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Press Conference Interview With The Cast And Director Of Paranoia

With all the news being unveiled lately about the potential breach in personal liberties due to the invasive nature of the internet, Director Robert Luketic and his cast of A-List talent couldn't have hoped for a more timely release of their latest film, Paranoia.

Paranoia

Paranoia

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I got the impression that in this movie it’s more about ambition versus moral compass, rather than privacy. Can you speak to how that works?

Robert Luketic: I think that it’s tough. I approach my work and what I do as a good person. I like people that are good, that have good intentions. I believe you can be successful without having to sacrifice that position. And that’s the sorta character that I was attracted to in this piece. He does make very moral decisions, in fact he betrays who he is. Essentially gives up everything that anchors him in in the world, and has supported him in the world, to have this fantasy, this illusion, of what life on the other side of the river would be like. I found that it was an interesting dichotomy between all those things.

Amber Heard: I don’t think that ambition and morality are mutually exclusive. I think it would be pedantic to assume that we have to choose between them, even in movies. We’re compelled by characters that have to face such decisions.

Robert Luketic: And, make mistakes, that are not black-and-white, that are not perfect.

Amber Heard: You would have to struggle for everything including your characters, they have to struggle as well. I don’t think that ambition or morality need to be mutually exclusive, or are.

I like the fact that all the characters were really strong, that’s really important to me when you see a good thriller like this. Amber, your character is a strong female, determined, hard going, and just driven, and I really like that. What did you like about your character? Mr. Ford, you’re on that borderline of staying close to that technology but at the same time you need that younger generation to keep business going. What was that like?

Amber Heard: I was drawn to Emma because she’s independent. She desires a future for herself that she, and only she is responsible for. I love that she’s trying to prove herself in a world that’s not necessarily set-up to accept her, or accept her easily. She’s going into a field that is still very much a male-dominated world and she’s doing so and relying on nothing but her own strength, her own wit, her own ability, to succeed. Nothing else. She’s not copping out in any way, and I liked that about her – strength, independence are always something that I’m drawn to in all my characters, no matter how different they are from one another – strength and a sense of independence, both in their character and in their position in the movie. Those are pretty much the standard things I look for. Plus, Robert has a long history of directing women who stand on their own two feet, no matter what their individual characters are. They are all women that are not determined by how the male characters around them perceive them. He has a history of protecting us as women, so I felt like I was in good hands.

Harrison Ford: For me, a character is made up of all those things that help tell a story. In my own experience, which helps me string it all together, this is a character who’s preceded in his appearance onscreen by a body of information about him – who he is, what he is, how he’s behaved in the past. So I wanted my first appearance onscreen to complicate that. Robert was wonderfully collaborative about things like that. When I showed up with a shaved head, he was OK with that. When I said I wanted to wear blue jeans and a t-shirt to my fancy house backyard party, he was OK with that. Those are the kind of things which I use to help describe a complicated character. The guy’s bad, bad to the bone – but there’s no fun in seeing that presented in that way, so I thought there were interesting opportunities in the construction of the script and the sophistication of the filmmakers that would allow me to create a character different then what I’ve played before.

Could you comment on how the final film compared to what you originally envisioned.

Robert Luketic: I’ve said this before, whenever I’m asked about this. For me movie making, especially in this day in age and on the budget-level we worked on, is a process of compromise. What is up here [taps forehead], is expensive to put out. I always look at my movies and I see where the compromises are very magnified, and remember I’ve watched it a thousand times before I sat here in front of you. I read the book, I actually got the screenplay first, then I read the book and so in terms of the adaptation to screen process – the book was written in a time when we weren’t in this socioeconomic quandary that we’re in, and the technology wasn’t quite what it became, the monster that it became, so it was written in a different time. Part of the adaptation was about updating that, and I think we did a good job in that regards. In terms of the scale of what I wanted, to be able to shoot in New York City and do all that kind of stuff, that’s always a filmmakers’ pain. That’s just part of life. I’m not one of those directors that gets unlimited resources to make things with. But given what we had, I’m so proud of what this cast did.

You guys played with mobiles, electronics, and computers. Harrison, your character built radios. Did you grow up tech or electronic nerds, or did you build anything when you were a kid, or where did you draw inspiration for that?

Liam Hemsworth: When I found out that I was going to do this film, my character has a scene where he takes apart a number of phones and does numerous things to them. So I got some old phones and I took them apart, and [laughs] that’s about all I did. I took them apart, and couldn’t even put them back together. I couldn’t say that I’m as smart as Adam, in that way.

Harrison Ford: I grew up in the stone age.

Robert Luketic: But you fly sophisticated jet aircraft.

Harrison Ford: That’s the one thing in which I have developed some capacity because that’s something I wanted. But, I don’t want to be a slave to electronic devices. I don’t want to be connected to my friends. I don’t want to send snapshots of my dog and cute pictures of my family life to my friends and family. I don’t want to be liked, by pushing a button. I use all of this technology to basically replace devices that I had in the past which worked just fine.

Amber Heard: Like smoke signals.

Harrison Ford: I don’t really use it for very much. I like books. I don’t like to read things on the internet. Anyways, I don’t have much of a connection.

Lucas Till: Do you remember those AM radio kits you get when you’re a kid and you build your own AM radio? Well, I never actually built one. But I did get them as a gift, for like 3 Christmas’s in a row, and I hated them. It’s just like guitar, anything that takes too long. I always really had a grasp of technology but it takes too much time for me to spend as much time as I think Kevin does in the movie tweaking things. As far as that’s concerned, I don’t think I share that much with the character.

That concludes our interview but we’d like to thank everyone for their time. Be sure to check out Paranoia when it hits theatres on August 16th!