I'm curious about the order that you put the four vignettes. Obviously,
we start with a birth story and the last one is a death story. But what
made you choose the order that you did?
The order actually changed at certain points. In the original screenplay, the order of the stories was "Machine Love", "Robot Fixer", "My Robot Baby" and then "Clay." "Clay" was always going to end. I couldn't imagine putting "Clay" anywhere else. And that order made sense in the original screenplay. But when it came time to edit the picture, we tried it in that order, and it just didn't feel right for some reason. And eventually, we switched "My Robot Baby" and "Machine Love". And it started to work.
I think whatever story led off had burdens upon it. When "Machine Love" was leading off, I think it put a lot of pressure on that story. "Machine Love" gets some of the biggest laughs, but it's also the most stylized of the pieces. Performance style, it's almost like a silent movie, probably because the robot is so silent and stiff. But it's off kilter in a way that the other stories are not. And to lead off with that, it was a little difficult. Folks didn't quite know what to make of it when it started the picture.
"My Robot Baby" somehow was an easier thing for people just to begin with. Partly because it's very recognizable as the normal world. And there's just this one sort of thing that's off. And it seems like it's just a fairly easy way for people to get into it.
In a very calculated way, it made sense to put it first, because when you're submitting an independent film to film festivals, you don't know if people are going to watch the whole picture. And so we put our biggest star in the first story. And honestly, even in small festivals, they recognize someone in your movie, you get a little bit more attention. That clearly wouldn't have been our only reason for doing that. It has to work aesthetically.
But then finally in the end, it also makes sense because of the progression from birth to death thematically. And then also because the time frame made more sense. The technology gets a little more advanced as it goes on then. You see this mechanical robot baby before you see the android, before you see the advances in the downloading of the consciousness. So it ended up working on many levels better that way.
Robot Stories takes a different approach to robots than a lot of science fiction movies do. What ideas influenced your writing?
It's very conceivable that when machines do become sentient, their first thought will be to destroy all humans. But on a fundamental level — maybe it's just me being the fuzzy-headed liberal I am — I believe that a thing that thinks and feels will probably be very similar to everything else that thinks and feels. And how it develops will depend upon how we treat it. And that when a machine becomes sentient, it actually may just want to reach out and try to understand the world it's living in and try to understand other thinking creatures. Which is sort of what the robot baby and Archie try to do. And so the movie is sort of an exploration of that notion, which is not seen as much these days in movie science fiction, because things don't blow up as much in that type of story.
It is nothing new. People have been telling these types of stories since science fiction first started. You can look at stuff like Ray Bradbury's "Electric Grandmother" and many other stories from the past and that thread is there.
There was also another thing. I was trying to figure out what I was going to do for my first feature film. With limited resources, what kind of movie are you going to make? It wasn't in me to do a low budget romantic comedy. That's the typical thing a lot of first-time filmmakers will do. Or to do a Reservoir Dogs rip off or something like that. Those particular genres were not compelling to me. I didn't know how to do them in a new way, basically. And somehow, this kind of story was one that's compelling to me, because of the way I grew up with things that I'd always read and the things I was interested in. And two, it was different. It was going to be something different from what was out there.
Who designed the robot child and how functional was it?
Well, the robot, I was always comforted by the stories about the making of Jaws. Because originally when they made Jaws, they wanted the shark to do, like 50 things. And then it ends up doing 10. And I wanted the robot baby to do six things. And it ended up doing three.
I always knew it had to be egg-shaped, because growing up in Texas, I think in the sociology classes, we had to carry around an egg in a basket. So we would never get pregnant, you know what I mean? Learn how difficult it is to take care of a child. And also because of the Tamogochi craze, if you remember that. Those little egg-shaped electronic toys from Japan you had to take care of. So that's why it was always going to be egg-shaped.
And so I drew these pictures. And then a guy named Matt Carroll (ph) was the one who put it all together. In the end, our entire budget for the robot baby was maybe $200 or something like that. So it ended up being made out of a couple of Oxo mixing bowls set on top of each other, the top of a Coleman lantern, and one of those touch lights from Staples became the belly light. And he used his magic tools to put it all together and make it work.
A woman named Rainia Ho (ph) in San Francisco made these electronics for the inside of it that turns the head and made the light come on and go off. Originally, it was going to have a motor inside so that when it scooted across the floor it would actually be motorized. But it ended up being pulled on a string.
What was you production process for Robot Stories?
The movie was made for more money than I've ever seen in my life, but it was a ridiculously tiny sum by Hollywood standards. It wasn't a no budget movie like Clerks or El Mariachi. But at the same time, we didn't have money for big CGI effects for giant robots smashing through the streets of Manhattan. Of course, if we were going to have giant robots smashing through the streets of Manhattan, it may have been a little less heartwarming. You know, "All I want to do is hold you."
The stories I wrote separately. I had these ideas for stories, and I wrote them. And they kind of fit into this Twilight Zone length. And then at a certain point I was looking over what I'd done over the years, and I realized I had three stories which dealt with robots or artificial intelligence and were these stories from the heart. And I wrote the fourth one, and that became Robot Stories. But the whole writing process took about two and a half years.
Then once we finally pulled the trigger and went into preproduction, it was pretty quick. We started preproduction the summer of 2001, we shot in September and October of 2001 and edited four or five months. And we made our first print in, I think, May of 2002. We had our festival premiere in October of 2002 in the Hamptons.
We did a year at festivals and then we took it out theatrically city
by city.
