I love when first-time feature directors knock it out of the part, even if it's in quiet, subtle ways. This is the case with Jake Schreier and his wonderful film ROBOT & FRANK, written by Christopher D. Ford and starring Frank Langella, Susan Sarandon, Liv Tyler, James Marsden, Jeremy Sisto and the voice of Peter Sarsgaard as the voice of a helper robot given to Langella's Frank as a way to help out the aging and forgetful former jewel thief. Langella reminds us that he is still one of the great working actings of his or any other generation, and his resistance to living with a robot is matching only by his enthusiasm for having one around to help him with a couple last heists.
ROBOT & FRANK was received warmly at Sundance this year, and it's one in a growing number of indie works that incorporates science-fiction elements into a very human drama and character study, but is difficult to call a full-on science-fiction film. Other than a couple of robots and some fancified cell phones, the movie is noticeably devoid of any overwhelming futuristic landscapes and technology. This is a very charming and simple story about an elderly gentleman attempt to keep his grasp on reality, as his mind slowly slips away from him. And it's a movie I think even your grandparents would like, because I know how much you want to drag them to the movies with you. Anyway, please enjoy my interview with Jake Schreier…
Capone: Hi Jake, how are you?
Jake Schreier: Hey, how’s it going?
Capone: Good. I’ve got to clear something up right at the beginning, because I was reading some of the interviews with you out of Sundance, and I still wasn’t quite clear on the answer to this question. Was the robot in this movie a real robot, or a person in a suit? I had assumed the latter, but then you showed all that video at the end of what real robots today are capable of, and I doubted myself.
JS: No, it was not. I wish I could say yes, because that would be a lot cooler. I mean I would rather say that, because hopefully people would believe it, but no, it was not a real robot. But the fact that there’s any question about it is really good news.
Capone: I'm telling you, those little clips you have at the end of the film are what threw me, because really what that's saying is, “What we are showing you in this movie is more science than fiction."
JS: Yeah, that’s the point of those clips, to tie it into our world a little bit more and it’s for fun, because they're fun to look at.
Capone: Tell me about the design of the robot then. Who came up with it? Who was in the suit?
JS: Yeah, so it was designed by a place called Alterian in Los Angeles and built by them. They do the Daft Punk helmets and all of the Farrelly Brothers movies, all of the fat suits and all of that stuff, and they're great. It's just a fun place to go, and the design kind of came from an actual segment of the robotic world, these elder-care helper robots, and they tend to look like little white spacemen--there are a bunch of them that look that way. So it was always where we wanted to go with it. It was very important to us that it be faceless and that it had a kind of less-is-more philosophy, because that way you project on to it, as humans are so good at doing. We wanted to take advantage of that, and then the rest is like, “How does someone actually exist in that suit and interact with it?” The girl’s name is Rachael Ma, who had to endue a 100 degree heat in upstate New York in that suit.
Capone: I did want to talk about the robot being faceless, and that seems really important for Frank to be able to project onto it. That’s the only way he can really relate to it, treating it like it’s human.
JS: What’s funny is that we have shown it to roboticists and it’s really fun to talk to them about the challenges. We're all working toward the same thing, which is making relatable robots--we want to do it because it’s a movie character, and they want to do it because humans have to accept these things and come to care about them in similar ways. You don’t want to get to that "uncanny valley" place where it looks too human or it has an actual face. It’s just a little bit too creepy. I idea was that you should always feel about it the way that Frank does, and hopefully when it first shows up, you find it a little bit creepy, and as he grows to love it, hopefully the audience grows to love it as well. For that to work, it just seemed like the emotion and those feelings are really going to come from Frank Langella’s performance, and we should let the robot not do much, just be what it is.
Capone: You worked with Chris [Ford, screenwriter] before, but what was it about his take on this particular story that you liked the most?
JS: He had made this as a thesis film back at NYU--a short version of ROBOT AND FRANK, that I was the producer on, which, I joke, means that we shot at my uncle’s cabin. That was my big contribution to that film. But I think just the image of it, the short didn’t have any of the family relationships and none of the burglaries or heists, but just the image of the two of them walking in the woods is so striking that you feel like there has to be something in there, and then Ford has to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to make that a movie. It was always like an image that stuck with me.
