'Minority Report', Production Designer, Alex McDowell

0:08Jawad MirWelcome back everyone to another episode of Team Dennis Dreams podcast, the Making of Stories. I'm Dennis Dorow here. I just finished wrapping up talking to production designer Alex McDowell. For those of you who don't know who he is, he's worked on films like Fight Club, Minority Report, The Terminal, The Crow, Bee Movie, The Cat in the Hat, and many more. It was a really fascinating conversation, but this one particularly focused on Minority Report and the technology in Minority Report, and the future in Minority Report. Really had a pleasure talking to him, and he's agreed to come back again to talk about his other films. We'll figure out what that would be, but, please do take a listen and watch this. Enjoy the conversation with Alex McDowell. 25 years now, and it's, it's amazing how things that were shown in that film, obviously based on a short novel, are sort of coming true now or have been for the last little while. I would love to know how your involvement on that project started, just to kind of kick off this conversation.

1:15Alex McDowellYes. I mean, I think quite simply from the beginning when I was hired, I was hired pretty much on the same day as Scott Frank, the writer. It was clear that a script had come been directed when Steve took over. But when I started, as I say, Scott Frank started at the same time because Steven wanted to completely, rewrite the script. Excuse me. So that was in itself unusual. You know, most films are not gonna get started at all unless there's a script that's been approved, as you know. But, being Mr. Spielberg, he didn't really have to ask permission. And we had the directive. I mean, I, what I remember is getting about a half-page synopsis that was an overview of the script that Steven wanted to tell, and it was quite different from the novel, which, you know, it's, it remains very different, from the original Philip K.

2:28Alex McDowellDick novel. But it did have the setup of Washington DC 50 years in the future, three PreCogs in the center of the narrative, and this dome of protection that they, that they offered to the city. And that's what we had. And he said, you know, "While we're writing the script, what would be great is for you guys to go ahead and build a world." and so with those sort of relatively simple, frameworks and a couple of other things, which is he wanted it to be a benign, apparently benign future, so that the audience was, surprised when it turned into something that was less benign. And, also very specifically, he didn't want it to be science fiction. He wanted the audience to believe that it, this was a world that really existed. And there was no kind of escaping that politically, if you like.

3:29Alex McDowellSo that directive particularly sent us on the path of a different kind of research than an art department and a designer might normally do, which was to go out into the world and go really deep. And Spielberg's name gave us a key into the kind of places that you might normally not have access to, like the military research at DARPA or into Apple Research labs or into, MIT Media Lab and those kind of places. So we had this unique access, and we had specific questions to ask. And it was all about what do you think or, you know, where's your research taking us? And so the beginning of the film was really that, was like go out into the world and discover what we can about the way the future is leaning or the way that current research and intent is leaning towards a vision… a visionary future.

4:32Alex McDowellThat was hand-in-hand with a small group that Steven brought in, early on who were experts and who were experts in various different fields, and kind of launched, some of that early direction and actually also gave us access. So we had Neil Gershenfeld, a quantum physicist from MIT, who gave us that boost, you know, into the Media Lab. But was also instrumental as a consultant in the technology of the PreCogs, if you like. He was, actually the, tell me if I'm, if I'm sort of going off on tangents here…

5:13Jawad MirNo, you're fine. I'm, I'm intrigued. Please keep going

5:16Alex McDowell... Clearly am. But, yeah, so Neil Gershenfeld, as I say, a quantum physicist, we asked him, how should we consider the notion of precognition? And he said, "I've never been asked to do it, but I can probably solve that problem." So, we were engaged at that level, you know, of people who were really thinking deeply about the possibility of these fictional, concepts being feasible. So that was the setup. And the script took quite a long time to develop, probably around 12 months. So we were developing this, the world hand-in-hand, you know? I mean, we certainly weren't just building a world i… in a, in a vacuum… we were reporting back to Steven, and then he would come back to us with narrative ideas that were evolving for the script.

