Terry Gilliam on His Epic New Dystopian Film the Zero Theorem
wired.com
wired.com
Utopia requires verdant green lawns, large old trees, calm ponds or slowly flowing water. Big Open spaces. Lots of good light, clean surfaces, rich materials and blue skies.
This adds up to larger sets, more expensive sets (more care needed in their construction and use), lots of expensive lights or desirable locations -- everyone loves a picturesque park, so imagine how much it costs to shut one down for filming. And now imagine what happens if that day is cloudy, or rainy, or a scene just didn't get captured on schedule. (This is also why so very few movies are shot on or around water. And why, when they are, massive water tanks are so often used. Even though they are massively expensive to create, they're far cheaper than trying to film out on open water.)
If you need to build and furnish a "utopian" apartment or a building, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing, with graceful curves and clean surfaces. Drop the fancy chair? You might have to get a new one or at least spend time and effort reconditioning it or setting it so damage isn't visible on camera.
Dystopia, on the other hand, is conveyed with dark, cramped, dirty, broken and grimy sets and setting. These things are easy to find, are not in particularly high demand, can be done trivially on a sound-stage, etc. If you need a building you can literally just screw together shipping pallets and scrap metal. If you need to furnish a room, you take a stroll through a dump or buy some cheap dorm-class furniture and then beat it up a bit. And, importantly, less light. Fewer lights to rent and move and set up and operate (and move and set up and operate and move and set up and operate...). You can shoot into the night, you can shoot facing a decrepit building, you can shoot in the back of a rusted out buick in a garbage dump.
Star Trek TNG also managed to pull off utopia on a budget, although who knows if that would be feasible in today's fractured TV landscape; at the time, TNG was nearly the only sci-fi game in town.
While cost is a benefit for dystopian media (ie, Snowpiercer), it's also just easier to tell a story in those universes, as the conflict comes baked in.
The budget for Blade Runner was US $28,000,000.00 in 1982, which was A Lot. It's so much that the IMDB page says "(estimated)" .
Don't spoil it by reading about it!
It is true that it's not particularly representative of the series.
I say "new then"; dystopian SciFi was a staple of drive-ins in the '70s - from Silent Running to Planet of the Apes to Logan's Run...
It's not like there isn't a huge backlog of great sci-fi to draw on that isn't dystopian. I'd like to see The Foundation Trilogy as a multi-year "Breaking Bad" style series.
It's basically a massive essay, but Scorcese's "Personal Journey" manages to explain why movies are in terrible shape without being hopeless about it. The reasons are profound.
The Matrix was even old hat at the time - future dystopian, man vs. machine - Terminator 1 and 2 really hit those themes.
But the Matrix took the idea and dug down, found ore, and refined it, crafted it, polished it.
Gilliam has some good notches on his belt so I'm hopeful there will be substance.
I also hope Gilliam hits this one out of the park on general principles.
I haven't seen a good dystopian movie in a long time. I was however also not very happy with Zero Theorem but they tried to do something different at least.
My relationship with Hollywood is this: I'm always happy they do something with SciFi. No matter how bad it is. People like SciFi atm and this brings money to ideas which also rises the chances of one really good movie. Then it all was worth it.
Same goes for TV shows. Black Mirror has been mentioned here. What a great show! But it was a great time for SciFi also. Look how many episodes Star Gate got. I couldn't watch it because it was so shallow but many people liked it and it was great for the genre.
Similar to most of the Monty Python films.
It's like a desert you can only eat in small batches but delivered in full cake size.
Gilliam's serious films, on the other hand - yeah. The main needs to listen to his editors. Every time I watch a Gilliam movie, especially a director's cut, I'm always frustrated how much his movies drag through the 2nd act. The man needs to learn some brevity, but at his age he's obviously made up his mind that the audiences need to absolutely wallow in his beautiful imagery.
The movie is a must for all the Lisp and Emacs hackers out there who embrace the hacker philosophy.
The rest was totally lost on me
Unsurprised about the negativity in the comments.
You might not like the movie, but it is quite original and dares touch a lot of subjects most of the film industry can't articulate more than 1 at a time.
I wonder how HN takes Black Mirror.
Black Mirror is more of modern Twilight Zone. Really tight stories exploring a narrow ideas quite well. The only exception is probably "White Bear".
Zero Theorem is kind of the opposite: it felt completely unfocused until the end. I usually hate characters that only exist to deliver exposition but I was thankful for Management's monologues and the dialog with Leth's supervisor. The story felt frozen in place whenever they weren't on-screen.