mpostor, the upcoming movie based on Philip K. Dick's 1953 story "Imposter," was originally shot as one-third of an SF anthology film. But executives at Miramax loved it so much that they gave director Gary Fleder the green light to flesh the short out into a full-length movie of its own.
Once finished, the movie had to wait more than a year to reach audiences, owing to a variety of delays. But the movie is finally headed for the cineplex, starring Gary Sinise and Madeleine Stowe in a cautionary tale of the future. In the year 2079, the Earth is at war with an unseen alien force. Weapons scientist Spencer Olham (Sinise) awakes one day to find himself accused of being an alien spy, a clone and the object of a high-tech manhunt. Stowe plays his beleaguered physician wife, Maya, who must help Olham prove he is who he says he is.
Fleder (Don't Say A Word), Sinise (Mission to Mars) and Stowe (Last of the Mohicans) took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about Impostor, which opens Jan. 4.
Gary Sinise, you've said that the character of Spencer Olham was more of a Harrison Ford part than anything you'd ever done. Can we assume that was a major reason why you signed on for the job?
Sinise: It was. What I mean by that is that Spence is kind of an Everyman character, who's vulnerable yet heroic, yet caught in a web of mistrust. And he's got to prove something while up against the odds. The character also offered me a lot more in terms of being a leading man than some of the other ones I've done. He's a little more active.
Some have described the film as SF-action-humanistic drama. How would you describe it?
Sinise: It's a very simple story about a guy who's trying to prove something against the odds and who wants to get back to his wife. Many obstacles are laid in front of him.
You worked with Mekhi Phifer, Madeleine and Vincent D'Onofrio on Impostor. What can you
say about each of them?
Sinise: I only worked with Vincent [who plays Olham's nemesis, Major Hathaway] in a few scenes. Once I get out of the interrogation chamber, he's basically chasing me. Mekhi [who plays a reluctant ally] and I developed a really fine relationship. He's a wonderful actor and was very supportive and giving. I think he's got a lot of talent. And Madeleine is great. She's great to work with.
Had you read "Imposter"?
Sinise: It's been quite a while now since I read it, but when we were working on the short, I was reading it and talking to everyone about it.
And?
Sinise: What's interesting about the short story is that it was written in the '50s. It's kind of remarkable when you think about it, when you think about how it relates to where we are today and current events and the threat of terrorism and paranoia, and what that makes the government do. Although it's a world far into the future, it's one person's vision, and it somehow relates to and reflects our own lives [now]. That allows us, in our way, to identify with the story and understand it. A good SF piece can really make you think about that.
There's an actor in the cast list named Mac Sinise. That's your son playing the young Spence, right?
Sinise: There's a quick little shot of me as a little boy, and he did that. He played me in Mission to Mars, too.
Let's look back at some of your other genre projects. Let me throw you titles, and you can just say whatever comes to mind first about each one. Apollo 13?
Sinise: I remember Ron Howard's relentless attention to detail and his determination to tell that story as accurately as he could within the time limit that we had. It was a six-day story that he had to pack into a couple of hours. Also, he was working with a story where the entire audience knew the outcome. The craft of that movie is the fact that we can be totally suspended and intrigued and interested and emotionally involved in something when we know how it's going to end. That was the expert job that Ron Howard did.
Mission to Mars?
Sinise: I had high hopes for the movie, and there are elements that I really like, and things that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. There are some very good things about it as well.
The Stand?
Sinise: The Stand was great, because it was my first shot at a romantic leading-man character. It was a great character, and it was a great piece to work on, a lot of fun, because there were so many different actors in it. It was really the first leading part that I ever had on film. I'd done Of Mice and Men, and that was a big reason why Mick Garris and Stephen King asked me to do The Stand, because they liked Of Mice and Men. So when I got the opportunity, I jumped at it. I'd been playing character parts that didn't look much like me. Certainly on stage, this wasn't what I'd done. It was a straight-up leading man, and I enjoyed that.
The Green Mile?
Sinise: It was a couple of days' work, but I was glad to do it, because I thought the scene was really well written, the script was great, and I like working with Tom [Hanks]. We'd worked together a couple of times before, and [director] Frank [Darabont] asked me if I would just come down for a few days and play the part. I went for it.
Madeleine Stowe, what appealed to you about this script?
Stowe: It was sandwiched very quickly between two films that I had done. And I was very reticent. I didn't want to [do it], because I felt, "Well, you know, there's nothing new for me to do there that I haven't done in some form or other." ... [But] I liked the story a lot, and I thought, Gary Fleder and Gary Sinise. So I suppose that would be what it was.
It was very quick and brief. And then the next thing you know, they wanted to turn it into a full-length feature. And I was again, ... "I don't know what I can really bring to it that is all that interesting." And they felt that if the character wasn't there, they didn't have a movie. I said, "I think you're wrong." And, you know, I think I even went on the record, when this was all coming around, saying, "I don't know why they want to make [it full length]." Because the short was perfect. And I didn't know if I could trust the fact that they could expand it into something interesting. And they did. So it all worked out.
It doesn't feel like they blew up a 40-minute short into a a 90-minute movie.
Stowe: No, you can't tell that. It's pretty seamless. I mean, the short was extraordinary. It was really one of these things ... And that's why they decided to make it longer. Because [Miramax executives Harvey and Bob] Weinstein had all their movie star friends, Tom Cruise and all these people, come in, and [they said], "Oh, no, this has to be a full-length feature film." And that's basically how it happened. And they felt like, you know, "God, we could really have something here."