6:19Alex McDowellAnd so it was this very integral kind of integrated process. And it seemed, you know, as it developed, it seemed like the right way to make movies. You know, it was, it was, not being presented with a script that very often you have to kind of, as a designer, throw away, you know, because it's dealing with all of the storytelling ideas, but the context is something that we have to consider from the ground up as a designer. In this case, we sort of flipped the model and actually radically flipped the model by having, the world first. We were coming up with frameworks for conceptual ideas that would not have come up, I believe ever, you know, in a, with a writer who was sitting in a bungalow in Echo Park, in LA, you know, writing 96 pages. Because we had a, you know, a much larger resource to pull from, so when, in, there would, there would be a number of scenes in the film that existed because they stimulated the narrative, and they allowed a narrative to exist because of discoveries we made in the world.

7:36Alex McDowellI… in some ways it's closer to the way a writer would work on a story that was contemporary, where they would be going out into the streets and they'd be pulling ideas from the reality of the world that we live in. We had to build a world that was im… immersive enough to allow Scott and Steven to step inside it, essentially.

8:01Jawad MirYeah. No, that's... Thank you so much for all that detailed information because Minority Report, I mean, it's just one of those films, and one of the things that you said that making the audience connected to the film by not making it way too science fiction, and that's one of the things I loved about Minority Report because, and that goes to production design specifically, is because you had these, all these futuristic elements in the world that existed even today, right? Like the, a bunch of homes on a street in Washington, DC, or could be, you know, the car plant where they built the specific, special tech Lexus, I think, if my memory serves me right. And so there was all these real components which really, and then obviously the story at the core, right? Of just a man trying to prove himself innocent. And w… I'm really co… fascinated about what you said about Apple. Is that something that if you're i… able to talk about? What did you learn at Apple in terms of that, at the time Apple wasn't as big, right?

9:04Jawad MirIt was just, it was pre-iPod. I think it was just about pre-iPod age that it was in. What did you guys discover there that helped shape the film in any way?

9:16Alex McDowellYou know, I think places like Apple were giving an ins… a framework for thinking about the future… ... In a different way. You know, they certainly weren't handing over

9:26Jawad MirOf course

9:27Alex McDowell... Products that were in the research lab. Actually, you know, the huge flaw in our future, vision was that, there were no cell phones. So actually the Apple would've been helpful if they'd actually let us know that cell phones were gonna be pervasive. But, no, I think it was, you know, in some specific places when we were going to Lexus and we had permission to redesign their vehicles, because that was a focus, you know, like how do you drive in the city…

10:06Alex McDowell... We were, and we had this, license to redesign, a product like that and have them brand it. We were considering what is a vehicle? How do you drive? What is driving? You know, what is it, how does that work in a future city, in a city that is very vertical because there's been this massive influx of population who want protection under the umbrella of the Precogs. And so this huge influx of population needs a new city. That was a big part of our design, was going to architects, directly and saying, "How do you..." You know, another layer of research was we weren't inventing a city as a fictional space. We were going, "Well, how would a city develop? What would the new design processes of architecture?" The first kind of parametric designs that were coming out of Frank Gehry's office or out of Greg Lynn's office.

11:06Alex McDowellSo we had that kind of thing going on, like, well, how does a city function? And one of those things was if Tom Cruise lives at the top of the city and he goes to work in Old DC, how does he get there? I mean, I'm getting into a lot of detail here, but I was very interested in something we discovered, which is the height of buildings is only constrained by the number of elevators it can contain. At some point the footprint is taken up with so many elevators that there's no room for the building. So, the, so that sparked the idea of, well, what if your car was an elevator, and therefore what if your car can move vertically? A little bit of like, what if your car was part of your living room?

11:54Alex McDowellBut mostly how would a car move vertically and horizontally? And that set up some questions about, designing a car that was capable of that, which was very specific to the final design because only certain shapes can… Can actually accommodate that vertical and horizontal and rotate. And the other part we considered was what if you didn't have to drive? What if it was a combination of an elevator and a taxi cab? So we stumbled into autonomy essentially. L… I mean, a decade before autonomous vehicles were on anybody's chart because we were just asking questions that were logical. And I would say that it's become fundamental to, really has become fundamental to world build… worldbuilding is that your research has to embed itself in a provable logic.

