ill Smith, the king of summer movies (Independence Day, Men in Black) returns to form in the upcoming SF blockbuster I, Robot, which is "inspired by" the beloved short-story collection by SF author Isaac Asimov.
But don't be fooled: This year's I, Robot, from Dark City director Alex Proyas, borrows a few themes and character names, and its plot even turns on Asimov's legendary "Three Laws of Robotics." But it morphs those elements into an entirely new narrative, based on Jeff Vintar's original spec script Hardwired, a murder mystery set in a future world where robots are commonplace. Vintar and Akiva Goldsman, who won an Oscar for A Beautiful Mind, reworked the script to fit into Asimov's universe.
Smith plays "robophobic" Chicago homicide detective Del Spooner, who is called to the labs at U.S. Robotics on the eve of the largest rollout of robots in the history of the world. It seems that Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), the father of the Three Laws, has jumped out of a window—or been thrown. Spooner suspects that one of Lanning's creations, a prototype robot named Sonny (voiced by Alan Tudyk), may have played a role in the death, and he teams up with reluctant "robopsychologist" Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) to unravel the mystery.
Cast and crew took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about I, Robot, which premieres July 30.
Will Smith, why did you want to do this?
Smith: I loved the blend of genres, you know? It's a mystery, which is supposed to clash with an action movie. Mystery and action, they don't kind of blend well, because the pace of the mystery is a little slower, and you've sort of got to discover things. And then there's the action movie element that I love, that is not really overdone. The action sequences go on as long as they're supposed to go on, and then right after that you're into the drama of it. And I think that there's just so many things going on in this film and very, very rarely do you get an opportunity in an action movie to tell the story of a little girl dying, and how that affected you, and take six minutes of screen time and tell the story.
And I loved the idea: the gamble of making this kind of movie, because it's actually a small art film that is masquerading as a big summer blockbuster. [Take,] like, the interrogation scene of Sonny. I was looking at that scene last night and going, "You can't compare that with anything, you know?" There's no other movie where you have that level of emotion and connection with ... a detective interrogating a robot without it being silly. ... I love the film and hope ... that people can connect to it.
You make your first appearance in a nude scene early in this movie, standing in profile in the shower.
Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Smiles.]
It got a great reaction at last night's screening. Did you think there was a real point to it, having that nude scene?
Smith: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. ... My character suffers from a psychological condition called survivor's guilt, all right? ... I sent a script to a group of psychologists and asked them, "Tell me what this character's behavior would be." And they said paranoia was one of the things. So the shower door [is] open, [there's] no shower curtain, with the gun hanging over the thing, and they said he would never be able to wash his hair, because he wouldn't close his eyes in the shower. So it's, you know, those kinds of things. But you probably have to have a degree in psychology to take all of that out of it. But it gives it a certain level of reality when ... you know that that much thought went into it, and even if you don't, it's just kind of a cool naked guy [laughs].
There seem to be a lot of people bringing up the nude scene.
Smith: It's interesting, because America's the only place that it's really a big deal. Actually, you know, the scene in this movie was actually a full frontal nudity, but they had to digitally remove ... Yeah, it was the most expensive CG shot, jut to remove it, for the American audience [laughs].
How do you stay so buff?
Smith: Oh man, I train. I train at lunch or after work, three, four, five times a week. It's kind of a game that I play with myself. At the end of the day, everybody's tired, and everybody's going home. I need to know that I'm the one person that's going to the gym. It's just, I need that mindset. Because I've been successful financially, it's easy to get lazy, and then once you start to slip physically, you're going to start to slip mentally, and then inevitably you're going to slip creatively. So I start with my body, then my mind, and it keeps my creativity.
Does that put pressure on your wife, the Matrix Reloaded's Jada Pinkett Smith, to kind of catch up with you physically?
Smith: She just need to keep up, you know? She just need to keep up. No, Jada's not going out like that. ... She watched the [nude] scene last night, went right to the gym this morning. She's like, "Nope. No, you're not catching me out there."
You're also a producer on this film. Describe the juggling act.
