in the movie...
...because it's very uncharacteristic for, you know...
...a big sort of summery movie...
...to sort of stop and muse about philosophy.
And I wrote it because I loved it...
...and I thought it was great to get those ideas in there. They're not--
It ain't rocket science. I'm not saying anything that new at all.
It was just, I thought, a nice thing to bring these questions up.
I'm sure it's the same questions everybody's been asking...
...since anybody's been writing stories about artificial intelligence and evolution.
But, you know, Alex ended up staking it out...
...and sort of thinking how the movie wouldn't function without it...
...and at moments where, in the process of a movie coming together...
...things like that are often vulnerable, he really fought for it...
...and I appreciate it.
There have always been ghosts in the machine.
Random segments of code...
...that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols.
Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will...
...creativity...
...and even the nature of what we might call the soul.
Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light?
There was the quintessential paranoia scene:
Will leaving the precinct, and there were a bunch of robots there...
...and they seem to be communicating...
...and they turn to Will, then this homeless guy starts screaming:
"They're talking about you." It was the Body Snatchers scene.
It was kind of great. It's a Vintar scene. It was great.
We moved it-- Jeff had it in a subway.
Well, it was actually an elevated railway...
...and then we moved it around, but we could never quite get it in.
It was a cool scene.
When we talked about reshoots, we talked about reshooting that.
This scene, the way you're seeing it in the movie...
...I'm assuming will not be as wildly obvious as in the preview...
...that the eyes of the fake robot, of the actual generic NS-5...
...are a different color.
At this point, there was a scene which has been cut from the movie...
...which was about--
It sort of touched upon Will's relationship with Lanning.
He actually-- In this scene, he kind of apologizes and thanks Lanning...
...for, you know, basically letting him continue living, you know...
...which is what Lanning did.
We cut it for pacing reasons, which is a bit of a shame...
...but, you know, to me, it was a pretty nice scene.
You know, it sort of just....
It sort of elaborated a little bit the relationship between the two.
What do I see here?
I'm sorry. My responses are limited.
Lanning used Sarah, who's the little girl who died...
...as a kind of emotional kind of...
...impetus to Spooner to get him to explain a point.
A rather intellectual point about emotion overriding logic.
Lanning and Spooner had a more detailed conversation...
...about why Sonny had been given the opportunity...
...to override his Three Laws.
That being that emotion can override logic.
And logic...
...or at least its form as the Three Laws...
...will lead to only one inevitable conclusion...
...and that conclusion is revolution.
And so we had a little bit more of a mind game getting there.
And ultimately...
...we lost the emotional beat...
...because we took a cutaway of Robertson and used it earlier...
...which you saw, and we couldn't tell whether it was too convoluted or not.
And we felt like we wanted the movie to move quicker at this juncture.
And again, if anything comes back in the DVD, I wouldn't be surprised if it's that.
We looked at each other yesterday, "I kind of miss it."
"Yeah, me too." So we'll see.
Human in danger!
Human in danger! Human in danger! Human in danger!
I believe...
...as far as I can tell, that Bridget is actually naked, but I don't know.
I'm just saying for the record.
All characters in my movies get shower scenes.
Not all of them, but many of them do.
Not necessarily shower scenes, but they get to do a scene in a bathroom...
...because, as you well know, bathrooms are very important to me.
One day I'd like to do a movie where it's just people in bathrooms.
It would be like a kind of a....
A sort of a Jim Jarmusch kind of thing, you know.
Move now. I'm going to service.
Please remain indoors. This is for your own protection.
There were, at various times, a lot more cutaways...
...to this sort of-- The world being occupied by robots.
Some of them we shot and didn't use, some of them we didn't shoot.
We-- You know what, we played with a lot.
And this is actually something that changed over the course of shooting...
...for both creative and budgetary reasons...
...which is, the original takeover of the city was bigger...
...and it sort of involved a kind of robotic cordoning off of humans into sectors...
...sort of like living robotic corrals.