12:55Alex McDowellY… you know? So…

12:57Jawad MirYeah

12:57Alex McDowell... So on the whole, the hover ships are probably pushing the edge of scientific, possibility. But, you know, on the whole we were considering the finest level of detail and that's how the, gesture controlled screens came up because we were going to scientists. We went, met an engineer at MIT Media Lab who was doing that for his thesis project. And literally pitched a, gesture-based i… interface to Steven and then we integrated the real, you know, essentially real technology. Ba… you know, s… the part of it that was traditional film magic was that we were able to put it on a transparent screen and we were not bound by,.. You know, the thing that I think dates movies is often the mon… the monitors, right? In 2001 or in…

13:57Alex McDowell... Fight Club, I'm sorry, in Blade Runner, very specifically dated by the kind of technology that they were using to do in-camera screen graphics. Where we had, because of the gesture and because it was a fictional piece of technology at that moment, we had to produce, CG overlaid screens and therefore they don't date. But, yeah, I think that, you know, th… that was the... Every question that was being asked about robotics or eye transplants or, how precogs could exist, every piece of that kind of future-facing technology, the notion of, excuse me, the notion of targeted advertising, I mean, Amazon was maybe two years old in 2000.

14:54Jawad MirYeah.

14:54Alex McDowellCame from, again, work that w… we saw at MIT Media Lab, which was very specifically directed towards how would you do that local targeting? And so having that concept in our minds at the very f… you know, early stages of that research allowed us to extrapolate to, well, what if it was pervasive? And again, you kind of by going through that logic, what we were doing was just having this opportunity because we're dealing with fiction, of a kind of design fiction process where we're leaping ahead based on logic. But we're really going through exactly the process they're going through in the research lab. We just get to be able to accelerate it. So I would say…

15:43Jawad MirYeah

15:43Alex McDowell... You know, we weren't, we weren't being clever, we were just, we were just paying attention…... Listening carefully.

15:49Jawad MirI mean, you guys pretty much... I never thought about the phones now that you mention it. I, it never occurred to me that there's no phones, but pretty much everything else you guys nailed. I mean, you look at, the screens with gesture movement. You look at the scene, in the, in the subway where Cameron Crowe is holding a newspaper and the news gets updated live. I mean, not necessarily in that way, but now you have tablets and, you know, internet and all that stuff. The robotics and autonomous car, like you said. And obviously, I think the, one of the most coolest and scariest sequence in the entire film is a Spidey sequence, right? Where those three spiders, Spideys I think they're called, come in and try to just do retina scan, Tom Cruise's character.

16:34Jawad MirWhat w… was that sort of part of your realm too in terms of bringing that to, and talk about that if that's the case, how that concept started?

16:42Alex McDowellYeah.

16:42Jawad Mir'Cause I think that's the coolest thing in the film, for me at least.

16:45Alex McDowellOh, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I, all of this was being, you know, questions that were being asked as they would be with any script. At some point, and I don't remember when, I'm sure by that time it was a very specific narrative detail that…

17:00Jawad MirRight

17:01Alex McDowell... That Steven wanted to have in the, in the film. But it's always the job of the art department to get into that level of design detail.

17:09Jawad MirRight.

17:09Alex McDowellYou know, if, or it should be. You know, may… maybe it isn't always, but we were designing some of those things three years before visual effects, you know, came on board really. So… ... You know, 'cause we started, we were working... Well, two years, right? Because we w… we were working starting in 2000, film came out in 2002, so we had a full year of development and then visual effects would've been six months afterwards I guess. But yeah, I, again, we were, we were working with the robotics lab at MIT Media Lab. I keep coming back to MIT because they were the most generous in opening up to the, to the labs and I think because they're doing educational research, the questions we were asking were the right kind of questions to go into a, into a kind of PhD environment. So if you're saying where are robots going, I saw a still a piece of AI animation today in LinkedIn of a robot that was basically behaving as the Spideys, and it's still not there in terms of the technology.

18:28Alex McDowellI mean, six months ago I saw a vertical, public transport system that could go m… vertically and horizontally. We do see that it's, it is 20, 25 years later that is still coming out. But it was a co… very much as I said, I mean, we were very lucky to have access.