Smith: Yeah, it's definitely difficult. What happens is, as an actor, there comes a point where I'm not a producer anymore. ... I have a producing partner who will have to continue in producing. But I produce up until the first day of shooting, and then the first day of shooting, I become an actor. So now my partner has to argue with me, you know ... because I can't wear both hats. Because as an actor, if I want two extra days to shoot the scene, I need two extra days to shoot the scene. And the producer has to work that out. I can't think to myself, "You know, as an actor, well, you know, we've got to get it, and we've only got one day in this space, so we've got to get it." I'm not thinking that. As an actor, I need my space, and I need my freedom, which inevitably conflicts with the production.
There's a scene in I, Robot where your character must walk between ranks of hundreds of robots, which were all computer-generated. How hard is that, to have absolutely nothing to work with?
Smith: Yeah, well they'll put a tennis ball or something there. ... Somebody as a joke ... started printing out robot faces, so they would just tack a robot face up there, you know? Really, the thing that they need is the eyeline. They just need you to be looking at the right place, [where] eventually the eyes will be. ... [But] it would have been impossible in a scene like the interrogation scene, you know, because that scene is so much about the interaction. And fortunately, Alan Tudyk, who plays Sonny, we had the opportunity to actually play out a scene, work a scene, to rehearse a scene and to do it like actors.
[Tudyk performed Sonny with a] process like they did for Gollum for The Lord of the Rings. So there was actually a person there, in a green suit, and then they replaced the person [with computer-generated effects]. But for all the other scenes, like the fighting scenes, ... we worked the scene out with stunt men ... and I learned all the moves and learned where everyone would be. ... And then I'm doing it by myself. If you see that [mimes a fighting routine], it would be the perfect tabloid videotape that Will Smith has lost his damn mind. Just by myself [fighting sounds], it just looks bizarre.
Your character, Del Spooner, has a fondness for all things old, and he hates technology. I'm just wondering, in your own world, how do you feel about technology?
Smith: No, I am strictly the future. I need every single gadget that I can possibly have. I need the latest Panther or Jaguar, whatever the latest thing. I need the newest iPod, I can't have the 10 gigs. Yeah, all of that stuff. I need everything. All the new, all the latest gadgets, I got to have them. ... There's a music program called Reason that connects to another music program called Pro Tools, and I have an album coming out for Christmas, and I just recorded my first single from inception, creating the music, laying the vocals, everything, in a hotel room, and mixed in on my laptop on a plane, flying back to L.A. And it's like, it's just insane to me. [I] burned a CD, so I have a CD of the record, everything in my laptop. It's come to that point. It's just beautiful to me.
Can you talk about working with Alex Proyas? He's got sort of a different way of working with actors.
Smith: The great thing with Alex that is his strong point, that will be the thing that people are going to love in the audience, but studios are going to be dying, is that he wants to make art films. He's committed to the artistry of the film, period. And there's a difficult thing when you're spending $100 million to make a movie where people are saying, "Hey, fella, give me something conventional." ... Alex, at every turn, wants to make something special. And sitting watching I, Robot last night, that was the thing that I really loved about it. You don't sit in that movie and say, "I know what's about to happen." Very rarely in a summer blockbuster can you not predict what the next scene is. ... With this movie, Alex's strong point is that he pushes the envelope everywhere. Just to take six minutes for that interrogation scene, just the pace, it's an art-film pace. It's not action-summer-blockbuster pace. And I think that's what makes him special. Whatever he wants to make, I will make it with him.
Alex mentioned that one of the subtexts of the film was kind of a racial commentary.
Smith: Absolutely. I mean, there's so many little things in this film, the comments that are made and things that just skate by when you go back and look. But what's really great is the, it was sort of the road map of slavery. And what we talked about was, if there was a part two, robots essentially came to be used in the way that slaves were used. And then what happens in the movie, there's the fight for their freedom. So then they get their freedom, and the part two could eventually be the, now that they're free ... it's time to be brought into society with their own race, with their own, now they're their own people per se. So there's lots of interesting concepts and things, but none of those decisions have been made, but there's wonderful commentaries to be found.
At one point you say, "It's a human thing, you wouldn't understand."
