A few weeks ago I got to do something incredibly cool: I was able to visit Tokyo for the first time thanks to Paramount Pictures and theGhost in the Shellmovie. While some studios release the first trailer for a big upcoming movie during the Super Bowl, or drop it on YouTube, forGhost in the ShellParamount went all out and invited reporters and a few lucky fans to a special location in the heart of the city where they had costumes, props and even Batou’s car on display before showing the trailer, some clips and conducting a Q&A withScarlett Johansson,Takeshi Kitano, and directorRupert Sanders.
For those not familiar withGhost in the Shell, it explores what it means to be human. When you’re able to copy your consciousness to another body, when do you stop being human? Is it your body or mind or both that makes you who you are? In addition, in the world ofGhost in the Shell, hackers can plant memories in your head and the recipient can’t tell what’s real or fake. The world ofGhost in the Shelltries to deal with real issues in a technologically advanced world.
Of course you’re able to’t make a big budget Hollywood movie tackling these philosophical issues alone. But when you mix in these themes with a cool story and some kick-ass action, it’s the kind of thought provoking stuff that makes me excited to see it.
In the film, Scarlett Johansson stars as The Major, a special ops, one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid who leads the elite task force Section 9. Devoted to stopping the most dangerous criminals and extremists, Section 9 is faced with an enemy whose singular goal is to wipe out advancements in cyber technology. Loaded with an all-star international cast featuringPilou Asbæk,Michael Pitt,Juliette Binoche,Kaori Momoi,Rila Fukushima,Chin Han,Danusia Samal,Lasarus Ratuere,Yutaka Izumihara, andTuwanda Manyimo.
A little after the Q&A ended and the party started to slow down, I was able to participate in a group interview with Rupert Sanders. He talked about how the film is not an origin story but a “birth story”, where they’re at in the editing process, how the film’s villain (Kuze) is an amalgamation, how Clint Mansell is going to do the music, why he wanted Scarlett Johansson to be The Major, having a diverse cast, and a lot more. Check out what he had to say below.Ghost in the Shellopens March 31st.
Question: It’s nice to have a trailer and that we can finally talk about this movie, because before this the conversation hasn’t been about the movie, it’s been about the controversies. What has that been like, knowing you have this movie and you want to show it but all of the talk has been about the issues?
RUPERT SANDERS: Quite seductive, actually. We knew this time would come and I think we’re proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve done it, so it wasn’t like, “I’ve got to get it out there. I’m not gonna take any more flak.” It was like, “It’ll come out when it’s ready.” I feel even when we started putting out the little 10 second teasers, those little glitches –Because I really wanted the marketing campaign to kind of hack into the system. We’re not one of the normal films, we’re quite weird and out there, but I think we can also inhabit a much bigger. So for me, we started to see it when that stuff came out and people were like, “Oh, maybe there’s something in this,” and I hope that we see this week –and your reactions obviously count– what people do think and how it grows and how it finds its place, which is a hard thing to do, you never really know. You’re kind of casting a fly out into the water and you just don’t know whether it’s gonna sink or swim.
I think fans of the franchise are gonna be very interested and maybe a little surprised in how much you’ve pulled from both films, the whole Stand Alone Complex series, you’ve pulled aspects from each of those things. Was there ever any concern about pulling all of these disparate storylines together and using aspects of each of them like that?
SANDERS: It’s hard, because I don’t think you could’ve taken the 1995 film and just remade it frame by frame. I think it’s just too philosophical and too introspective. That’s what so many people like about it and I hope that we’ve channeled that into the film but hopefully built a bigger film around it, so that people are excited in the cinema but come out enriched in some way. I think so many times I come out of the cinema and just feel like I’ve been battered over the head and my money has been taken, I haven’t actually left with anything other than a few bits of popcorn stuck to my trousers. And I hope that there’s something in here that…A lot of work has gone into it. I’ve been in this for three years and it’s been a wonderful and exciting journey, but I really hope people love it and get something from it.
You’re a huge [Takeshi] Kitano fan. Of all his films, which is the one that you find the most interesting and why?
SANDERS: I thinkHana-bito me was the one that kind of –There’s something about that aspect in Aramaki, is that he’s an incredibly violent exterior shell and then inside there’s this kind of incredible warmth and intimacy to him. I was so lucky to work with him. What a precise and amazing actor. You just literally put the camera on him and you just see these feelings coming. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.
Did you feel like you wanted to ask him for advice as a director at times?