Slowly, over time, we started to believe the movie wasn't escalating correctly...
...that it got too big before we got to V.I.K.I. level...
...so that you ended up with what felt like the climax of a different movie...
...because, obviously, just off, say, the trailer...
...this movie could end in the streets.
This could be the movie that ends with the big war of humans and robots.
And what happened is, we kind of ended up building that movie.
We wrote it, we boarded it, we budgeted it...
...and we started to think to ourselves...
...that it was more than we wanted if V.I.K.I. level was gonna be important.
We wanted V.I.K.I. level to be important.
We wanted the climax to be about character.
We wanted it to be that recapitulation we were talking about.
And the grammar of that didn't exist anywhere on the street.
On the street, it was just gonna be wild, random, giant melee.
And when we looked at how much it cost to finish it that way...
...and what we wanted to do later, we started scaling it back.
So over time, during the course of the movie...
...we made less and less of a meal of that...
...although still, I think, quite a nice one.
Please remain calm and return to your residences immediately.
A source of great mirth on the set...
...was the fact that our proxy actors...
...when the red light comes on on the robots' chests...
...we would simulate the interactive lighting...
...with sort of flashlight bulbs...
...attached to their chests.
And at some point--
The robots only have one, but the human proxies on set...
...we actually had two of them...
...because we felt we needed a little bit more illumination.
Simon Duggan, I think, needed more levels...
...so we strapped another one on.
So we had some rather absurd moments on the shoot...
...where we had dozens of these guys in green leotards...
...wearing two red lights on their chests...
...which we, of course, started referring to as "titty lights."
Which constantly amused us all.
We were sort of shut down by the city after our first night of robot wars...
...in downtown Vancouver there. Because as things go, on a night shoot...
...it takes you a while to set up.
And in this instance, we had hundreds of people with guns...
...and all sorts of things...
...and a pretty complex sequence...
...and one that we wanted to be sure was done very safely.
So it obviously took us quite a while to set up our first shot...
...and I think the first take was done at 3:00 in the morning.
Of course, by that stage, everyone had gone to sleep...
...and thought we were the quietest crew in the world...
...in all the surrounding high-rise apartment buildings.
And then we sadly disrupted that theory...
...when 400 people started shooting automatic weapons as we yelled "action."
So there was a little bit of, you know--
A little bit of discord and upset.
And I regret it, but it was really the only way we could do it.
Then the next day it was, you know, very--
A lot of disputes going on with the city council people.
I mean, the funniest moment was-- We had full permission to do it and all...
...but the funniest moment for me was...
...I was sitting around waiting between setups...
...and I saw this incredibly irate guy who was obviously one of the people...
...who was trying to get some sleep in the apartment buildings...
...and he saw me and made an absolute beeline.
This is amongst thousands of people and extras and ADs...
...and he made a complete beeline right to me.
I guess I was the only guy sitting around doing nothing.
And he was so furious he couldn't get the words out, and he was like:
"Who do I talk to? Who is responsible for this?"
And I just had to say, "I'm sorry, man. I don't know. I'm just hanging out here.
I don't work here."
So as to avoid his wrath, and then moved on, moved away.
It's the service areas. It's one of those things that really is set up.
At the beginning when Spooner asks about surveillance, Calvin says:
"Of course, standard procedure everywhere except the service areas."
And then here when she opens the hatch to the subbasement, she says:
"Service areas." And he says, "No surveillance."
Service areas. No surveillance.
- Fire alarm. - He must have evacuated the building.
Everything's locked down. But don't worry, I've got a man inside.
I think this is one of Sonny's most Sonny-like lines...
...which is when he says, "Well, technically, I was never alive...
...but I appreciate your concern." I think that's very Sonny.
Technically, I was never alive. But I appreciate your concern.
I made a switch. It was an unprocessed NS-5.
Basically, I fried an empty shell.
- I couldn't destroy him. He was too-- - Unique.
It just didn't feel right.
You and your feelings. They just run you, don't they?
