If you’ve seen Duncan Jones’ Moon, you’ll already be familiar with the work of Gavin Rothery. Rothery worked as part of the Art and Visual Effects department on the film, and has a solid career in concept art and video game design. He’s also a writer and director having unleashed his feature debut Archive into the physical world this week. It’s an incredibly accomplished slice of science-fiction, and having given it the full five stars in our review, I highly recommend you check it out. Set in the year 2038, the film joins scientist George Almore, a man who is hard at work creating a human-equivalent artificial intelligence. His latest proto-type is almost ready, but this risky stage of development throws up some unexpected consequences.
Rothery spent almost a decade working on bringing the film into being, and the result is simply beautiful. We sat down with Rothery to discuss the project to uncover what his intentions were and how the idea first popped into his head.
I read that Archive was almost ten years in the making, can you remember how the idea first came into being?
It was a really bad weekend I had. I was doing a big spring clean in the rather small flat that I was living in with my girlfriend. You know when you do a big spring clean of your flat, you’ve got to clean everything right? And you have to trash your house. Then you kind of rebuild it all by putting it back together. So, in the middle of the big spring clean your house is just trashed, you’ve got everything, stuff off the surfaces, cleaning stuff everywhere, a vacuum cleaner… I was right in that spot….and as a freelancer, your computer is everything. It’s your tool for earning money, it’s your archive of all your work. It means a lot. It’s your access to everything. I had two computers. When you work as a freelancer you have to upgrade your computer every couple years. You have a secondary computer and your computer. Both computers were on… some weird kind of power thing, BANG, everything goes out. I never found out what happened, but I lost a load of data; corrupted hard drives. It was really bad whatever happened. ln that moment on that Sunday, I was left in a house with no power and absolutely trashed. So I had to just continue the house clean. It just felt awful. I was just in such a bad mood. I was really, really, really fuming, and over the course…when you’re cleaning you get inside your own head. I was thinking about ideas for movies because I’d got a couple of conversations on the back of my work on Moon and I’d done some work in advertising, directing commercials and stuff. I was getting people asking me what I wanted to do. So some opportunities were starting to manifest and I was thinking about things that I might want to look at developing and I just had this… I just felt hard done by. I felt like these computers killed themselves on purpose, just to make my day worse. That idea lodged in my head, the idea of a machine killing itself to spite me. It felt very Philip K Dick. It felt like one of those nice weird conceptual ideas, but an idea like that isn’t the story. It isn’t a film. So I kept thinking about that and then arrived at the point where, what if something was creating an artificial intelligence, like a human equivalent of intelligence, and as soon as he turned it on all it did was kill itself. Turn itself off. There’s a story there. What’s happening, why is it doing it? How do they stop it from doing that? Maybe when they understand what the machine’s perspective is, their view changes. That ultimately led to Archive. That was back in 2011.
Archive is essentially a big existential mystery, one that deviates from expectations. How hard was it to piece the story together to make sure that the fantastic ending was concealed for as long as possible?
I just remember when we were writing it I did have a couple conversations about, “Hey maybe you should put some bread crumbs in there”, and I just think that they’re a little bit insulting to audiences and I didn’t really want to do any of that. But what I wanted was to make a film that you can watch, get to the end, and then watch it again all the way through, and then you see them on the second watch. Things that aren’t apparent in the first watch actually are very clear in the second watch. I was getting into a lot of the metaphysical stuff. Iconography, symbology, things like flowing water as regard to death. I wanted the film to feel different on the second viewing and enjoy it on a different level too. You put a lot of time and effort into making a film, it seems a shame to only watch it once. There are some films that can be great films, but you only need to watch them once and that’s it. I wanted to do something that had value in repeat viewing.
You started your career as an illustrator and comic artist before moving into visual effects, how do you think that your skills helped with the creation of Archive?
When I look at my whole life and career and unpick, like all of us right, it all makes sense now, but back then this wasn’t what I intended to do. It wasn’t like I set out from school intending to become a writer / director. What happened was, I was on my way to become a comic artist. I went to Uni and studied graphic design, specializing in illustration. They are my two big loves, graphic design and illustration. Basically I just drew comics for three years.
Then I graduated 1996 and that was when the comic industry was really collapsing around that point, it was having a really hard time. Then Sony launched the original PlayStation console, which they spent a lot of money marketing, and made computer games get very cool. All of a sudden we’d gone from the 16-bit or 32-bit to 3D. You’ve got games like Wipeout with custom soundtracks by very cool bands, The Prodigy. Never had anything like that before. They made games very appealing so basically all the kids started playing PlayStation and not being so interested in comics.
But what I found was that the skills that I’ve been developing for comics translated great to the games industry. I’ve always loved sci-fi stuff, so whenever I draw anything it’s usually in that space, it’s just what I like. My own comics I was drawing at uni, I’d spend a chunk of time designing everything that was gonna be in it, then drawing it. I was already kind of doing my own concept art just to be able to draw the comics I wanted. Comics, they give you a lot of skills. If you can work it all out and do it, they leave you with the ability to tell stories, the narrative flow of imagery, it’s basically storyboarding. It’s how you lay images out next to each other in order to communicate. Then you’ve got your design stuff as well as an element of graphic design, laying out a nice-looking panel where you go from text and stuff. There’s a lot of skills that go into that, so everything’s been super useful and I’m so glad that it worked out this way even though it was accidental.
The robots are more human than the human that created them, George himself portraying the more traditional cold-hearted machine. Why did you decide to invert these dynamics?
I love little plastic men. Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running were the ones that really originally took to my heartstrings. I saw Silent Running when I was six and that film just left a huge impression on me. The way that Douglas Trumbull was able to get so much out of… essentially people in plastic boxes, and I just think it’s such a cool magic trick. So much of that is projection. So much of the humanity of J1 and J2 particularly actually comes from Theo. It’s like a bounce effect that happens, they’re reacting to him, so you don’t get it without a lot of setup. So even though it looks like a lot of it comes from the robots, which it is, a lot of it is also coming from Theo because he’s the one driving it. So if you deconstruct it really, Theo had to do a lot of work to enable that bounce effect to work.
Whenever I’m doing something, I like to try and push it a little bit. You set your own mini challenges inside the thing you’re doing and I felt like if I gave J1 and J2 designs that didn’t have faces…so they couldn’t really emote in any way that we could kind of get a hold on facially. They didn’t have clear eyes to look at. I thought if I took that away from them, it puts you in a very interesting place because you almost anthropomorphise things.
The designs of both J1 and J2 are drastically different in appearance to J3. What was your intention behind the contrasting looks?
The idea behind that was George is really only interested in the end result. He’s not really interested in the steps, which is why J1 and J2 aren’t as developed. The idea is that J1 and J2 are really all about the brains. He knows that they’re never going to get all the way there so he’s not going to bother making them too nice a body. He just needs to make sure motor functions are working and get as much of the brain as he can so he can make the next brain. He’s not going to spend a lot of time on aesthetics so he can properly make that. The brain is what he needs and he gets there in three steps. So J1 basically is just a big brain on legs. He never even bothered building her any arms. It’s just a waste of time for him, never mind just keep moving forwards. J2 has an elongated head because her brain is a lot bigger than a human brain. She’s more sophisticated, she’s older, she needs more of a body to be able to make sure everything’s working properly. But he doesn’t need too much time, just make sure all channels work together. Then with J3 he is like, “this is the one”, and he spends a lot of time on it.
This is a film that looks so lush and expensive. As an independent production I’m guessing the budget was pretty tight and modest, what do you and your team do to stretch the production beyond its limited funding?
I think it helps a lot in that I do all those other jobs. I can design stuff and I know how all that stuff works, how things are made. I can design stuff inside a budget. Archive and Moon were created in that low, low budget indie space where what you do is you get hold of a chunk of money, then you figure out how to make a film inside that chunk of money. So everything comes back from the amount of money you can get a hold of. That’s how I have been working on both of those films. They have an idea of what the budget is so I’ll design a set that I know that we can build, and then we’ve got a set where we could go anywhere. We can light it and move the camera anywhere, and that’s going to add a ton of value to the production. It’s worth spending 2 to 300 [thousand] pounds on a set. You get the moon base in Moon, you get the house in Archive. With Archive we had a three million pounds micro production. So spending that 2 to 300,000 pounds on the set, no brainer, you get so much out of that.
As far as the story telling goes, I know how to tell a story in that space. I know what I don’t need. So I know if I can get this, this and this, that’s like 85% of it right there. I work like that. I’ll pick a couple of big battles and make sure that I can definitely win those, and those tend to carry the rest of it. With Archive I knew that I needed some nice wide cinematic stuff, so I just took my drone, went to Norway and shot a bunch of stuff in Norway. Myself and a producer went and did a little guerrilla shoot, hired a car, drove around and it cost like nothing. Plus when we were shooting in Hungary, when we were up the Mountain in the snow, I’d get my drone up between setups. I was just banking all this drone footage. It was a way for me to get that scale into the film without bringing it into the cost. All the big nature stuff, that didn’t cost anything, but it was because I knew how to fly a drone. I had a drone and I knew where to go to get the footage.