Smith: You wouldn't understand, exactly [laughs]. [It's great] to have the black character, to have the main character, essentially racist. He's robophobic. You know, he's robophobic.
Alex Proyas, how did you cast Alan Tudyk as Sonny?
Proyas: It was actually a real challenge. ... I think it was probably the hardest role I've ever cast. I think we met like a thousand people. ... And Alan was one of the last ones to come in, and sometimes ... I'm not exactly sure what I'm after with a character, and sometimes I just pray that the right person walks in the door, you know? Because you have a visual idea of what you want someone to be like. And in this case, we had to design the robot, so that was not really part of the issue. But there was a quality, I guess this sort of childlike innocence, that I was after. And Alan walked in, and he was like, that's the guy. He just seemed to capture that really beautifully.
He performed Sonny on set in a green suit, and he was later replaced with a computer-generated character. Did you model the CG after his physical movements?
Proyas: Yeah. Everything's matched exactly to Alan. ... We would sit there and look at his performance. We cut his performance just like a regular scene. And for me it was also very beneficial on the set to actually have Alan, because we could go and do the scene just like we were doing a regular scene. And then we would ... go and look at his footage and match exactly all of his physical movements and all of his facial expressions. ... If he lifted an eyebrow on a certain word, we would try and match that exactly. And by dissecting the performance so specifically, I think we managed to bring the soul of his character through this CG creation. I was very happy with the way it turned out.
Are all the robots in the movie computer-generated?
Proyas: Yeah. ... We built full-sized ones that didn't actually function. ... We used to have them stand in to see, so we could line up shots. And also I liked them, because we had to light the NS-5s [a new model of robot] in a very specific way.
Can I just ask about Isaac Asimov and the choice to call this I, Robot, when it only has some elements from the book, and otherwise it's really Jeff Vintar's story. Why didn't you just shoot Jeff's script?
Proyas: Well, it's sort of a pretty long, complicated story, but I actually wanted to do I, Robot initially, and we couldn't get the rights to I, Robot. Jeff Vintar's script I came across several years into this process, when we were trying to obtain the rights, and it struck me as a kind of ... a parallel story. It was very heavily influenced by Asimov, but I guess that I wanted to use the laws and Asimov's world and the spirit of his story.
It's a very difficult collection of stories to try and distill into one narrative. I mean, it's impossible to do. People have tried to do it, and we actually looked into doing it as well. So then the choice, ... when I, Robot ... rights became available, [was], "Do we ... go away from Jeff's script? Do we focus on one particular story? Do we try and combine two or three stories together?" And I think in the long run we ended up with a sort of composite of Jeff's script and of the Asimov stories. And I think there's quite a lot of stuff in there. There's kind of very specific moments from the stories that have kind of been blended in, and like I said before, for me, the ideal of this is that if the film does well, I'd like to be able to explore [the stories] further [in film]. I just think that there's so much stuff in that collection, it creates such a universe that's so intriguing, ... you'd need to do more than one film, I think, to do it justice.
Are you worried about sort of a negative reaction from Asimov purists?
Proyas: Not really. In fact, Asimov's daughter last night was extremely complimentary of the film, which I was very pleased at, actually.
Some people who saw I, Robot thought they saw C-3PO in one of the scenes.
Proyas: I will not confirm or deny that.
Are there deliberate homages to other science-fiction films? I mean, one of the ships looked like a hunter-killer ship out of Terminator.
Proyas: That wasn't, necessarily.
There's an R2-D2 sound in the movie. But ... C-3PO is not in the movie as far as I know. ... That's all I'm going to say. There's a few others.
You have to tell us a little about Will's nude scene.
Proyas: I would never talk someone into being nude if they didn't want to be. It seemed right for the character. I mean, wanting to see, you know, the opening scene of the movie is kind of the birth of the character. We wanted to see him very vulnerable and kind of just, you know, it seemed like the right thing to do. I believe it's Will's first nude scene in a movie, too, from what he told me.
You had Rufus Sewell waking up nude at the beginning of Dark City as well.
Proyas: Yes, well, there you go. There's something odd, you know? ... I love bathroom scenes, and I don't know what kinky thing it is, but I do. I like to see characters in bathrooms for some reason. There's actually a bathroom scene in The Crow. It's actually my favorite bathroom scene that I've done.