Two thousand eight hundred and eighty steps, detective.
Do me a favor, keep that kind of shit to yourself.
V.I.K.I. level was a very complex thing to shoot...
...because the whole set was raised up.
It was all these steel catwalks.
And it was only raised up maybe 8 feet off the floor...
...but it's amazing how much--
How complicated that makes things.
You know, when you have all your actors running around, and....
You know, you have to be careful because people can get hurt...
...just by falling that small distance.
And often we would have to disassemble the set so as to get our cameras in...
...and then reassemble it afterwards. That took an enormous amount of time.
So every setup on V.I.K.I. level took hours to do.
Nothing was easy. You couldn't just run in there with a hand-held camera.
You have to build everything up...
...build platforms up to the level to get it all shot...
...so it was extremely frustrating and time-consuming to do.
And apart from that, it was all against green screen...
...and we had hundreds of robots running around...
...and glass falling from the ceiling and God knows what else...
...that certainly added to the complexity.
Poor old man.
He saw what was coming.
He knew no one would believe him.
If you had the luxury of making the movie...
...after you made the movie...
...there are things you imagine doing.
Having said that, rarely would you ever get all the things you got...
...because so much of what exists...
...is there because of this kind of surprising collision of factors on the day.
That's why movies are exciting to make.
Because it is the definition of "the best-laid plans of mice and men."
I mean, they are, you know, cascades of miracles...
...that they work at all.
And there is something of a first love in every movie.
It's like a new relationship.
And you get to exploit that, for lack of a better word, magic.
If you went back and did it again, much of what you remembered...
...as being joyous would not live up under the cold scrutiny of real life.
There's something nice about seeing it through the gossamer of memories.
So, you know, could we all go back and do it again? Yeah.
Would we do it better? No.
Are there things we would fix? Yeah, probably, but it's not worth it.
I mean, I'm really proud of this thing...
...and I really, really enjoyed and admired...
...the people I worked with.
And that's sort of all you can ask for your day job.
All the actors in this were great, and we had a really good time.
Everyone had a great sense of humor...
...and when you're making a film this complex technically...
...there's a lot of waiting around and a lot of frustrations...
...when things don't work on set...
...and everyone took it in their stride, and we had a lot of....
A lot of amusing moments, let's say.
You know, I make an effort to-- If there is something that's taking a lot of time...
...to explain as much as I can before I bore people into submission.
Because I think it's the toughest part for them, is...
...you know, having to do a scene that takes on-screen...
...you know, 30 seconds to play out...
...can take sometimes three or four days to shoot.
And to sustain yourself over that period of time...
...and hit the same level of energy and emotion on every shot...
...though the shots can be shot days apart, is a real challenge, I think.
Go! Go!
At one stage, I wanted V.I.K.I. to be able to move up and down...
...the actual positronic brain component...
...which would have been very much like the Krell facility.
But it's, um....
Partly why I wanted to do that is because I needed her...
...to be different heights for different parts of the movie.
The best I could come up with was to move her where I wanted...
...but it sort of proved a little bit impractical.
V.I.K.I. has more of a relationship to HAL than to Frankenstein's monster.
Frankenstein's monster is quite human in his despair.
Um.... HAL, I believe, at least...
...is rationalizing his behavior...
...which I don't think Frankenstein's monster--
Frankenstein's monster is kind of misguided, wronged...
...and then just pissed off.
HAL is self-serving, but attempting to generate a cognitive construct...
...that makes him think it's okay.
And V.I.K.I. is one step further than that...
...in that she believes she's serving humankind.
You are making a mistake. Do you not see the logic of my plan?
To me, the great thing about this movie is that...
...yes, it delivers on a sort of "action robots can be bad"…
...that there's some peril, there's some excitement...
...which I think you have to on a movie of this scale.
I don't think we could make a movie without some--
Like a big blockbuster movie without some level of conflict...
...between man and machine taking place.
But on this flip side, you've got Sonny, who is anything but that.
