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Starring Keanu Reaves and Jennifer Connelly and opening this Friday is The Day The Earth Stood Still, a remake of the iconic 1951 science fiction movie of the same name. The plot centers around the visit to Earth of an alien, Klaatu, and his robot protector, Gort. Check back on Friday for Science Not Fiction’s review of the movie: today we have an interview with director Scott Derrickson about how he tackled remaking a classic and the role of science in science fiction.

SNF: What attracted you to this particular project?

SD: 20th Century Fox sent a script to me to me. I was very skeptical when I first got it because I love the original film and wasn’t sure it was a good idea to do a remake of it. But when I read the script, I thought it still needed work, but I felt like the idea of updating the movie had value. The original was rooted in the social issues of its time. I liked the idea of retelling the same story but changing the social issues to the issues that we are dealing with now. I also felt that it’s an amazing story that the majority of the movie-going public doesn’t know. That, combined with the visual possibilities of it, was it.

SNF: With a remake, were you worried that you’d be caught between the people who’d complain that you hadn’t departed from the original enough, and so were just making a copy, and those people who would see every change as an attack on a beloved classic?

SD: You can’t win with that. If you’re going to venture into remake territory with a film that has a fan base, you accept the fact that there’s a percentage you can’t please. I knew that going in and dealt with it ahead of time. But I believed in the value of doing the remake. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the original, just like I don’t think Peter Jackson thought there was anything wrong with King Kong. I do think that if you going to remake a beloved film, you have to respect the original and try to take from it everything that can be used and adapted to a modern audience. And I certainly did that with this film. There’s a lot of elements from the original film that are in this one.

SNF: What was the design brief you gave for Gort?

SD: I have to be honest, I really gave a terrible one to start with. When I first got on the movie, I thought we can’t bring Gort from the original film, with that tin-can figure. As incredibly cool as he is in the original, I just said we can’t do that. I also made the argument that it doesn’t really make sense that he could be in a human shape. So I said we’ve got to come up with something, something more linked to this alien technology we’re developing. Let’s wow the audience with something brand new. We worked for a good 3 or 4 months doing artwork and designs and concept work for a new Gort that would be completely re-imagined. It just got worse and worse and worse.

The more things that would come in, the more bizarre they would get, until I felt like I was looking at images from the Museum of Modern Art. I was with my visual effects supervisor, expressing that “we’ve got to get something better for this,” and he said, “I don’t understand why we’re not going back to the original on this.” I just kind of looked at him, and it was just one of those moments when I just realized “what am I thinking? How can I do this without letting Gort be Gort?” It was one of the biggest near-disasters that we had on the movie. I said get rid of everything that we’ve done, just give me an updated version of the original that modern audiences will like. That led to something that we all believed would be very satisfying to people who didn’t know the original movie, but at the same time is recognizable as Gort.

SNF: Where do you draw the line between scientific accuracy and trying to tell a good story?

SD: In moviemaking, if you have to choose between good storytelling and any kind of accuracy, you’re probably going to want to bend toward storytelling. But I actually don’t think that that choice is ever really forced on a filmmaker. I think you can almost always do both. I went through a lot of effort to make sure that the science of the movie was real, all the way down to the equations on the blackboard. All of these things that most people are not going to appreciate–that was put in there for people like your readers.

My feeling about it is that it’s science fiction, and because it’s science fiction, you got to be really respectful to the science element of it. I’m married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that in screenplays or movies that I’ve worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won’t know the difference. It’s disrespectful to the people in those professions, it doesn’t respect the significance or the import of what they do.

In this movie, our main character is a serious scientist in a real field. We felt it was critical to have some root of legitimacy –- if not complete legitimacy – in all of the dialogue and all of the science that’s presented. There are people who are going to see this movie who will know. If I put in there what was in the screenplay to start with, those people would’ve been pulled out of the movie. I think Hollywood’s often very guilty of not giving enough attention to these sort of things. In a science fiction film, you’re uniquely responsible to pay respect to the science represented in the movie.

SNF: How did you work with your science advisors?

SD: The first thing that I did was I gave the script we were working off of to [Seth Shostak] our science advisor and I asked him to tag everything that’s a misrepresentation of accurate science, and everything that might be, including dialogue and storytelling. It was a lot more than I was expecting. Once he had done that, I sat down with him, and just went through everything and the possibilities for changes. Some parts of it became more complicated, for example the equations on the blackboard [that feature in meeting between Klaatu and a Nobel Prize winner played by John Cleese]. It’s a real equation about [cosmology]. If an alien were to come to Earth that equation is one of the questions we’d want to ask.

SNF: Does this movie represent human nature as something that is going to evolve progressively or self-destruct?

That is the question that Klaatu is trying to ask. I think the film does ultimately take a position on that issue, and it’s not the position that everyone would take and its not just optimism. I think that the argument that John Cleese’s character makes is that it is human nature for us to destroy each other. But it is also human nature to have to get into those really difficult messes before there is enough motivation and enough admission of the truth to make the significant changes that are necessary for us to evolve. I really like that idea because I think it matters. I think its an idea that’s significant in the world right now and I think that’s it’s in the air, the idea that we can change, that America is changing and the world is changing. We’ve made a mess of this war in Iraq, we’ve made a mess of our economy, we’re making a mess of this environment that sustains us, but those very messes can become the things that motivate us to become better than we were in the first place. That’s an important idea.

December 8th, 2008 Tags: Scott Derrickson, The Day The Earth Stood Still
by Stephen Cass in Aliens, Movies | 3 comments | RSS feed | Trackback >