The movie also has contemporary themes in it.
Proyas: There's certainly a racial issue that is touched upon in the movie, certainly. And I'm certainly not blind to the idea of having a black man be the hero of a movie like this. ... It's an interesting approach. It's an interesting parallel to historical events, you know? ... Coming from Australia, I'm currently very aware of racial issues, because ... there's a whole situation in Australia [of] political refugees who are coming to Australia by boat and traveling a thousand miles, and the Australian government are choosing to place them in detention camps in the middle of the desert. And it's a huge problem. It pains me and many, many millions of Australians ... where people are struggling to do something about the situation. So I think for me, that's ... the parallel in my world that I saw in the movie ...that I had in the back of my mind, I guess, as I was making the movie.
Alan Tudyk, when you did the scenes, and you were in every scene dressed in a green suit, how was that?
Tudyk: Yeah, I did feel like an alien, but in a good way. [Sonny] is an other. He's not human. It did take me a little while to get used to the green suit. So much when you're acting in a part, you put on your costume, and you go, "Ah, this is it, right here." Or some piece of jewelry or something, you go, "Oh yeah, this is mine, now. I feel it." I felt it, and then when I put on the green suit, I was like, "I've lost it. I lost it. All I've got is green right now! This is obnoxious." But a day went by, and I had it after that.
How about finding the voice of Sonny? HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey is kind of the grandfather of all robots and computers; you can kind of go that way. But how did you come up with the voice for him?
Tudyk: He's just sort of calm. He's somewhat calm. It's about saying each word correctly was the main part of it. ... He doesn't get too out of control. ... But he doesn't breathe. That was one of the hardest things. When you're an actor, ... if you change your breathing, your heart will follow. So if you're upset, you can do so much with your breath. And I couldn't do that. So it became about inflection and allowing the emotion that I felt to come out just in the voice, the inflection of it. It was quite a challenge.
In seeing the final film, do you see yourself in the computer animation? I mean, your facial expressions, subtleties of performance?
Tudyk: I do, just because I know myself. ... My mother saw a lot of it, you know? People who know me really well will go, "That's Alan, in the way his lips move. I saw Alan's lip move!"
Bridget Moynahan, your character is kind of stoic, all business. How much of that is in your real personality? Or how much of that could you relate to that character?
Moynahan: She took it to an extreme. It was very uncomfortable for me to watch that last night, because it's so far from who I am on a daily basis that it was weird. It was very strange. Yeah, I don't like that. I like to keep it light.
How much of the character is like the Susan Calvin in Asimov's books, who is much older?
Moynahan: I don't think that the character in the book really had a full emotional life. I think she was very closed off emotionally, in the book as well. I think there was only one story where she supposedly had a flirtation with a man, but I never really got a good sense that she was that open in the books. I don't think it had anything to do with age.
Did you fight to have a nude scene in the film because Will's got one?
Moynahan: And they wouldn't let me do it. They had to fog it all up and everything.
Are used to working with those kinds of special effects where really no one is there? That scene you do with the robots and they're all supposed to be in rows and there was nobody there at all?
Moynahan: There was nobody there, and that was my first day of shooting. And I had never done any green screen before or any of that. But they just sort of moved me in there. ... It was fine. Nobody ever really listens to me anyway, so I got the same response from the tennis ball [laughs].
What was it like working with Will? Does he fool around on the set? Is he fun?
Moynahan: He's so much fun. ... He would be playing around the whole time, and he knows ... we had so much work to do [that] when it came down to shooting, it was just like, "All right, come on, let's get to it." He's good like that, because I could be laughing the whole time, and he knows that. Tears, everything. I'm an easy audience.
How was it working against Alan in his green outfit?
Moynahan: Alan was a dream to work with. I think it would have been a much harder project if they didn't have an actor playing that role. And it was, I had to learn that quickly, adjusting to working with the actor, not working with the actor. But he always gave me so much when we were performing, and also offstage, he made it easy for me.
Back to the top.
Also in this issue:
Geoffrey A. Landis