SANDERS: We didn’t have much time to sit around and chin-wag. But it’s always hard directing someone who you admire greatly, and Takeshi is very generous with his praise of how I worked. We were praising each other on different aspects of how he was a bit funny tonight about his process, but he’s very meticulous. We were doing scene where he comes out of the car and he was a bit worried because it was a low car and he had to get out in one fluid move, so we went outside after we’d been shooting and he was lying in the car and very slowly getting out and feeling where the gun went and the case went –there’s a lot going on in that scene. And he’s like, “Okay. I’ve got it,” and then we shot and everything, lights, squibs, and everyone was there and he literally exploded out of that car and did five rounds in milliseconds. And that’s about his precision, he wanted to get it right, he stayed late a few nights and got it right and just killed it. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.
It didn’t really click for me how this was gonna be an origin movie until I saw the trailer and it definitely made sense why you used Kuze as the villain. I know you’ve been keeping him mostly a mystery, but was there any point where you were considering doing the Puppet Master storyline directly from the anime?
SANDERS: No. To be honest, Kuze borrows a few facets from different characters in the series, he’s not just Kuze and he’s not just the Puppet Master. So he’s a kind of amalgamation, so the way he moves through the network and stuff is borrowed from other elements…He’s kind of out own creation, and Michael Pitt was incredibly immersed in that world. He went fully in there, he was living in a shipping container next to the set so he could smoke and punch punching bags simultaneously. He’d be like constantly skipping rope, he was incredible. He and Scarlett [Johansson] together were like these incredible specimens, but he was scrawling and drawing and he really immersed himself in the violence of the man and I think it’s an incredible performance.
I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about music. There were a few themes we saw in the teaser, what’s making it into the finished film and what music are you going with?
SANDERS: Well, I haven’t finished the film yet so I’m still in that process of trying stuff. I got a great composer, Clint Mansell, who’s obviously done some incredible work throughout his career. We’re kind of dancing around a bit of like 80 synth and a kid of intricate sound design as much as instrumentation, and it’s an evolving work in progress. We haven’t scored the film yet, but that’s what’s luring us that way at the moment.
Is the music that we heard tonight going to be in the finished film with the shelling sequence?
SANDERS: I don’t know, I haven’t finished the film.
During the Q&A you mentioned that the film is sort of a new take on the future, can you expand on those comments a little bit?
SANDERS: Damn, did I say that? I have no answer. I don’t know whether it’s a new take on the future, I’m bastardizing my own quote. I think it’s just that there’s something as we move forward into kind of technical transcendence, we trust so much … I mean, now you look at the phone in a different way. That thing knows who I’m talking to, how I’m talking to them, where I am, what I eat, what I buy, where I travel in my Uber account. And there’s something that we trust in that thing, we’re like, “No, that’s mine.” But what I think is interesting about our film is kind of the sovereignty of data, where if that was in your head and someone then hacked into your head, not only have they got your contacts, they got your thoughts and your emotions and your feelings; and that was a frightening twist on where we got to go technologically with the story. I also believe that if we parent that technology properly, then we can coexist with technology and our souls will survive, humanity will survive. I think there’s a lot of fear of technology overtaking us, but I think if we parent it correctly and we give it a reason to keep us around we can both live together.
Scarlett joked a little bit about having her experience playing cyborgs and aliens recently, but clearly she’s been thinking about these themes for many years. Was there something that she brought to the table in understanding this character and this film that was surprising to you or gave you some insight?
SANDERS: It was very hard for her, like she said, she had to strip away any of those affectations that as an actor you need to inhabit a character. She couldn’t really do any of that, so she had to be very still and very kind of pragmatic about the performance. But she’s very intelligent, and like you say and like she said, she’s been a mind without a body and a body without a mind and that’s kind of what drew me to her as The Major. She seems just to inhabit that world so well, and her voice, whenever you hear her voice it just takes you to that place, she really is to me the cyberpunk queen.
You told us about Takeshi’s scene that you showed tonight with the gunfire right out of the car. Tell us a little bit about the scene with Scarlett that you showed tonight and why you chose that scene to be her debut as The Major.
SANDERS: Well, I’ll back up for one second because there’s a lot of gunfire and Takeshi really nailed that sequence. But the other amazing thing is watching Scarlett with a submachine gun, she does something that very few people can do with it, she can unload a full clip without closing her eyes. She doesn’t blink at all, she’s like, “Prrrrrrrtttttttt” which is… We have a lot of military guys on set and they’re like, “Damn! How does she do that?” she really honed it and really trained herself hard, and there’s a lot of discharge coming out of those weapons, it’s not just pops and stuff. But that scene –I think that we wanted people to see that it was a dramatic film and that there was theater to it, not just like thermoptic suits and flying off buildings. It’s not just like a beautiful explosive world, there’s a real kind of darkness to it and a real drama to it, and that scene where it’s kind of containment is an essence ofGhost in the Shell. There’s a lot of the philosophy and there’s the kind of drama to it, which I think really is what we tried to do withGhost, and then Takeshi’s scene was action, so I think you’re gonna get action, philosophy, and drama in a beautiful set of characters.
