Most of it is shot on location, certainly the action sequences. So it’s incredibly complicated in Central London with all the restrictions. We wanna have extremely anarchic scenes but keep everything grounded so you fully believe what’s happening to these characters. Even though they’re shootouts in Central London or King’s Cross Station, you wanna feel this isn’t fantasy land.
It’s a paranoid conspiracy thriller. What is truth in a post-truth world? It hit the sweet spot for me, but it didn’t feel like anything I had done. I had no idea what would happen next, which I always loved. So I jumped in and developed it with Eric, Noah, and Mike for the subsequent five hours and directed all of them.
I am proud that we updated a classic story without feeling like a rehash. It felt like we were in a time in the world ripe for retelling this story. There’s been a collapse of trust in the idea of truth, and Ronan’s script felt like a post-truth thriller. We wanted to retell the story in a way that felt appropriate and illuminating for our time. The way audiences have responded to it at multiple levels indicates that we’ve achieved what we wanted.
I like what Cheech said recently: “We both got to tell our stories, and nobody got killed.” There are always two sides to every story. The fact that they were both willing to sit down and talk individually gave me greater context. I always knew that I wanted them together, but first, I needed to hear what they had to say alone.
I love how he sees space on a spectrum of human thought, from robotic missions to the actual science that we do, telescopes, observations, and leaping into the imagination. He can discuss all this and reveal his passion for it. He sees our fascination with space and what it means to us on a larger scale, and I thought I could make a movie about this guy.
There are so many levels of existential crisis. The choice that they made was to be proactive, to resist, and also to continue their art, to hold onto their humanity. It’s a juxtaposition that exists within their lives. It held up the most precise mirror possible to the reality of peaceful people who fight and then go home at night and make something beautiful.
I know that Bill Murray has better things to do. He definitely doesn’t need me or this movie. If he wants to be here, I wonder what he’s gonna do with that role. You know? It’d probably be exciting. I’ve been lucky with this. I was lucky that my first film had Robert Downey Jr attached – who doesn’t wanna work with an actor like that?
What is interesting about this story is that it works on an emotional and intellectual level. The crimes are horrible and unimaginable but when you examine the context of the time in history and the societal influences there is a strange logic there. It makes them not just isolated acts of evil, but part of an oppressive community. Then it starts becoming a story about all of us.
I happen to think that the films that I do, I feel like in the end, are not going to be disposable, that they’re going to be movies that people want to revisit. So it’s up to me to make sure every detail goes into them so when they do revisit it, they enjoy it even more or see something they never saw.
We built an image-based treatment as an edit of the film to explore how Elwood and Turner see the world differently. Then we populated it with the necessary language to convey certain moments. We worked with this idea called adjacent imagery – imagery that’s not solely plot-driven. It has a sort of experiential, metaphoric, and symbolic resonance so that it’s not so utilitarian.
