Set in suburban Orange County in a paranoid, dystopian
future where one-fifth of the American population has been hired to spy on everyone
else in the name of national security and the war on drugs, director Richard
Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a hallucinatory
and cautionary tale of drug use based on a novel by Philip K. Dick somewhat
informed, in turn, by his own experiences. Owing to the genre cachet of its
author, there was considerable interest from
studios in making the film.
Waking Life — it
came with all sorts of strings that voided the deal. “We never really thought
it about (as live action),” explains producer Tommy Pallotta. “There were
certain design issues. …What does it mean for the characters and mirroring
their psychological universe? It just really didn’t come to us. It was just an
artistic vision we had that we felt matched the material. Very early on when we
tried to get funding for the project we were met with a lot of resistance,
because it’s an R-rated film and they didn’t feel that there was an audience
for it. So they were interested in it, but only wanted us to do it live action.”
In the wake of the success of
different for trippy live action-animated hybrids, and the more R-rated, the
better. Still, A Scanner Darkly is
far from an easy sell. A paranoid journey into the absurd — with all its
attendant double crosses, head feints and slurry identities — Pallotta
describes it as an independent-minded animated film with adult themes. “To me
it’s science fiction,” he says, “but does it really fit what people associate
with that genre? There are no spaceships. To me the interesting things about sci-fi
are the philosophical and existential questions about what does it mean to be
human, the ontological questions (about) the nature of reality.”
“Sci-fi as a genre has a certain set of expectations in movies,”
Pallotta continues. “I think there’s a cynical notion on the moviemaking side
that people have to see a chase scene. But teenagers are really open-minded, they’re
into seeing different movies from different countries and people are so much
more sophisticated now — they want something new, something they haven’t seen
before. So I have faith that the audience wants that as well.”
That the $8 million A
Scanner Darkly is a labor of love is undeniable. All the actors (including Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson and Winona Ryder, above) accepted
scale — a necessity, really, given that they worked for a month or less while
most of the film’s animators toiled for around a year. The estate of Philip Dick
also cut their fee significantly after discussions with Linklater and his
production staff. How that love is embraced by audiences — darkly or brightly — remains to
be seen. For a review of the film, click here.