Sci-fi is back in the menu! Thanks to Netflix, The Hollywood Handle had the opportunity to interview director Brad Peyton about his upcoming film, ATLAS, which stars Jennifer Lopez and Simu Liu and is expected to release on Netflix on May 24! Check out our full interview below:
THH: What initially inspired the concept of ATLAS, and how did it evolve from the initial idea to the final script?
BRAD: You know, I didn’t write it, so I don’t know exactly what initiated the writer to write it. What I can speak to is what was attractive to me initially, which never changed, which is the story about someone who doesn’t trust and has to learn how to trust. I found a very relatable theme in that, and mostly because almost all relationships are built off respect and trust, in my opinion. So, uh, you know, that’s sort of the underpinning of the best relationships you have in your life. And this woman has shut herself off to that. And then the irony of the fact that she mistrusts technology and specifically AI, because of a trauma, and then she has to spend the bulk of the story stuck inside of a piece of tech run by AI. I just thought, okay, this is very rich. And I would say the other aspect is that at this point in my career, I really started focusing on trying to work on projects that I just had never seen before. Like, there was no version of this movie that I’d ever seen where I was like, oh, yeah, it’s sort of this and this, but put together and done in a different way. I was like, this was a hard movie to pitch. You know, like, it was just like an odd movie to try to, like, tell people what you wanted to do with it. And I have to thank Netflix because they were very supportive of this from the very beginning. And even, you know, the cast and bringing on Jennifer, this is not a movie that would get made at a lot of places. But, my thing was like, I want to make something really unique and special and different. And that’s sort of what I latched onto and carried through the whole process.
THH: How was working with Jennifer Lopez to develop her character’s arc throughout the film? Why do you think she fits perfectly for this role.
BRAD: Well, working with her was great. I really, really loved working with her. It was a very kind of intimate experience because a lot of the time, it would just be her in the arc suit and then Greg voicing Smith from a sound booth on stage and just me and Jen talking. And because she’s acting opposite no one most of the time. So we had a lot of conversations throughout the entire process. You know, she has a very unique skill set in the sense that she is a solo performer who’s used to going out and performing to stadiums of people, where she is the driving force. Even though she has backup dancers and all that, she is the performer. And this material could be very daunting to a lot of actors because they were in a, ah, mech suit by themselves, acting opposite no one for multiple weeks on end. Like, I think she was in that thing for like six or seven weeks or seven or eight weeks. There was a lot of time where she’s just acting in the suit by herself. So a lot of actors, I think, would be very intimidated by taking that on. I think she was initially, but very quickly, what happened, I think, is that she got into the rhythm of being that solo performer. A lot of this physicality comes from a dance background. You know, like, she’s in a big mechanical suit that’s moving and it’s driving how she walks, even though it looks like she’s driving how it walks, in reality, when we’re recording it, you know, we have to program the suit to walk, so she has to react to it like she’s the one causing it, you know? So her skillset lent itself to pulling this off in a really high level in a really great way. And I would also say, like, that attribute, that virtue of courage is something that I think she’s had to probably have her entire life and her entire career to get where she is. And it was so important for her to have that, to be able to take on a role like this. Um, and it’s one of the reasons why I think she delivers, like, an unbelievable performance, because I think she’s so suited to taking on this sort of physical challenge of being there by herself, that once that got comfortable, she could just go into the emotion of it. The emotion of the scene could take over. So it was very much a unique experience where the actor and the film and myself, I think we worked really well together in order to craft this.
THH: The film deals with artificial intelligence and its implications. What message do you hope to convey about the relationship between humans and technology?
BRAD: Well, I think the main thing is that it started for me with, I don’t want to repeat what other science fiction films have done before, and most science fiction films have said: “AI is the bad guy, the evil robots are coming.” And I was like, okay, we’ve done that. And I get it. It’s very dramatic, and I understand it. It’s relatable in some ways. But for me, the real reality of it is that AI is just a tool, and like any other tool, it could be used for good, it could be used for bad, but it really comes down to the people that are using it and the responsibility they take. So my stance on this was, I want to show you the possibility of the bad and then the possibility of the good. So it’s really a conversation starter in that, because AI is coming. It’s on the horizon, if it’s not already here, and it’s not going to be all bad, all good, it’s going to be a lot in the middle. And this movie sort of tackles the AI component in a much broader, more nuanced way where it doesn’t say, oh, it’s just this one thing. It’s really a lot of things. Um, so I’m hoping people understand that it’s like the conversation about AI has to be a very nuanced one that’s going to go on for a long time, but ultimately it comes down to the human’s responsibility of how they utilize it.
THH: This is a film that required lots of VFX work. What were the biggest challenges in bringing the futuristic world of ATLAS to life through visual effects?
BRAD: Man, I would say the biggest challenge was just the fact that this movie was done in pieces. Like, I would have to record Jen in the mech suit, and then I would have to record the environment with certain people in the environment that the mech suit was going to go into. And then I would have to augment that environment and augment Jen and augment those people with visual effects. So a lot of times our shots would be three or four pieces brought together, stitched together, and then augmented again. There’s very few shots in this movie where it’s like, I just got to shoot the shot, you know, like, it just is what it was in camera. So it was really, really challenging because I had to basically constantly convey to people what I had in my head, what I was seeing, what I wanted it to be. And I also had to explore the possibilities of things. Like, I didn’t want to stick to my plan so religiously that I wasn’t pushing myself even further. And so that was one of the other really complicated things is that as much as I’d stick to my plan and shoot my plan, if I saw an opportunity, I would push myself and push my team to explore that in the best way possible. So there was never a period up until the very end where I was like, okay, the term like “good enough” does not exist in my vocabulary, or anyone who I work with vocabulary. So the visual effects was sort of the most complicated part, because I just wanted to give you the richest world I could, the most complicated world I could, the best tech I could. So that component of bringing that all together with the photographed elements, just that alone and keeping that straight in my head, that was probably the most difficult element.
Watch the FULL interview below!
ATLAS releases on Netflix on May 24.
