NAB
From the dystopian science fiction thriller Mr.
Robot through Amazon’s military mystery Homecoming to
his new film, Leave the World Behind, writer-director Sam Esmail’s
thematic obsession is the impact of technology on society.
article here
The film examines the reliance we
have on technology as an apocalyptic series of events cuts off all
communication.
“I’m not a technophobe,” Esmail insists in a Google Talk moderated by Josh Lanzet. “I think technology is agnostic, it has no
morality to it. It’s the human side that I’m more fascinated with. I really do
think that it’s our sort of complicity, or how we use tech that will, in the
case of the film, kind of offer a cautionary tale of what could happen to our
world if we go one way or the other with it.”
Can we can still have sort of a
functioning community without technology? he asks.
“Ultimately, technology, is a double-edged sword,”
he said during an interview on the RealBlend podcast produced by CinemaBlend. “When I think about… the positives, it gives us
access to information, to people, to media, to content that we want to explore.
I think it’s a tool like anything else [and] it’s what we do with it.”
Based on Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave
the World Behind is set mainly in a country house outside of New York
City, where a couple played by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke travel with their
children, for a weekend getaway. On their first night there, two strangers
arrive at the door: played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la who declare they are
the owners of the house and ask to be let in, citing a blackout in the city.
Distrust and paranoia ensues as Esmail uses the tropes of the disaster movie to
explore relationships of race and class.
The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and The Day After Tomorrow were
among influences but the idea that touched a nerve was about how people can
lose sight of their common humanity in the face of a crisis.
“It’s pretty relevant today given what’s going on
in the world,” Esmail told Matt
Zoller Seitz at Vulture.
“The other thing that interested me is that this book does the inverse of what
a typical disaster film does. The disaster elements tend to be the center of
the story in disaster films. The characters tend to be secondary. Here, I could
invert that process and be with the characters and have the disaster element
exist more in the distance. That instantly felt more authentic to how humans
would experience a crisis like that.”
Esmail read the book during lockdown
when the idea that people can easily lose sight of their common humanity in the
face of their own danger was all too real.
“But prior to reading the book I had this idea
percolating in the back of my head about trying to construct a sort of disaster
thriller centered around a cyberattack,” he told Brenna Ehrlich at Rolling Stone. “Because I think cyberattacks — even though
they’re out in the public consciousness — there’s something ominous but equally
mystifying about them.”
The Hitchcock Connection
Classic paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View and North by Northwest were other touchstones, the latter providing inspiration for a scene in which Mahershala Ali’s character runs from a crashing plane.
“It’s not very subtle,” Esmail admits to Rolling
Stone. “In all honesty, I don’t think there’s a movie made in contemporary
times that doesn’t show some influence by Hitchcock. I think he’s essentially
invented modern-day film grammar, but clearly, his work was looming large over
the film.”
We
also learn from Vulture that Esmail cast Ali in part because
he thinks of the actor as a modern day Hitchcockian leading man. “The prototype
was Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s films. They are an Everyman.
They’re not five steps ahead, like a superhero, but they’re half a step ahead.
They’re savvy enough to size up any situation. Mahershala has that.”
The director also talks about the cinematography
of Leave the World Behind, in particular the camera movement that
seems to move through the architecture similar to The Shining, and
another iconic Hitchcock film.
“That was a huge influence,” he admits, talking
about Kubrick’s psychological horror film on the ReelBlend podcast.
“I love big camera moves, especially when it’s relaying something the audience
doesn’t know. It’s like what you’re saying: It’s almost as if the movie’s a
little possessed, and you’re the demon looking down at those people.
“It’s that great shot in Rear Window:
Jimmy Stewart’s asleep and the camera’s moving, and then you’re looking across
the street seeing the thing he’s not seeing, and then you realize, “Wait a
minute — who am I? What’s happening? Who’s seeing it?” It’s very unsettling.
Ever since I saw that film as a kid, I’ve always loved the idea of a camera
being its own sort of person.”
Esmail’s script exhibits an eerie
synchronicity with current events. For instance he made the movie when conflict
had not yet escalated in the Middle East. Yet there’s a startling scene where
Ethan Hawke’s character is being pursued a drone that drops leaflets written in
Arabic that say “Death to America” — and later, another character who heard
about similar messages, this time in Korean.
“Honestly, I tried to follow the guidelines out of
the playbook of how coup d’etats actually work, especially when it’s a foreign
actor,” he told Rolling Stone. “Propaganda misinformation is an old
tactic. I just took that and magnified it and heightened it to this situation.
It plays on your own biases and your own beliefs about who our enemies are, and
I always love it when you can remove the barrier between the audience and your
protagonist.”
Turning on Tech
Another scene features a number of
Teslas that turn on their self-driving functions to block the roadways. Esmail
says he didn’t seek permission from Elon Musk for that.
“Look, I wrote it in the script. I
asked my amazing props guy, Bobby, to bring a bunch of Teslas out on the
street. We shot the scene. I edited it in post, I showed it to Netflix, I
crossed my fingers. And to this day, no one has said anything to me. So yeah,
I’m hoping the movie comes out and no one will say anything.”
What doesn’t get lost in a digital
attack are physical media like vinyl, DVDs and VHS (though you’d still need a
source of electricity to play them). These become a source of comfort and
nostalgia towards the end of the picture. But how did that sit when making the
movie for a streaming service?
Esmail wasn’t afraid to poke the hand
that feeds. On the one hand, he claims to be a “great proponent” of physical
media, but also explains that one of the advantages of streaming services like
Netflix “is that you really have access to any movie from across history at
your fingertips,” he says.
“So there’s, there’s always a
conflict because I’m a proponent of theatrical. I’m a proponent of DVDs and
Blu-rays. But I’m also not mad at a streaming service that lets me see all the
classics at a moment’s notice.”
Nonetheless he includes a cheeky shot
that he doesn’t think “the Netflix folks” have noticed: “In the very end, you
see Rose’s thumb hovering over the remote, and it goes past the Netflix button
to hit ‘play’ on the DVD player.”
Notes From a Former President
The film’s exec producers are Netflix
stablemates Barack and Michelle Obama, who were more involved in production
then lending the cachet of their name.
“He’s a huge movie lover and a huge fan of the
book,” Esmail confides to ReelBlend. “He really was committed to
making this into a great movie. And he was giving me notes at the script stage,
multiple drafts, including, post rough cuts. It’s kind of a surreal because I
do think he is one of the most brilliant minds on the planet and to get his
insight on the disaster element, characters, the theme. It was the highlight of
my career.”
No comments:
Post a Comment