Capone: In the last couple of years, there have been a few of these microbudget science-fiction films that have found other ways of letting us know they are in the future without doing these giant cityscapes with cars in the sky. Talk about how the budget that you had dictated the direction that the story could go in or some of the visuals that you were able to afford.
JS: It’s meant to feel very relatable. Certainly our budget affected that, but it was more like, we knew when we were writing it what budget we were likely to have. So it’s not like there was a lot of stuff in there that got taken out. It’s always smart to write to a level that you can achieve and have it not feel compromised, you know? I think for this, it’s part of the narrative that Frank exists in this kind of older world and the onset of technology is coming into it, so there’s nothing that feels poor about it not being there, because it’s not supposed to be there in his life, and for the robot to be striking as an image, it has to be one of the few pieces of modern technology in his world. If it worked for people, then we’d get away with it, because of that.
Capone: With Frank being an older gentleman, you can kind of keep his house future free.
JS: Yeah, like he’s got the internet TV that his kids bought him, but he never has any messages and he’s not very good at using it. [laughs]
Capone: I’ll admit, one of the first things that popped into my head when I heard about the film was that great old SNL commercial with Sam Waterston, where he’s selling insurance to old people that protects them from robot attacks.
JS: [laughs] Yeah, and his daughter is in the movie, so that’s funny. [Katherine Waterston plays a shopgirl in a store from which Frank frequent shoplifts]. Yeah, that’s a great one. I mean of course there are all of those jokes and it’s funny, because we have been doing this little Tumblr campaign with these little fake ads for the robots, and it’s funny. We went out of our way to make them sweet and maybe a little creepy sure, but it’s just funny to see the comments. It doesn’t matter how nice the image is, like the robot with two kids feeding ducks at a pond, and people write, “He’s about to push them in,” or “They're about to take over! We can see it happening,” because of all of these movies about robots taking over and killing everyone. That’s just what people assume is going to happen. We were really trying to make a movie where it didn’t go down that path.
Capone: I’m sure the question you’re getting the most is about assembling this incredible cast. How were you able to do that?
JS: That’s all my producers. I mean that’s Galt Niederhoffer, who’s made over 20 movies in New York, all with great casts. She just always delivers on that front. And the movie is made by my commercial production company that I’ve been working with for a number of years called Park Pictures, and they just started a feature division when we were finishing the first draft, and they had just brought her in to head up that division along with Sam Bisbee. They just went after it. It was amazing.
Capone: And when Frank actually came on board did he have any ideas about his character that maybe altered the script a little bit?
JS: Absolutely, I mean that was the most fun part about that process, each actor that you bring on, they want to meet with you and they always have comments. What’s interesting is that you have been sort of trying to make the script work as a whole organism, and you’re trying to make it function, and they look at it from the perspective of their character, obviously because they're being asked to play it and they always have notes like, “This doesn’t feel honest. It feels like you’re having this happen, because you need to get somewhere, but I can’t make that work as an actor,” and so it really improves the more of those meetings we have. As each person comes on, you make these changes based on those perspectives, and Frank’s was the first. He wanted to impart a little bit to us of how it actually feels to be 74 and to still feel youthful and vibrant, but everyone is treating you all of a sudden like you're a child or something and really make that more a part of the script.
Capone: Not to ruin any of the surprises of the film, but you do leave that idea of “How much of this memory loss thing is real, and how much is he putting on to make himself look innocent of the crimes he is committing?” But you kind of punctuate the end of this film with the scene near the very end of the film that makes it a little more clear where he lands in that spectrum in terms of how much memory loss is an issue in his life. Why did you want to include that?
JS: As the drafts progressed, memory became more of a crux of the film and the conceit of the movie is that as Frank and the robot grow closer, his memory improves, and he becomes healthier and so he’s sort of living high and thinks he’s got control over everything and so we thought it was important to take that down a notch, to bring him down to earth. It was partly in terms of narrative structure. It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to it. I can’t really defend it, because I can’t reveal it, but I’ll say this: It is plausible. Whether people think it is or not, I checked it out and it is plausible that that could happen, but I can’t really say anything because I can’t give it away.
