Interviews
‘I Am Mother’ Robot is Almost Entirely Practical, Director Grant Sputore Reveals [Interview]
Today, June 7th, Netflix hits the bunker to avoid the apocalypse with Grant Sputore‘s sci-fi thriller I Am Mother, starring Hilary Swank and Clara Rugaard.
Rugaard plays a teenage girl who is raised underground by a kindly robot named “Mother” (voiced by Rose Byrne) that’s designed to repopulate the earth following the extinction of humankind. Their unique bond is threatened when Swank’s character arrives with alarming news.
The film’s concept began with a conversation between Sputore and co-writer Michael Lloyd Green, who set out to “write something that would be a feasible first film.” Sputore continues, “Not too many characters. One location. But we wanted to sneak as much scale into that format as possible. Global stakes. Big ideas. Plus all the sci-fi trappings we love.”
“With that in mind, we just started a sprawling conversation about the things we were dealing with in our personal lives – and were concerned about in the world at large,” he added about finding the social commentary that would drive the story. “What rose to the top for me was the question of whether I was ready to be a parent, in tandem with this larger question of whether humanity was ready to be a ‘parent’ to artificial intelligence. How do we go about teaching another entity to be good, when we struggle to do that ourselves? And to go even deeper, what does it mean to be ‘good’ at all.”
SOCIAL COMMENTARY
I Am Mother touches on a lot of classic genre cinema, but does its own thing. Here Grant discusses inspirations and how he approached injecting his own “personality” into it.
“If you were examining the DNA of this film, I think you’d find strands of Alien, Terminator, and Moon, for sure. Some of that is conscious, some of it isn’t.”
Speaking to the robot that drives this thriller, he adds: “One of the things I’m interested in is how different AI is from us, but also how similar it’s capable of being.”
“It’s not a mistake that early in this film I show Daughter being taught by a robot, which is intended on some level to hold a mirror up to the idea of programming and ask how different it is to program a machine vs educate a child. That gets even messier and more interesting when you consider how cutting edge AI systems are made these days, via machine learning.”
Grant continues speaking more to the film’s social commentary and how it has changed since The Terminator came out decades ago:
“Technology has firmly cemented its place as the backbone of how we run our lives and the entire human civilization for quite some time, but our interaction with technology is becoming increasingly personal and intimate. We have a relationship with technology in a way we didn’t have even 10 years ago. Most of our great science fiction films were made in a time where there was a Frankensteinian fear of technology – but now we’re inviting it into our homes and feeling far more comfortable about its place in our world. That’s fine – and I genuinely think technology isn’t to be feared, it is the thing that has allowed humanity to thrive – but it’s important to make the distinction between a smartphone and a smart-AI system that can navigate our world and make decisions for itself. The stuff that science fiction has long imagined is about to become very real and as we stand at the cusp of that revolution, it feels fitting to look at our relationship with technology and work out how to ensure it’s a good one.”
“In the film, that’s partly through the lens of how you teach and understand the concept of doing the right thing – whether that’s to a machine, or to a child – which is another reason I hope this story feels timely, since that is something all of humanity seems to be struggling and disagreeing about these days: not just how we do what is right, but what is right to begin with.”
PRACTICAL EFFECTS
“The film isn’t actually that effects heavy,” Grant reveals. “We were very judicious about where, how and what kind of VFX are featured, to make the budget go as far as possible and really increase the film’s sense of scale, without increasing its budget.”
“Our Mother robot is almost entirely practical. The only times she’s not practical is when we couldn’t risk the suit getting damaged, since we only had one of them.”
“From the outset, I knew I wanted to do Mother practically,” he adds. “It felt right, that a film that was partly conceived as a love-letter to the sci-fi films I’d grown up on would be made in the same way. I’ve always been fascinated by the practical magic seen in films like Alien, Terminator, RoboCop, The Thing, Jurassic Park, etc. Everything Stan Winston touched – and subsequently everything the geniuses at Weta Workshop have worked on.”
“Undoubtedly we live in an era where the world’s best CG is completely indistinguishable from the real thing, but you need an enormous bucket of money to get there and if you fall even slightly short, it pulls the audience out of the film.”
“Given our robot is one of the leads of this movie, I wasn’t willing to risk going CG.”
“Plus, there’s all the intangible stuff that going the practical route gives you. Like the very real relationship the young toddler at the start of the film formed with the robot. Or the fact you can improvise and get inspired on set, since the real robot is standing there in front of you.”
“In pre-production, there were as many people excited about doing the robot practically as there were people who were nervous. Sticking a guy in a robot suit can go wrong pretty quickly and some people will inevitably imagine the worst. The way to calm those nerves – and to actually get an amazing robot suit – is to work with the folks at Weta Workshop. As soon as we told people we were working with Weta, their reputation (and 10,000 Oscars) put the doubter’s minds at ease.”
“Mother was performed by three people, simultaneously.”
“Most obviously, Rose Byrne provides the voice of Mother, but her face is essentially an animatronic puppet that’s being radio controlled by Tim Domett. Independent of that, Luke Hawker is inside the suit giving the physical performance and delivering the dialogue on set. Luke and Tim developed this seamless hive mind, where they could get Mother’s face and her body working together in perfect unison. It was a sight to behold.”
“In particular, I can’t sing Luke’s praises loudly enough. The guy suffered and sacrificed to make this film. He wore that heavy suit without complaint and gave everything to the character. He even gave up pizza and beer to be able to fit inside the damn thing. I wouldn’t do that. If I had to give up pizza this film would never have been made.”
“On top of that, Luke was actually the supervisor at Weta who oversaw the manufacture of the suit. He was the one constantly pushing to make it as great as it could be – and often to the detriment of his comfort on set. He was the one, a week out from shooting, that decided he’d stick real hard-drive components on the suit, even though they weighed a ton, because they looked better than resin replicas.”
I Am Mother, which had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, went online (pun intended) today, Friday, June 7th. The trailer teases an intense, claustrophobic thriller, but I can assure you it’s much, much more than that. Grab some popcorn and make I Am Mother a priority this weekend.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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