18:51Alex McDowellAnd because we were thinking this future reality directive demanded that we paid attention to a real, again, extrapolating forward from the things that we…

19:08Jawad MirRight

19:08Alex McDowell... Even if they were speculative.

19:12Jawad MirRight. Okay. I'll tell you a little story before I ask the next question. So I don't know if I should be saying this, but it's too late now. When Minority Report came out, about three, four years before that, I started this website on DreamWorks. It was a Spielberg website, but it turned to DreamWorks. Like, when Amazon was brand new, internet was brand new, and it blew up. Like, it blew up to a point where I was visiting movie sets, press junkets, you know, at a very young age. And I remember I got con… I received an email from a guy who used to w… who worked at a movie theater, and he said, "I have access to the Minority Report trailer." and it wasn't released yet. It was just a theater chain that received it. So I asked him to, if he's willing to digitize it, which back then was, like, a big deal, and send it to me. And he did, and then I posted it, and my server went down.

20:14Jawad MirA… and then I got a letter from 20th Century Fox about copyright infringement. Whi… which was the first time I ever knew what that meant. Like, 'cause, you know, you just didn't realize that was the case. But that kind of... It, that's how Mi… Minority Report personally is connected to me because I've sort of going through that. But that film itself, Alex, is just... Has so many... And does it, does it fascinate you? Like, or does it scare you that the things that you guys did in that film, whether it's through screenwriting or production designing and Spielberg's vision, is in the last 23 years has been slowly coming true, and it's probably even beyond that now?

20:54Alex McDowellI would say kind of the opposite. I mean, what has happened in my design space, in my career since Minority Report was a reconsideration of whether you could essentially build anticipatory worlds, on the basis of this notion of a platform of research. And what we know because I've been doing just that for 25 years since then, w… have used and developed a world-building methodology which is specifically designed to do that, extrapolation forward. So the work we generally do in my studio now, because I teach, so I'm not doing production design. I'm not production design…

21:43Alex McDowell... At the moment. Or just intermittently. The work we're doing with corporations, for example, we're working 10, 15, 20, 75 years forward, and our work is just that. Is like if you build a logical world, you can make very viable assumptions, and then you can move forward into, not executing them to the level of making them into films, but executing them to the level of never l… less of immersion. I mean, we've made games that are set in 75-year future cities as teaching tools for, undergrad students in American universities. We're try all of the time w… we're now taking that very real capability and using it to point, different ways of thinking about the future.

22:46Alex McDowellSo I think if you were to take Minority Report as a way of... Well, you know, it's, it, to a large extent it's a very dystopian view of the city as it, of the future as it turns out. You can look at that as a way of warning the world what could be happening. Or you could say, let's steer it towards how it could be benign, how it could be a viable but better world, just to be slightly berserk about it. Our world-building methodology hasn't actually changed much from Minority Report because the amount of direct… the amount of input you get when you're doing deep research finds a balance, right? Because you have different v… viewpoints coming in. You have different types of expertise kind of bringing ideas together, and it balances.

23:49Alex McDowellAnd so another thing I think that was true in Minority Report is that we were being challenged to make it right because there were different inputs coming in from the outside saying this wouldn't work or this wouldn't work. When we bring 20, 30, 40, 70 experts together to look at a near-future world in fantasy or in fiction or in, In a kind of projected reality, we're finding this balanced futures which are believable because they're not utopian and they're not fully…

24:23Alex McDowell... Utopian. You know, unless the question being demanded is what would it look like if it was full dystopia. But if you're really doing a projected world based on balance but very intensive research, then you end up with a level of reality because you're just testing it all of the time. So it's, it's, it's a process I teach. It's a process that we use in every way we, you know, in every design challenge I get.

24:57Alex McDowell... And it, and it works in some very simple way because we're saying if you walk out into the world outside your front door, there are 1,000 factors at play. So all you have to do is kind of understand that's true whether it's present reality, past, or future. You always have to consider all of these intersecting coexistent realities. So you can build a world that is like Minority Report, got a very high level, high income, space and a very low income space, and you can f… find that as a... Y… you can, you can look at the spectrum of that. You can look at the spectrum of scale. You know, a house in 50 years is not gonna suddenly look sci-fi, you know, when we... But our devices might be. You might have Internet of things running your…

25:53Jawad MirYeah

25:54Alex McDowell... Your stove and your lighting, but your... And then your cellphone as we discover becomes this potent and rapidly updating piece of sci-fi essentially. You know, it's, it's always on the edge of being its own future. So that sort of notion of scale in relation to time is also interesting. So we're looking at a kind of what I would call a 5D world all the time now because all of these factors are in play.