And to me, I think, you know...
...I sort of feel there's a level of reality going on in many ways...
...because we're saying robots are complex enough creatures...
...that they can be.... They can be "good" and "bad"…
...because they're not really being bad. They're justified in what they're doing.
From their perspective, completely justified.
I mean, they're trying to save the world.
So I think, for me, it gives an interesting sort of level...
...to a justification for a sequence like this to exist in this movie.
Now, here's the one where you gotta figure, "How's he gonna get them out?
Because there's a whole force field there...
...so unless he breaks the force field while he's in there...
...those nanites are trapped inside," I'm just saying.
These are not red flags. These are things we look at and go:
"Oh, well, that one got away."
You know, there are a lot of decisions in a movie.
I can answer, I can say:
"Well, the field generator actually turns out to be inside the field to protect it...
...so, in fact, Sonny's ability to reach through the field is part and parcel...
...of his ability to disengage it."
See, now, that's total bullshit, but I can say it like it might be real...
...and there's enough logic to it to let you go, "Okay, keep going."
I find that whenever I am in doubt, I just say the words:
"Engage the inertial dampeners," and I'm fine.
I also feel that it's one story...
...out of a much bigger universe...
...and more complex world, and I think if you think of this movie...
...as one short story out of a collection of many short stories...
...and actually many novels and many other stories...
...it's a component, it's one event...
...it's one particular incident in a much richer universe.
So I think, for me, you know, it's not the be all and end all.
I think, in some ways, people are attributing the movie...
...with a lot more than it's capable of doing in two hours.
I am deeply useless in that action sequence.
I mean, what I'm useful for, I believe, is in concert with my partners...
...in this case, Will and Alex...
...really bearing down on what the outcome goal is...
...that we're looking for, building to and repeating this moment of choice...
...Will's ability to rely on that which has failed him in his past.
And the success of that leap of faith, which this literally is, right? Um....
So I know we're getting there, and I'm gonna do everything...
...to make sure we get there. How we get there--
Let me put it this way, I was there for almost every day of dialogue...
...and when they started shooting this, I was calling them...
...and asking them how it was going.
Look, on the other hand, I'm sure there are many writers who are wildly useful...
...in that context. I'm just not one of them.
What we have here is Spooner's opportunity...
...to literally perform a recapitulation.
It is the recapitulation complex taken to its most metaphoric or literal.
He gets to be in a circumstance where, again...
...his fate is in the hands of a robot.
Save the girl!
Spooner!
Suddenly, Spooner's put back into the nightmare of his incident...
...with the little girl, which is, he's dependent on the robot...
...to do what's right and not do what's logically correct.
And in this instance, because he's dealing with a robot...
...that is capable of making a moral judgment...
...as opposed to just blindly following the law...
...he does make the right decision...
...and in fact allows a sequence of events to happen that actually do work.
Action has to function as an expression of character.
I mean, if, in fact, your action sequence does not serve character growth...
...don't do it, especially a climactic action sequence.
That's why we didn't end in the street. We ended here...
...because here was the canvas on which we could paint this exact moment.
It's a repetition of what happened in the car...
...but this time we get the chance to have the successful outcome.
The outcome informed by empathy.
The robot with a heart gets to reach out...
...and we get to reach back.
And that's character. Getting there, you know, that's the action part.
The story isn't over when they dispense with V.I.K.I.
The film has opened up into a much greater moral dilemma now.
And to me, this is why I like ending the movie in the way it does...
...is there are much bigger questions that have been raised.
To me, it's a testament to the complexity of the story...
...that it doesn't just end with blowing up the mad computer.
It actually lends itself to a story beyond that story.
It took us a while to arrive at the ending, which you've seen...
...and which you're seeing now. We had several different alternatives.
What we did is, we wanted to open ourselves to the question...
...of Sonny's continuing on, what the future might bring for him...
...the resolution of this notion of destiny...
...what to do now, now that your programming is completed.
And to bring him back to an icon we've seen earlier, the man on the hill.
