Back when they bought the rights to adapt Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel The Electric State in 2017, Anthony and Joe Russo knew they wouldn’t replicate its gritty, dystopian tone.
“There’s a very intentional departure in tone from the book, to broaden out the scope of the movie and appeal to a family audience”, Joe Russo told Zavvi. “We wanted kids to see the film and be exposed to the themes in the movie.
“The youth are particularly vulnerable. We made the movie for our kids, as we see that they have addiction issues with technology, and the movie explores that through allegory – we needed to make it suitable for them so that they’d able for them so that they’d have that exposure to these ideas.”
As the directors of several Marvel blockbusters including the upcoming Doomsday and Secret Wars, the sibling filmmakers are experts at appealing to family audiences. Part of the reason their dystopian, road trip sci-fi has taken so long to get to the screen is finding a way of honouring the message of the source material without watering it down, even as they knew it needed to become more accessible to younger generations.
“It was a tricky process”, Anthony explained. “Chris Marcus and Steve McFeely, the writers, took a while exploring the story, because it’s a unique story, and it required a lot of exploration to really know what it was we had on our hands.
“We knew this material had the potential to be a very unique world building experience for audiences and for us as storytellers, and we wanted to deliver on that. I think that was always our primary driver, at every step of the way.”
This tale is set in a retro futuristic 1990s dystopia, in the aftermath of a war where artificially intelligent animatronics rose up to try and overthrow the human race, but the Brothers hope audiences look past the time period and recognise The Electric State as a story about anxieties in the current moment. Joe has long insisted that people “should be scared of AI” and is on the board of several tech startups that purport to regulate it.
However, he believes that its widespread adoption in creative fields is inevitable - the brothers’ production company AGBO even hired an AI expert last October. Part of what they wanted to explore with this film was the tension between utilisation and regulation of tech, which has been more of a driving force throughout their careers then you may expect.
Joe explained: “We see ourselves as technologists. When we did Arrested Development, that was the first narrative show on network television that was shot with digital cameras, so we’ve always been looking to push the boundaries of technology in some way.
“However, this doesn’t mean that we’re not acutely aware of the inherent dangers of AI, especially the existential issues surrounding it, not all of which we can control. There are bad actors in the world who will always be trying to use this tech to do things beyond our reach.
“The one thing we are convinced of through the exploration we have done in the AI space is that it can work if humans are in control of the technology they’re using, not vice versa. You can’t have AI acting autonomously – the most important and simplest rule for regulating it to me is that it must go through humans first.”
In 2023, Joe also made the bold prediction that, by the end of 2025, we’ll see the first narrative feature films created entirely by AI. He hasn’t changed his mind about this.
“I’ve seen a couple of credible short films in the last couple of months, and with every text-to-video model that gets released, I think you can see massive improvements in the photorealistic quality of it. There are legal issues surrounding AI and how models are trained, so I don’t think anybody could probably make any money out of them, though.
“What you might see is a free platform where creators make content using various AI tools and share that content with others, riffing on some of their favourite IP. You’ll see something like that to execute stories long before you see it used professionally.”
With these advancements in mind, the directors argue that it makes practical effects more expensive to pull off, with their sentient animatronic sidekicks and villains – voiced by an eclectic ensemble including Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie and Brian Cox - all brought to life via CGI.
“We did consider using animatronics quite specifically”, Anthony added, “But I think the most important quality we gained by going the route we did was tailoring these robots to their human performances.
“We had talented motion capture actors who are skilled in movement, who not only effect the mechanics of the robots with their physicality but can give a big sense of intentionality and emotionality through the way they behave and move. We capture all that information and performance when the voice actors do the recordings, we’re capturing everything happening in their face and their body language and then doing the same thing for the motion capture on set.
“We use all this when we animate the robots, so the visual effects animators have a ton of references. It means there’s a texture to them that comes from having that human performance, which offers a quality we’d never be able to achieve with animatronics.”
“And due to the scale, it would have been impossible to create without CGI”, Joe added. “There are dozens and dozens of robots, so the movie would have cost a whole lot more.”
Ultimately, despite the tech being at the centre of both the narrative and the film’s creation, the pair see this as one of the most personal movies they’ve made. Not only are they telling a story they hope will resonate with their families, but even the smaller details were hand-picked due to their own personal attachments.
Just look around the lair of smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt), a character who is like Kurt Cobain in the book, but designed far closer to Kurt Russell here. Every corner of his lair is filled with pop culture ephemera that the brothers adored in the 80s and 90s.
Anthony concluded: “A lot of our favourite music from the decade is there, but then you’ve also got cultural artifacts from the time like He-Man candy bars, G.I Joe lunch boxes, Cabbage Patch Kids and Beanie Babies. Those were all part of our life during that period and have an extraordinary resonance with us.”
The Electric State is streaming on Netflix from Friday, 14th March
