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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Jet packs? Mag-lev cars? Two of Spielberg's experts explain how they invented 2054.
Jul 10, 2002 | Eye-scanning spider robots, vomit-inducing "sick sticks," holographic home video cameras, vertical highways: Welcome to the United States circa 2054. Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" is essentially a neo noir in which Tom Cruise runs around trying to prove his own innocence. But what distinguishes the film -- besides its ominous political warning -- is its dense, ingenious conception of what life will look like 50 years from now. Not since the neon-soaked "Blade Runner" (like "Minority Report," also based on a Philip K. Dick story) has such a conceivable, self-contained and ultimately disconcerting vision of the future been captured on-screen.
That the film succeeds is as much a credit to Spielberg's direction and Cruise's sturdy performance as it is to Alex McDowell's inspired production design. Helping McDowell achieve the look and ideas of the film were a coterie of self-styled futurists assembled by Spielberg prior to filming. This "think tank summit" (as it's been widely dubbed) hosted a cross section of philosophers, scientists and artists. Two of these conceptual consultants, Harald Belker and John Underkoffler, spoke with Salon by phone from their respective offices in California.
A native of Germany, Harald Belker is recognized as one of the premier conceptual artists/designers in the business. After graduating from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Belker designed automobiles for Porsche and Mercedes (most notably the latter's Smart Car). In 1996, in his first Hollywood job, he was asked to dream up a new Batmobile for the franchise-killing "Batman and Robin," and went on to work on "Inspector Gadget" and "Armageddon."
John Underkoffler, of the left-brained variety, spent the better part of his pre-Hollywood years as a researcher at MIT's prestigious, multidisciplinary Media Lab. There, he toiled on a myriad of intellectually minded projects encompassing everything from holography to computer graphics to electronic publishing. Having survived his virgin foray into the film industry with "Minority Report," Underkoffler now finds himself a wanted man, serving as a science and technology consultant on Ang Lee's anticipated comic-book opus "The Hulk."
What exactly is a "futurist" and how do you become one?
Harald Belker: I know people who call themselves that, but I'm not one of them. [Laughs.] I think I live in that world, sort of thinking of the future a lot. I like to give my input toward futuristic looks and designs specifically. But call myself a futurist ... I don't think so.
John Underkoffler: I think you just have to blather a lot about the future. I hope to see the term become slightly debauched -- in the present it probably already is. It was still a plausible position, say, three years ago, because the economy was good and we had the kind of technological utopianism thing going on. But it doesn't work as well when everyone has told all the stories there are to tell and actually it's time to invent some of the stuff instead of just talking about it.
So, technically, would it be fair to say that you get paid to see what the future is going to be like?
Underkoffler: In the context of these movies, that's definitely a piece of the job. The interesting thing is that it's not just broad-strokes prognostication. It requires coming up with all the details as well.
On "Minority Report," you're credited as being a "science and technology advisor." What does that mean?
Underkoffler: It extended quite broadly. It was everything from inventing future history, sort of extrapolating from the present to describe trends that by 2054 were already in the past and would've led to what we see on the screen. And these aren't merely technological trends but also social and political. For everything you see on the screen, there's actually a hundred times more well-knit back story.
Describe the process of how you begin to invent an imaginary world. What's your source of inspiration?
Underkoffler: I think it might even be more interesting to talk about the collective effort inspiration. For example, Alex McDowell produced -- and kept revising throughout the course of preproduction -- what we called "the 2054 bible." It's a brilliant document, and I hope someone gets encouraged to publish it. Its notion was that it kind of laid out in about 80 pages or so the entire world that we were going to build. It covered everything from architectural overviews, the trends that had led to more vertical buildings and cities, the urban areas pulling in the skirts, so to speak, and rising into the air to allow green to return to surrounding lands (that sort of ecological imperative), the political tenor of the times, the individual economics of different social strata that led to certain architectural forms, right on down to the gadgets -- the nonlethal weapons, the hover packs, the little spider robots that run around and identify you.