You know, when we end with Sonny...
...going out to the industrial wasteland...
...and at the point where he doesn't know what he has to do...
...but he knows that he's free...
...and he has to use his free will to determine where he goes from there...
...I think that's a really beautiful way to end a movie that's ostensibly about...
...the rediscovery...
...and the birth of emotion.
You know, for me, Spooner and Calvin rediscover emotion...
...rediscover their humanity, and so does Sonny.
Sonny discovers it without rediscovering it...
...because he's never had it in the first place...
...but he discovers what it is to be human.
No. He said I had to promise.
This scene was also kind of fun...
...because this was the opportunity to do a final twist.
By now, nobody's remembered the murder mystery...
...and I really wanted to come back to it.
I wanted to end the movie as it began, as a murder mystery...
...and I want it to be a twist.
I wanted to not know who did it all the way through.
And though I think everybody thought they knew who did it...
...as soon as V.I.K.I. was revealed, I wanted it to be Sonny after all.
I wanted us to be guessing all the way through.
I wanted it to be a little bit more complicated...
...um, both emotionally and narratively.
I think, ultimately, it is a testament to Alan's performance...
...and his incarnation as Sonny, that you're okay with it.
That, in fact, it's okay to say that your protagonist was a killer...
...even though he was a killer for all the right reasons...
...because Lanning made him promise to do it...
...and then he simply fulfilled that promise.
But, you know, it's an odd choice.
Are we making it too complicated for a mass audience?
Are we making it too rich and too detailed? Um....
And, you know, every step of the way, we've shown that the movie...
...actually works better with an extra level of richness and detail to it.
But it remains to be seen whether we'll be allowed to retain those aspects.
They, that is, the studio, and I'm choosing not to name names...
...at this point, think of it as:
"But what if someone has a question to ask at the end of the movie?
What if someone is unsure what's gonna happen?"
And I'm going, "But isn't that a great thing?
Isn't it actually cool if people come out of the theater...
...and there's a little bit of a dialogue with their friends...
...about what the ending was about and what happened?"
It's not like we're making it so mysterious, but there's...
...an element of interpretation. And I think that's a really cool thing, you know...
...as long as it feels emotionally satisfying, which I believe it does.
If there are a few ideas, a few questions that are thrown out by it...
...my God, it's like-- I mean, everyone says they get sick of seeing movies...
...where you forget the moment you walk out the door of the theater...
...so it's actually kind of nice to have something people are gonna talk about.
I hope to God they do.
I mean, we would have succeeded admirably if they manage to do that.
Or if we manage to get them to do that.
We also got an opportunity now to pull back and out...
...in a way that sort of creates scope and scale...
...and leaves you with a bigger visceral experience of the movie.
The essential philosophical constructs of the story are embedded within it...
...and it's very hard to completely wash those away.
There is a complexity that is inherent there.
It makes you ask questions.
It makes you think about things.
And it does come essentially from Asimov...
...but I also think it's a great testament to Jeff Vintar and Akiva Goldsman...
...and what they brought to the story as well.
It is hard to sweep that away, but you can certainly diminish it...
...and make it feel like a cop-out at the end of the movie...
...and the studio are more than capable of achieving that at this point in time.
Because the one thing I can guarantee is, if you end this movie poorly...
...and you try and dismiss what you've seen for the last hour and a half...
...and that's what people are left with, then that's a really, really bad thing.
That's enough to severely compromise the film, you know.
So we hope that that's not what happens.
We hope that--
You know, to a certain extent, we're at the mercy of a test audience...
...and it's horrific to be in that situation, but we are.
We hope that people find the ending emotionally satisfying...
...and we're allowed to proceed with this ending.
Which, personally, I don't find that challenging an ending.
I mean, I find it a fulfilling ending, but it's not like we're killing...
...the hero of the movie in the last three minutes of the film.
We are simply doing something that we all feel is emotionally resonant...
...and satisfying. A way to end the film.