How did your character grow from the short to the full-length feature?
Stowe: She didn't much. I mean, they just showed her at work. It was about opening up the film, more than anything else. And, you know, my inclination was to not [do it]. [But] because I was so fond of the people I was involved with, I just went ahead and did it. ... [In the short,] the hospital didn't exist. And there's a scene [added] with D'Onofrio and another where you see her being doctorly. ... All the other stuff was from the original.
What's it like knowing that aliens want to kill and clone you?
Stowe: [laughs] This character's kind of an innocent, isn't she? She has no idea what's going on. ... I was really shocked [by the ending]. I forgot about the ending ... both times when I'd seen it, and it still shocks me. She feels all the same things that you or I might feel, and it was kind of a stunner for me.
Gary Fleder, what did you have to do to turn the short into a full-length feature?
Fleder: That's a long story. I'll try to make it not quite so boring. We shot the short as part of a trilogy we were doing for Miramax, kind of like New York Stories. Danny Boyle [The Beach] doing one, me doing one, Bryan Singer [X-Men] doing one. When the short was being shot, Bob Weinstein was so happy with the footage, he said, "I'd love to make this as a feature." And I said, "You're nuts. We can't do that." But, you know, Bob is not nuts. Bob is a really smart guy. And Bob has a sort of mad genius about him. So we began talking about how to do it. How to take the footage and sort of create this bigger thing. And also take the script. So [Pitch Black writer/director] David Twohy got involved, and we blew it up. We sort of made it into a bigger story.
Why did it take so long to get this released?
Fleder: There were a lot of issues with the rating. ... I delivered the film as an R rating about a year ago. Like before I began shooting Don't Say a Word for Fox and New Regency. And while I was gone, there was a conversation. You could see that things were happening, that films that were PG-13 were making more money. And this film is designed to play, I think, pretty wide. But you also don't want to leave out younger kids and younger ... audiences, that sort of American Pie audience. And the big issue with time was just getting it cut right. We made some more trims. And we re-previewed the film about two and a half months ago, and the film previewed about 25 points higher than last time. Because I think making the film less horrific, less violent, made the film more accessible. Because the film's already pretty tough.
What did you have to cut out?
Fleder: There was more violence. ... I was going for that kind of visceral Jacob's Ladder sort of thing. ... It was more viscerally disturbing. For example, that whole interrogation scene with Vincent D'Onofrio and Gary Sinise. It was much more sort of brutal. The guy having this thing taken out of his chest was sort of much more graphic. ... Because as a filmmaker, you become inured to your own special effects. And I realized looking back that the film was just too harsh. And we toned it down. It took a lot of time to go back and forth and looking at different takes.
What's interesting for the movie is that, post 9-11, post-tragedy, the film has interesting resonance culturally. And I'm not saying that we're in any way gaining from that horrible, horrible, horrible tragedy in New York and in the world, but I am saying that the film can be appreciated, I think, in this context, just in this climate. Because the film is about a lot of these themes of ... everything from the bioethics of scanning people and DNA and sort of that kind of obsession, but also the issues of the witch-hunt mentality and judging people not for who they are, but what they are. I think that's an issue now that's been raised.
In the film, you never see the Centauri. You never see the enemy. It's a great sort of thing like that Philip Kaufman remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's sort of like it's ... this unseen, intangible evil. And, I think, it goes back to '50s sci-fi. ... If you had actually seen the alien, it would have been a much more goofy movie. The fact is that not seeing it makes it relevant again in this context.
A new opening was shot for the expanded movie?
Fleder: We shot that a year ago. It was not exploitative of [current events]. The only thing we added to the film, post-tragedy, was that little card that says the [story] was written in 1953. It was the only thing we added. It was Bob's idea. Bob Weinstein said, "You know, let's just remind people that this guy was prescient." He wrote this thing ... 50 years ago.
The movie seems to have echoes of Blade Runner, which was also based on a Dick story.
Fleder: It's hard to get away from what Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner, because there was so much great stuff. Because it feels organic. … If you go to [Los Angeles' Universal] Citywalk … Universal looks like that. We've become desensitized to how much neon and signage and the stimulation of all this visual assault of information. That's part of society. The film's also, graphically, about not having everything being square. Odd angles and things being 45 degrees. In that way, we tried to get away from the Blade Runner sort of L.A. noir [look].
Impostor marks your first SF movie.
Fleder: It's funny. In a way, I'm the right guy for the genre, because ... I'm not a big sci-fi fan. But I love the story. So I had to sort of make myself understand the genre by just sort of saying to real futurists, "What will the world look like in seven years?" I had to sort of spend a lot of time reading lots of books about futurism and what's happening with biology and chemistry and computers. ... We're moving into an age of discovery. ... We're cloning. With computer technology, where you can teach computers to think the way we think. It's an interesting challenge to see the world that way. So for me, it was getting into that place of not making it sort of like just this sort of artificial, facile environment, but making it really organic to what's happening now in society.
Pretty soon, we may all have little chips to track our whereabouts with GPS. Because maybe it's important. Maybe you'd find Chandra Levy if you did. But then again, you give up your civil rights. It's an issue of what's more important: Finding a missing person or having your privacy.
Ian Spelling contributed to this interview.
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