26:21Jawad MirYeah. No, that's true. And I wanna go back to Minority Report. Before I do, I'm always curious, about people's journey of why they became who they wanted to become or how they became who they are in terms of you being production designer. What was your journey like in terms of getting into that world? Was it a specific movie that you saw? You always wanted to be production designer? Was it something else? If you can talk about that briefly.

26:47Alex McDowellYeah. Well, what I would say is don't anybody try and follow the path that I took because it is... It's a complete series of accidents. I was not… ... I mean, I would say the transformational piece for me in, that was cinema focused was seeing a Tarkovsky festival in London.

27:12Jawad MirYeah.

27:12Alex McDowellBecause it connected directly to my experience of growing up in Malaysia and, being in a, this kind of m… you know, push and pull between history, decay, and future. But my background was of, I went to f… to art school as a painter. I was doing fine art. I was, engaged in, you know, a very sort of traditional route towards being a painter, and then I saw the Sex Pistols. And my sort of viewpoint of the world shifted right away. It was like, well, the, what's really going on in the world that's engaging in the level of change that we had to consider were in Margaret Thatcher Britain, was being manifested in music, not in art. And so I shifted, and not a… as a musician, but as a artist I shifted into design, a narrative design for, you know, record sleeves and framing what the narratives of the bands were, and then that migrated into music videos because we were there in London when the very first music videos were being made, and Iggy Pop said, "Can you make us a music video?"

28:35Alex McDowellAnd I had no idea what a music video was, and I said, "Of course we can." And then, you know... And so I was a production designer, the first thing I ever did, and I've never, you know, I've only ever done what I do. But, you're being challenged. You go... You know, I came to the U… the US in '86 because there was so much music video work here…

28:59Alex McDowell... In LA. And then those directors like David Fincher started doing commercials at the very highest level, so I moved into commercials with them. And then, m… Alex Proyas, I mean, I did a film called Lawnmow Ma… Lawnmower Man before Alex Proyas, but that was a slightly different route. It was something, someone coming out of Silicon Valley actually, Brett Leonard, who was interested in vi… virtual reality and wanted to make a movie about it, which was crazy predictive in the sense that I now run a lab at USC which only deals with virtual reality.

29:36Jawad MirOh, wow.

29:38Alex McDowellThe same, the same scientist at NASA who brought me in and showed me these massive virtual reality rigs, you know, and $70,000 machines, brought me into USC ultimately around 20 years later. But, yeah. So anyway, yeah, it's music videos and then, and then The Crow was really the first…

30:05Jawad MirYeah

30:05Alex McDowell... Point at which I was, fully de… dedicated. I didn't do, I didn't go back to commercials I don't think after The Crow.

30:14Jawad MirRight.

30:15Alex McDowellAnd The Crow was offering op… opps to… a different level of filmmaking because it was such a powerful film and people recognized it and, you know, it was, it was noticed. And then going back to working with David Fincher, which has always been, you know, b… both in the commercials, music videos, and in film, the most precise challenge. You know, just, I mean, David is a... H… he works in a different space than any other director I've worked with in terms of the level of precision and, detail and specificity about the shots he wants. And so as a designer, you really have to pay attention. Not that there weren't other very complicated movies…

31:07Jawad MirYeah

31:07Alex McDowell... Out there. But that's, that's kind of the trajectory, this what I would call falling forward. And that led to, teaching as well. I had no intention to be a teacher, but it just…... Came across my path at say the right time. And I didn't have any intention of building worlds for giant corporations, but that also just kind of came out of Minority Report actually very directly, so one accident after another really.

31:41Jawad MirThat's so fascinating. I wonder, when you worked with David Fincher on music videos, were you involved with Propaganda Films a lot like Michael Bay and a whole bunch of other individuals

31:49Alex McDowellYeah, that's where I was working

31:51Jawad Mir... Gore Verbinski…

31:52Alex McDowellYeah

31:52Jawad Mir... I think, yeah. Yeah.