Capone: Right. I have no doubt it’s plausible.
JS: I think for some people, it isn’t. My dad is a child psychologist and he was a colleague of Oliver Sacks and so it was in house, but I got some clearance on the plausibility of it.
Capone: I will say, for as many movies as I see in a year, I can almost always see a twist like that coming, and this one just floored me. You completely threw me off.
JS: Have you watched it again, because there are funny little hints.
Capone: I haven’t watched it again, but I'm sure I will.
JS: If we were Spielberg we would have put in these kind of echo-y reverb recaps of all of the lines that reference it, like in MINORITY REPORT.
Capone: You did do a lot of commercial work before this movie, and I’m assuming you had a fairly tight schedule on those. Did working on commercials for so long help you work more efficiently on a shorter schedule?
JS: Yeah, I mean in a funny way, on commercials you have a whole day to do these tiny little moments. I think more than anything commercials give you a real commend of all of the technology that’s out there and it gives you a real set up experiences working in a lot of different scenarios working with a lot of different crews and a lot of different problems to solve, and it makes you comfortable with that. The other thing bout commercials is you put them together pretty quickly, and because of the budgetary and actor constraints of this movie, we ended up in this position where we had two weeks to prep the whole thing, which is insane. That sounds insane, but the only way I could kind of wrap my mind around it was like, “Okay, pretend it’s a commercial. You only ever have two weeks to prep a commercial, and in the end there aren’t that many locations or setups, so kind of dive in like that and hope that it sort of works out.
Capone: I’m curious about Peter Skaarsgard’s robot voice. Was that voice being heard while filming, or that get put in later?
JS: No, he didn’t come on until after we shot. On set, Frank’s nephew would read the lines. He was a PA on the movie. Frank was amazing that way. I really thought I would need to make it as real as I could and have the voice come through the robot. It didn’t matter at all for him. He always said “I had the robot in my mind,” and he wouldn't tell me what it is--he had some other things he put in there for it. Sometimes we would just have the robot torso and an apple box, because Rachael would need a break, and he would just be talking to an apple box as a body, and it wouldn’t matter. I mean he was completely in the scene, he was that good.
Capone: The most dramatic scenes in the film are between Frank and his kids, who are all disconnected form him and each other. So apparently some things in the future aren’t going to change at all.
JS: That’s true.
Capone: Why did you want the relationship for Frank and his kids to be so fractured?
JS: Yeah, first off, hopefully you realize at some point in the movie that it’s his fault, so there’s a past that he needs to grapple with. He’s not just an old guy who had a nice family and now has to deal with a robot. He’s a complicated character, and also part of the question of the movie is for someone who reaches that point and created those problems with their children or who are being treated like they really aren’t a full adult anymore, could a robot actually be a better friend to you for a time? Is there a way in which that robot is someone who could teach you? Frank is someone who has neglected human relationships his whole life. Could this robot oddly teach him a bit about that and how to do a slightly better job?
Capone: It’s always funny when people ask a director at Sundance, “Do you know what you’re doing next?” since they literally just finished their film a couple of days before. But a little time has passed now, so do you have an idea of what you are up to next?
JS: I don’t. I mean I have a couple of things that are in early, early development that are being written, and Ford and I have another idea that we're thinking of developing, but there’s nothing where it’s like, “This is what I’m doing next!” I definitely like the idea of continuing to work in films where the genre is a little less clear, so it’s a little less clear where the movie is headed. I’m happy with how that turned out in ROBOT & FRANK.
Capone: Would one of the genres in question for the next project also be science fiction oriented?
JS: Certainly the thing Ford and I are working on is also in a near future, but similarly a grounded sci-fi or future agnostic if you want to call it, where it’s not taking a hard line on it one way or the other. I think those themes are certainly interesting to us.
Capone: Jake, thank you so much for talking. I really liked the movie, so congratulations on it.
JS: Well, thank you so much. That’s great to hear.
