Michael Almereyda Talks ‘Marjorie Prime,’ Artificial Intelligence & The Film’s Unsettling Premise

Michael Almereyda‘s “Marjorie Prime” is a powerful story, set in the near future, where humanity has created artificial-intelligence that serves a very specific purpose. 86-year-old Marjorie (Lois Smith) has a new partner in her life who, oddly enough, looks like a younger version of her deceased husband (Jon Hamm), and it doesn’t take long to realize that he’s A.I. programmed to spend time with her, and reflect back the story of her life. Marjorie’s memories are fading, with the lines blurring between what happened and what didn’t happen. Hamm’s A.I. is there for companionship, but more importantly, he’s helping her puzzle the pieces together so that she can remember who she was and who she wasn’t.

Almereyda takes you on an almost psychedelic journey through the human subconscious. It’s not easy to let yourself swim into the film’s initial coldness, but if you are open to the film’s Resnais-esque contemplations on life and allow yourself to bring your own experiences to the drama, the journey is as rewarding as anything out there at the moment. By the film’s climax, the future feels closer than ever before, one which will be inevitable dominated by artificial touches. It’s hard for the film’s themes of aging and memory not to hit home.

We spoke to Almereyda about the film and the journey he took to make this indelibly poetic sci-fi chamber piece, come to fruition.

I found the film contained shades of Alain Resnais.
That’s been suggested many times. I’m definitely a fan, but he wasn’t an active influence. I guess the biggest influence is more incidental than intended. The film was chosen because it had a magical sense of being lost in time. Nobody had ever really shot a movie like this. Resnais is a master of exploring memory in movies and I wouldn’t shrug off any comparisons, but I wasn’t actively pursuing them.

How familiar were you with the source material, Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer-prize winning play?
I was very familiar because Lois Smith had talked about the play before when she was given the script as a potential project. It was in the way she described it that it had me follow-up to see it onstage. I live in New York, and I specifically went to Los Angeles to see her in the play. As the play was happening before me, I got a glimmer of what it might be if it were transplanted into a movie. It started forming in my imagination, and we spoke about it afterward and she was game. The playwright was receptive to that and things came together pretty quickly.

Did have have any rehearsals with the actors?
There was very little rehearsal. There was more a sense of shared camaraderie due to the movie being in one central location. Everyone had a sense of complicity and engagement and we just went at it. When actors are this skilled and experienced, have this much depth, rehearsal would be wasteful. I felt it was a matter of either sink or swim and these people know how to swim.

How long was the production schedule?
To be honest, it was 13 days.

Wow.
One of those days was without actors, we did stuff without actors.

So, actually, 12 days with actors.
I think it’s the fastest I’ve ever worked on a feature and I give credit to Sean [Price] Williams, the cinematographer, whose very resourceful.

That could definitely lead the production into a very hectic atmosphere, but it could also make for very personal filmmaking.
Well, I hope the latter [laughs]. The trick is we shot in two houses, which I hope seamlessly matched to appear as one house, but the houses were close together. It wasn’t a crazy scramble, it was more a focused orchestration of schedules and intentions. So, we made it work.

Were you ready to shoot anything at anytime due to the limited timeframe?
Movies are planned. I’ve always relied on an assistant director to do a breakdown. I mean, it’s part of the framework of a movie. That you don’t make it up as you go. Even though you’re improvising, and even if you’re not rehearsing, or you’re being spontaneous, you make sure the actors and locations are corresponding to make it a reasonable use of time. There was a lot of thought and care, and we made it work.

Was there a lot of storyboarding involved or none whatsoever?
I’ve done storyboarding and I can draw pretty well, there was storyboarding, but you can storyboard with an iPhone these days. I would often show Sean frames that were ideas of where we would position ourselves. Organic is the appropriate word, it’s a process that grows and you just have to trust your instinct, trust the people around you and it comes together.

This feels like a very tightly knit film. How did the initial cut of the film compare to the finished product?
I think not that different. There weren’t decisive cuts in terms of the process, I think the challenge was that, as a play the dialogue is rich, I had to start narrowing it down because we didn’t want it to be too heavy with dialogue. The other thing that changes in the editing room is discovering the right music and the music is very important to the movie in that it was embodying Marjorie’s memories and Marjorie’s inner life, it’s music that sometimes feels like it’s in her head, but it’s music that is also shared by the characters. So discovering some of that music, in the case of Mica Levi, who wrote some of it, was waiting for the music to arrive which was a necessity and process that took time. So, that was probably the biggest change, having the music get the right flow and the right weight.

Did you shoot a lot of takes or was it pretty seamless?
We didn’t shoot on film even though we wanted to, we didn’t quite have the money, so it’s commonplace to say you have more freedom to do multiple takes with video. We weren’t restricted, we shot as many takes as we needed and, with actors that are this strong, you don’t need to a lot of takes, but it was needed, it was fine.

I thought the sci-fi portrayed in the film wasn’t that far fetched, did you?
I didn’t think it was that far fetched either. I mean, it’s around the corner. Everything I’ve read about this technology is that it’s really happening now and it will become available soon. It’s not a dream that some form of this will be available in our lifetime and we will be able to make decisions on people we love and do care about being embodied in this way. I took it as not only a reasonable premise but as an unsettling and revealing premise because it tells us where we’re going and where we’re afraid to go.

Would you consider the film to be a tragedy?
No, because that would imply it’s a heavier matter than it is. It talks about life in a way that recognizes that it’s sad, but there’s also an element of wonder that is real and that, at the end of the movie, the way Jordan Harrison wrote the play, we arrive at a place of awe that I think is more than a tragedy.

The film is pure dialogue, but it is pure cinema as well.
I’d say it’s pure cinema, but it’s not pure dialogue because there’s also a lot of music, there’s a lot of light, there’s a lot of silence, there’s a lot of editing that brings you through space and time that is unique to movies and that is not meant for the stage.

But I love it when directors have the confidence to film people talking because it embraces an almost theatrical aspect of movies
Yeah, I guess so, but you can also say it embraces an aspect of life, some of us spend a lot of time talking and there’s an excitement in good dialogue, whether it’s Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges or Tarantino, it’s very alive, it’s more cinematic than action sequences from other people. So, I’m hoping it’s not stagey and is in fact dynamic.

“Marjorie Prime” is now playing in limited release.