31:54Alex McDowellYeah.

31:54Jawad MirAmazing.

31:54Alex McDowellAnd I worked with a number of those directors. I mean, Alex Proyas was there, David Fincher was there, Gore I worked with. Didn't ever work with Michael Bay, but the, a lot of young directors, some of whom became known and some of them less so. It was an ama… I mean, Propaganda was really like they just grabbed the best of everything out there, so. But I was working like seven days a week with Fincher for a year, so it was really just, you know, an intense learning, process for me.

32:27Jawad MirDid you work with Vadim Perlman?

32:31Alex McDowellNo.

32:32Jawad MirNo. Okay. Yeah, he did, I think he was part of Propaganda Films. He did The House of Sand and Fog. I don't know…

32:38Alex McDowellOh, yeah

32:38Jawad Mir... If you've seen it. It was a great movie. I don't know what... He's done only like very handful of films, but great storyteller. ... Going back to Minority Report, you know, the whole concept or the hook of the story is telling, predicting the crime before it occurs, right?

32:56Alex McDowellYeah

32:56Jawad Mir... I don't know if I don't know where I was reading this or it was a podcast where there was a country that was already sort of, not necessarily from a standpoint of Precogs, kinda working figuring out a way how crime is committed before it's committed by precisely figuring out people's social media data and how they're operating and what they're posting, and somehow running that through a system which somehow not necessarily predict, but can semi-predict that this can happen or he or she can do something.

33:30Alex McDowellYeah

33:30Jawad Mir... Do you think, do you think that's possible in our lifetimes?

33:36Alex McDowellOh, in…

33:36Jawad MirLike the way Mi… Minority Report has done it?

33:39Alex McDowellMore than possible. I think we have a, we have a regime in this country that is using that methodology to, arrest people before they were ever gonna do a crime. I think that, there is no question. I mean, it's, that is an interesting question, because we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at that with a film called Mercy…

34:11Alex McDowell... That I just finished designing with Timur Bekmambetov, that was looking at an AI legal system that's pulling evidence to do exactly that, to basically accuse people based on threads of evidence weaving together because it's an AI who has access to the dark web and to everything, and is just grabbing pieces of evidence and putting them together. In our process of research there, we were looking at surveillance technologies, you know, that can track 100 faces in a single frame con… can, you know…

34:48Jawad MirYeah

34:48Alex McDowell... You know, like, identify everybody who's on a march at the same time and... But to your point of following the kind of arc of narrative that is just being kind of b… people are putting themselves out on the, on the line without understanding it, right? In social media…

35:14Jawad MirYeah

35:14Alex McDowell... They know the implication of joining the dots. But you or I could look at a thread of social media over a period of a few months and understand much more about that person than they might want to be revealed, and that would just be from an absolute lay point of view. So if you're applying, again, this is the film Mercy, you're setting up a condition which might be science fiction, but it might also be reality because we don't really know anymore whether that technology's in play. The chances are, well, Singapore's using AI, legal system for traffic violation right now.

36:02Alex McDowellSo it only has to step up a little bit to get to murder, which was the theme of the film we were doing.

36:10Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. It's, it's a, the facial recognition technology, I did a film, about, I'm not sure if you've heard of the Uyghurs in the northwestern part of China.

36:23Alex McDowellYeah

36:24Jawad MirRight. So I did a whole film on that in s… in Search of My Sister. And in one of the aspects of that was they have the facial technology which if they have, then everybody else will have down the road, or they already have, where it can specifically…

36:40Alex McDowellYeah

36:40Jawad Mir... Identify the ethnicity of the individual. Not just, like, their who they are, but their actual... Just by looking at their facial features, it can... And this was, like, five years ago, so I can only imagine…

36:53Alex McDowellYeah

36:53Jawad Mir... What it is right now.

36:55Alex McDowellYeah

36:55Jawad Mir... And you talked about Mercy, which now I'm fascinated to see, because that is, that is... I mean, it's kinda like AI right now. If you go to Per… Perplexity or ChatGPT, all it's doing is collecting information from the web, right?