Can you talk about the set a little bit? In the original ’95 movie it’s totally Hong Kong, and then based on the images we saw today was more like aBlade Runnerkind of futuristic Tokyo.
SANDERS: We shot in New Zealand, so we were really off the mark [Laughs] on Neo Tokyo or Neo Hong Kong. So we built all our sets in New Zealand and then we worked with Weta Workshop who built all of the practical effects. I try to do a lot of my work in camera, I don’t like to be in green screen leotards in a green screen environment, I wanna be in the shit, and I think that’s why we ended up in the sewery streets of Hong Kong towards the end in like the last … Kaulu inside has been squeezed out and there’s not much left of that kind of great world left, but to me it’s important to find the gritty underbelly that then we started to lay visual effects in and started to dress on top of. So it’s kind of an amalgamation of Wellington, New Zealand, what we call Welling Kong, which is our version of Hong Kong where we changed some of the streets in Wellington. But most of the exterior was shot in Hong Kong, and we went to those places that were drawn into the plates of the anime on our scouts and we shot some of them.
You’ve talked a lot about how you wanted this to be a globally diverse cast and an appealing film, obviously people have been hung up on the fact that you chose Scarlett instead of a Japanese actress. So can you talk a little bit about how you did seek to execute it as a globally diverse film?
SANDERS: I think I was lucky that once I cast Scarlett, which was amazing because she doesn’t chose lightly, she takes what she does seriously, and in that long a career she’s done some incredibly seminal films. So when she was like, “I’m kind of interested, come meet with me in New York,” I was like, “Yes! This is going to be amazing!” And then it was amazing when she … Because you start doing wardrobe fittings and the wig’s not right, the clothes aren’t quite right, and you’re like, “Oh God, it’s gonna be a disaster.” I remember when it all kind of gelled: we were waiting for this wig to come from New York to Wellington, and before that we were using like stand-ins. But when it all came together and she walked out I was like, “Yes, that’s The Major. She really nailed it and she really inhabited it.”
But it’s a very international cast and I think that the best of casting her is that I didn’t have to cast big name actors around her, I could cast people like Juliette Binoche, Kaori Momoi, and Takeshi Kitano. That’s unusual for a Hollywood film, usually it’s that you need the star and then you need ten people who can be on the poster, but we didn’t have that. So it was great, I was given the freedom to cast the film however I wanted.
Ghost in the Shellis a huge franchise obviously and you’re taking pieces from these things. The problem I find in Hollywood is that a lot of people are making these movies expecting to make more sequels. Does this movie stand alone and tell one story or does it leave it very open?
SANDERS: I think Scarlett said it, it’s not an origin story in a way, it’s a birth story, it’s about her becoming someone. But we were like, “God, if people like it and we have to make another one, where do we go?” So I think the answer to your question is this film isn’t waiting for a sequel, it’s its own beautiful thing, and if we are lucky enough to make another… it’s not like we killed her at the end.
I’m curious what you learned if you did friends and family screenings and maybe if there was some feedback you got that impacted the direction you went in editing.
SANDERS: It’s complex and it does stand alone. It’s a complex film and I think one of the things that we learned in some of those screenings was that there was so much going on that there was a bit of head-scratching in the first act, and first act problems are much easier to fix than third act problems, so we were lucky enough to get some really interesting filmmakers and friends and people that I’m close with to come and give me advice. When you’re immersed in a film for three years and then you’re looking at it on a day-to-day basis in the cutting room, it’s hard to step back and go, “Okay. What is this?” and so I was very lucky to have people come in and go, “Dude, you need to open that out a bit. I’m getting a bit lost in there” or, “That could be tighter.” So that’s the beauty of the filmmaking community is that you may ask people for advice instead of waiting until they come out of the premiere going, “Oof! That was slow, that second act.” So you fix problems as you go, and that’s filmmaking. You’re on set and the script’s not working, you fix it. Every part of it, what you start with and what you end up with, is its own thing, really.
I feel like it could be easy just to lean into the incredible action sequences from the anime and manga and TV series, but so much of what makesGhost in the Shellwhat it is is the philosophy. So I’m curious, how much of that makes it into the film, how much are you going to challenge the viewer to really think about what you’re showing instead of just explaining it out?
SANDERS: I hope, like I said earlier, that’s what people leave with, that they leave with some philosophical introspection to it. But it’s not like a full Freudian lecture. There’s stuff in there even with what Batou was saying to Togusa, there’s a heart in it and there’s a philosophical essence to it and I think that’s what sets it apart from so many of the other films, because so many of them are just about action and jokes. This is not a funny film, it has a lot of action, but it has introspection and it has philosophy. For more onGhost in the Shell:
