![]() Set in a downtown Los Angeles as thick with high-rises as Manhattan, as modernistic as Shanghai and populated exclusively with citizens both gainfully employed and well dressed (an optimistic if unplanned antidote to the recent Elysium), the film focuses intently upon Theodore ( Joaquin Phoenix), who is very good at his job, that of writing eloquent, moving, heartfelt letters for others who aren’t up to the task he’s a sort of Cyrano for all seasons. ![]() "He said: either the movie's a bomb and it's got not only my name above the title but my name in the title, so I'm fucked that way or it does well and I'm just forever associated with this character.PHOTOS: It’s Lonely Out Here: ‘Gravity’ and 10 More Films About Isolation "We were in between takes one day, and he was naked except for a blanket around him, and was explaining to a friend what the plot of the movie was – and it started hitting me how crazy it was that he did this movie. "I don't think I realised at the time what a brave thing that was," Jonze said. Actually, his first reaction when he first read the script was that he thought he'd wronged Charlie in the past – he'd slept with Charlie's wife or something."Īfter agreeing, however, the actor threw himself into the role. It's funny – it took a long time to get to meet with him, and when I finally did get to meet him, his first question was, "Why John Malkovich? Why not Being Tom Cruise?" It was the same question our financiers had asked us. "Though we had a lot of pressure from our producers and financiers to think of backups." Did he know Malkovich personally? "No. "It was never anybody else," he said of casting the actor. Jonze also delighted the festival crowd with stories about his masterpiece, Being John Malkovich. And a lot of the feelings you have about relationships or about technology are often contradictory." I was very inspired by that, and tried to do that in. "On Synechdoche, New York, which I was originally going to direct, he said he wanted to try to write everything he was thinking about in that moment – all the ideas and feelings at that time – and put it into the script. The script is Jonze's own, and he cited Charlie Kaufman as an inspiration. He turned instead to the services of Hoyte van Hoytema, responsible for Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Jonze said his team spent 14 months in the edit of Her, and it is the first time he hasn't worked with his long-time cinematographer, Lance Acord. But I think Samantha Morton is still in the film in some way, her DNA, because she was with us when we shot it." ![]() So we ended up recasting, and casting Scarlett Johansson. Johansson's low, oddly cracked tones seem like a self-evident choice for the voice most likely to make you fall in love, but Jonze said it was actually Samantha Morton who played all the scenes with Phoenix: "We ended up realising that what Sam and I had done together, what we'd created, wasn't working for where the movie was going. In his film, Samantha likewise learns by doing: "I evolve, just like you," she tells a baffled but increasingly delighted Phoenix. The more people that talked to it, the smarter it got." But it was still, for 20 seconds, really exciting. After 20 seconds, it quickly fell apart and you realised how it actually works, and it wasn't that impressive. "For the first, maybe, 20 seconds of it, it had this real buzz – I'd say 'Hey, hello,' and it would say 'Hey, how are you?', and it was like whoa … this is trippy. "The idea initially came to me almost 10 years ago – I saw some article linking to a website where you could IM with an artificial intelligence," Jonze said. ![]()
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