37:10Jawad MirBut to be able to be able to identify people's likes and comments, and then just combine them all into something that could potentially be whatever, i… it's kinda scary. Because it... Most of the people, most if not majority of the people will be innocent, and they're…

37:26Alex McDowellYeah. Yeah

37:27Jawad Mir... Because they're expressing themselves.

37:30Alex McDowellI think we can, we can assume 100% that anyone who has been targeted can be tracked to that level of detail. You know. And false assumptions can be made. I mean, that's the whole premise of Mercy, is that the AI puts things together without all the information, without under… I… it... Something we're very pre… preoccupied with AI is that my own feeling is that what I would call kind of ironically our stupidity, you know, is untrackable. Like, the decisions that we make that are based on intuition and on reaction and on a set of absolutely immeasurable, m… moments that are around us that we are constantly reacting to. I believe when you come down to the human scale, which is a big part of what I am focused on in world building, is, like, how do you tell stories from six foot off the ground, not from a thousand feet?

38:35Alex McDowellThat we make mistakes, we thrive on, you know, our... I… I was just describing my career path. You know, there's not a single planned moment in any of that.

38:50Jawad MirYeah

38:51Alex McDowell... So how is an AI going to track my actual reality? Which is why I think the mistakes, if you like, will be made constantly, because they're gonna be based on models, not on the stupidity of us, of our individual natures. You know?

39:08Jawad MirYeah.

39:08Alex McDowellThat,.. And so at that point, this alliance i… is necessary, right? We don't necessarily understand AI, and they don't understand us, but there's a, there's an augmentation that is quite valuable if you can put those two things together without, y… you know, and adapt as we always have to new tools. But

39:34Jawad MirYeah

39:34Alex McDowell... But yeah, our survival I think has always been based on our unpredictability.

39:40Jawad MirI couldn't agree more. And I think what's really crazy now, you know, films that came out in the '90s or '80s, like, you know, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Judge Dredd. You have Strange Days, you have Minority Report. I mean, there's so many of them. Matrix. It kinda seems to be coming true now, you know, more or less. And where are we heading in terms of, you know…

40:06Jawad Mir... How mu… how much, how much c… how much independence do we have? Forget about from, you know, having a freedom of expression, in terms of from governments or... But even with AI or machine versus human.

40:22Jawad MirAnd yeah, that's the part that fascinates me, but at the same time it does, it is a little bit something to be concerned about, I think. And how do we… ... How do we overcome that? I don't know. I don't know. I… maybe it's just the way ev… evolution is.

40:38Alex McDowellYeah. I think so. I mean, and I think... Don't you think that it's inevitable that storytellers who are paying attention, which is where good films come from, are going to make,.. They're gonna join the dots, right?

40:56Jawad MirYeah.

40:57Alex McDowellMatrix is based on a set of conditions very grounded in reality that are just extrapolated forward. Blade Runner the same. You know, you see this... Always fascinated by that mo… that scene in Blade Runner where he is looking at a photograph, through the screen, and he goes, you know, "Push in. Coordinate XY3. Turn left."

41:23Jawad MirYeah.

41:23Alex McDowellRight? And right now, I mean, my students are driving AI that can go into a photographic image and turn left. It's, it's, you know, when we see A… AI will do exactly that. It'll extrapolate everything you need from 2D into 3D and 4D and

41:46Jawad MirYeah

41:46Alex McDowell... And s… And all I'm saying there is that I think anybody who's paying attention and using intelligence is going to be intuitively and unconsciously developing a knowledge of the future because they're... You know, everyone is speculating. And mostly they're probably tr… right, because they are, they have access to incredibly detailed information by stepping outside the door and buying an apple, you know? So, the dystopian part of it is a filter that the filmmaker puts on that because that's the story they wanna tell.

42:24Jawad MirYeah.

42:24Alex McDowellAnd dystopia more interesting than utopia and, you know, tension is better in narrative. But, But I think that's interesting and perhaps something we don't pay enough attention to because that would be my thesis is that storytelling is how we track where the world is going, you know, just by extrapolating forward. But in terms of that reality and how we protect ourselves from it, yeah, I think we adapt, you know, like you protect yourself…

42:59Jawad Mir100%

42:59Alex McDowell... From wolves.

43:00Jawad Mir100%. Before we wrap up, I just, if... I know it's been a long time. If you can remember anything interesting from the, from working on Minority Report. It doesn't have to be, like, science-related, just, like, the story on the set or in pre-production or anything that gave you guys a hard time in overcoming that, I would love to hear just one of those stories.

43:26Alex McDowellI mean, very much in the film, I mean, just, yeah, it's a, it's a interesting question because this isn't about the narrative. This is about production reality, so, but it also engages technology. We... That spider scene that you…

43:43Alex McDowell... Mentioned, was very complex, right? 'Cause it was one take. And so it goes up, you know, a level, and it goes across a number of rooms above, and the reach is extreme, right? It's moving a long way, 25, 30 feet in the air, on a, on a set on stage, where the roofs have been taken off. So the issue was, how does a Super Technocrane reach all of the rooms to get the views that it needs? We were in the very earliest stages of Previs. You know, Previs was, wasn't named at that point, I would say.

44:28Alex McDowellI mean, I was on the Previs committee in 2004 where I think it was formalized. So in 2000, we knew that we could model architecture, and we knew we could model and animate film equipment, so we built that set. We built a Super Technocrane, and we had the key grip run it. So I think, unprecedentedly, this was, the director was not involved. It was the key grip saying, "This is what the camera is capable of." No, so this is what the grip equipment, the Super Technocrane was capable of. Now let's see what that path needs to be, and then we'll move the set and design the set back to the Super Technocrane. And we'll build it 25 feet in the air and a massive rig for that Super Technocrane on track that is not going to be shifted by, you know, two feet, on the day.

45:28Alex McDowell... And having worked that out and done, you know, very, pragmatic Previs for a very, not just so that the studio thinks that a movie's m… being made that's real or whatever. You know, those, the Previs turned into a marketing tool, you know, completely n… useless to the filmmaker. But, in that case, that shot not only was planned entirely i… in advance digitally, but w… I think Steven did three takes, and we wrapped by 11:00 in the morning.

46:06Jawad MirOh, wow.

46:08Alex McDowellSo you could've imagined trying to do that before that technology…

46:14Jawad MirYeah

46:15Alex McDowell... Was possible. Even, I mean, we would all a… always have had models, and, you know, you'd be... But this was being able to animate the way that the Super Technocrane could extend and rotate and track. So I think a lot of that was happening. You know, I think the, vertical car chase was something also across the board planned. So we built, we 3D-printed models of the vehicle. We 3D-printed or, CNC cut full-scale model. We mapped all of that in Previs. The whole scene with Tom Cruise was done, frame by frame. That scene only existed because of that research we'd done and that design we'd developed out of the sort of notion of autonomous car. So the vertical f… car chase was fully formed six months before it was shot.

47:11Jawad MirWow.

47:11Alex McDowellYou can put Previs next to the final footage frame by frame. It's pretty much an exact match. So that level of technology was really, you know, kicking in, and that was reverberating through the art department because we were having to hire people who had the skills with the tools who had never been in an art department. So it flipped the kind of production model upside down, I would say.

47:38Jawad MirThat is so fascinating. That is so cool. Thank you so much for sharing all that detail. And, really a pleasure talking to you, learning about Minority Report behind-the-scenes stories, plus all the other fascinating science elements. And it's really great to see what you're doing. And I truly believe that life full of accidents is probably the best life that you can live because it's completely unpredictable.

48:00Alex McDowellYes.

48:00Jawad MirAnd that's where the excite… excitement kicks in. Maybe not at the moment, but, you know, as you progress in life. I feel that way.

48:08Alex McDowellYeah.

48:09Jawad MirYeah. I would love to, if you ever have time, would love to chat with you again maybe on a couple other films. But it was a pleasure to having you. I really appreciate it.

48:18Alex McDowellI'd, I'd be happy to talk again. Thank you for your great questions. You too.

48:23Jawad MirThank you so much, Alex. Likewise.

48:26Alex McDowellYou too.

48:26Jawad MirTake care.