Theo James isn’t only the lead, he also joined the project as producer. How was he as a collaborator and what do you think it was about the film that he connected with so strongly?
He knows quality when he sees it (laughs). You get this with a lot of actors when they’re working on smaller films. Theo does much bigger films than Archive, but you have to really buy into the project. When you pull the project together you need your actors backing you because that secures financing. When you’re making a film like Archive, you can’t pull any money in until you’ve got your star attached, and the star then dictates what your budget will be. You have to team up properly and the only way to do that is to properly roll your sleeves up and bring people on as producers. Levels the field a little bit.
There was a show in South Korea where they reunited a woman with her deceased daughter in VR so the Archive‘s storage unit for the consciousness of a deceased person doesn’t feel that unreal. Do you imagine that one day something similar might become a reality?
Yeah, absolutely. The thing is about Archive, there’s some ideas in Archive...I had all these ideas in 2011, and one of the frustrating things about getting started in the film industry and the time scales that it takes is that if you’ve got these zeitgeist ideas other things pop up that have similar ideas. Then your stuff comes out afterwards and there’s a comparison. What can you do? You’re just getting on and getting things made, but these ideas are very zeitgeisty at the moment. It’s near future stuff. That one foot in the present, one foot in the future. Like you say, these technologies feel like they could become real. It wouldn’t be so surprising if it got to 2038 / 2039 when the film is set and there was this technology. There might be. We’ll have to wait and see. Look at what people like Elon Musk are doing with things like Neurolink and stuff. Some crazy science is going on at the moment in laboratories around the place. Engineers working on things. There’s some real magic being cooked up; Neurolink is definitely one to watch, they’re doing some crazy stuff.
Science-Fiction films are always a great place to explore big human emotions and ideas. Archive covers so many: life and death, love and loss, jealousy, obsession, then there’s some almost Oedipal moments, and obsession. Why do you think the genre makes it that much easier to explore these complex human concepts?
I like sci-fi which has got personal stakes. So much sci-fi tends to fall into the more epic stakes where, “we’ve got to do this to save humanity, or save the Earth”, which are fun-to-watch movies, but you only ever get so much of the connection with that stuff. So I mean, the things you picked up on were very deliberate, love and loss were the two things – love and death particularly the two themes that I wanted to drill in on and write a story around. The interesting thing, and it probably says more about me than anything else, but I set out very deliberately to write a story about love and death, and then when I finished the film it occurred to me I’d actually written the story about fear of replacement, that’s kind of really what it is at the heart of it all. Maybe that’s the same thing. Maybe a fear of love and fear of loss and death, is actually a fear of replacement.
I just wanted personal stakes. I think the thing about these other films that have that kind of connection is because they had those personal stakes. If you watch Silent Running, it’s so personal. That film, you’re just with one guy. He’s got his three robot buddies with him, but most of the film you’re just with one guy. You’re completely on board with his struggle, you get what he’s doing and you get what’s at stake. It pulls you on a journey. Films like that, as an audience member if that’s your thing, it’ll take you on that journey. These things stay with you. I love those personal stories and even something like Alien. Alien is a good example because it’s a very commercial movie and it’s a cross genre sci-fi / horror, but again, it’s a very personal story. It’s just about a bunch of people facing this crazy monster that they don’t even know what it is. It keeps changing and they’re just trying to figure out how to not die. It’s an action version of a very close personal story. It’s a very clever movie.
Have you started the next ten year project?
You joke about this, but yeah. I’ve got like four projects. I’m running at the moment because, you know, you’ve got to run multiple projects. They’re like horses running against each other. There’s lots of conversations, things that might become something. But the one I hope to do next, I started nine years ago. So I’m now in the same sort of space. It occurred to me a long time ago that if I was ever going to get somewhere in my career and do something at any level of significance, it would probably be because I’d had an idea and developed it. So I started basically keeping all my notes in this [holds up electronic device]. I still have my original note for Archive that was made during that horrible afternoon. All my notes are in there, including my original one for this project that I’m hoping to do next, which is nine years old.
Archive is available to own now.
