Surrogates

From Jonathan Mostow, director of the blockbuster “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, comes the new sci-fi action-thriller “Surrogates.”

In the film, FBI agents (Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell) investigate the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a high-tech surrogate phenomenon that allows people to purchase unflawed robotic versions of themselves – fit, good looking remotely controlled machines that ultimately assume their life roles – enabling people to experience life vicariously from the comfort and safety of their own homes.  The murder spawns a quest for answers:  in a world of masks, who’s real and who can you trust?

Mostow talks about “Surrogates” in the following interview: 

Question: Was there ever a thought to having another actor play Bruce Willis’ Surrogate?

Jonathan Mostow: The question was, how do you represent both him and his Surrogate doppelganger? I decided on having the same actor because it’s a very different thing to think about something or to imagine it in your mind and see it on the screen. There’s an emotional transference that you have in literature that you can’t have in movies. People invest in the person they see on the screen and they can’t shift gears. Intellectually, you’re like, “yeah, that’s supposed to be Bruce,” but emotionally you don’t get it. In the sequence [in the film] you see the younger Bruce running around and you see the bald Bruce in the chair. That connection works.

Q: Can Surrogates feel pain?

Mostow: No. I mean you can. You can program it so that it will filter out whatever you want. But most people don’t want to feel pain. You don’t have to smell bad smells. Again, we don’t go as deeply into all that stuff in the movie as I wish we had been able to.

Q: So people can have more than one Surrogate?

Mostow: That’s an interesting question. No, not really. Every Surrogate is assigned its own unique code. Everybody in the movie basically has one Surrogate, but there’s one exception that I won’t get into because I don’t want to spoil the plot.

Q: Is there ever any worry that the Surrogates could have their own minds and take over?

Mostow: No. In fact, that’s what so cool about this movie. It’s such a simple idea. There are many robot movies and I understand that someone may look at this and think, “Oh, this looks like ‘I, Robot.’” “I, Robot” is a movie that — and I made a robot movie, so I speak from experience — that’s about the subject. There’s been a zillion robot movies, but they’re all sentient. They’re autonomous. They’re individually thinking. They’re artificial intelligence. These are puppets. They don’t have any independence. They don’t do anything you don’t tell them to do. If you want your Surrogate to [move a hand] you have to yourself, in your mind [move your hand]. It won’t do anything by itself. It’s just a very, very simple idea. These literally are — I guess you can call them avatars, but they’re not quite. They really are just puppets. It’s that simple. There’s not anything else dangerous about a Surrogate.

Q: You can save it for the sequel.

Mostow: (laughs) Right. There’s enough ideas in here for a few sequels, but maybe by sequel number four or five when we’re really strapped for ideas we’ll start having the Surrogates fight back. “Surrogates 5: Rise of the Surrogates.”

Q: Can you explain more about how the reservation works?

Mostow: The backstory in the graphic novel is that there was an uprising a few years ago and, to make peace with everything, they made these reservations where people live without Surrogates they autonomously control and no Surrogates are allowed. It sort of keeps out law enforcement and everything else because law enforcement and military is all Surrogates. Their spiritual leader is played by Ving Rhames in a character called “The Prophet.” Basically, they’re just living life. They’re farming for their own food. It’s the American stock crowd. The Whole Foods/Trader Joes crowd. It’s sort of that vibe. You might get the impression that they’re sort of like hillbillies. They’re not. He goes back to the reservation later and finds that they’re real people just living life.

Q: In the trailer, there’s the “inhuman” Surrogates, with distorted faces and body parts. What’s the story with those?

Mostow: There’s so much that you just only hint at these things, but there’s a brief scene in the movie where Bruce is going home on the subway. The subway is basically just populated by people who are shut off because if you have to take your Surrogate from work back to your house, you can take subway, walk onto the subway, sit down and get out of your chair, go eat a bagel and just come back before your stop is ready and your Surrogate can reactivate. He’s sitting in the subway with all these catatonic shutdown looking Surrogates. We see a bunch of Surrogates and, among them, is this girl who decided to customize her look as bald with spikes embedded in her head and her boyfriend is some freaky-looking kind of guy. Those are just little indicators of sort of the world. The idea with the eye guy is that, if you were a bartender, wouldn’t it be great to have eyes on either side of your head so you can see what all the customers want?

Opening soon across the Philippines, “Surrogates” is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures International.