Loading summary
Transcript95 lines
- [00:03]
Sidney Chandler
So what am I if I'm not human, what am I?
- [00:12]
Migizi Pensano
Whatever you want to be.
- [00:16]
Adam Rogers
Welcome to Alien Earth, the official podcast. My name's Adam Rogers. I'm usually a reporter. I cover science and technology mostly and I'm also a big nerd. So I'm delighted to get the chance to extend an inner jaw mouth thing and bite down into Alien. One of the great horror, science fiction and action universes and a perfect organism for thinking about the future of technology, humanity and monstrosity. So this show is our chance to talk about what happens on that show, of course, and also go backstage or let's say below decks and into this steam filled water dripping from chains cargo holds. I'll be talking to folks around the world from Hyderabad to London to the Gold coast of Australia to the Gambia to Pasadena and from across the production to writers and directors about how they shape the story, to actors about their characters and the, well, the action and the people who did the actual world building and alien making. And listen, the whole point of genres like science fiction is to have good fun while wrestling with complex, hard to kill, acid blooded ideas. So at the end of every episode we'll dive into one of those too. Fair warning, there's going to be spoilers, so watch the episode first or don't come crying to me. This week. Episode one, it's called Neverland and we'll be hearing from the series creator and writer Noah Hawley. Then I'll sit down with writer Migzy Pensineau to talk about a new addition to the Alien the hybrids. The mind of a child transcoded into a synthetic adult body. And I'll talk to actor Sydney Chandler who plays one of those hybrids. Lastly, we'll do a big how should we think about the idea of humanity in a roboticized, artificially intelligent future? First, let's do some basics. The secret origins of Alien Earth with series creator, writer and executive producer Noah Hawley.
- [01:52]
Noah Hawley
I remember there was a plan for a friend of mine's birthday party to go see Alien with a bunch of what would have been 11 or 12 year olds at the time. And I had a similar set of parents who pretty much allowed everything else but drew a line in the sand at going to see Alien and so I went to see the in laws instead. But I did see it eventually and I did see James Cameron's sequel in the theater, which was a very seminal moment for me. It remains one of the best action movies of all and completely different than.
- [02:24]
Adam Rogers
What had come before it too. So you, I mean, I Just remember not being prepared for what that was like to see in a theater how amazing that was.
- [02:31]
Noah Hawley
I think what made Alien so powerful a film was just the sheer unpredictability of the biological horror therein and the fact that it started as what felt like a documentary about space truckers that went on for, like, 30 or 40 minutes. And I think that slow build really resulted in the terror that people felt because they weren't prepared for it. The movie had.
- [02:55]
Adam Rogers
I actually do think about this with some maybe weird frequency, about what it must be like to create a new kind of monster that just lives in people's gestalt in the way that, like, Romero created modern zombies and to move.
- [03:09]
Noah Hawley
What had formerly been a B movie genre in which the practical effects were always a little bit silly and you had to suspend disbelief, where, as I said, the biological horror of it, the reality of this completely repulsive life cycle of this creature, that every time you thought, well, that's gotta be it, it got worse.
- [03:28]
Adam Rogers
Right?
- [03:29]
Noah Hawley
And you weren't prepared for that either. So I think that's one of the things that remains so critical to the success of the first film that every time you make another Alien gets harder to recreate for an audience.
- [03:44]
Adam Rogers
That comes to the challenge that falls on you here. How did you come to the project?
- [03:49]
Noah Hawley
I came to the project through fx. I made Fargo for them, and then I made a show called Lesion for them, which came out of a conversation in which FX asked me if I would ever be interested in doing anything in the X Men world. And my problem is, if you ask me a question like that, I'm going to have an idea. And so they asked me a few years later if they could get Alien, would I be interested. And of course I was and had an idea. But it went through a very long process because in the beginning, it was really seen as only a film franchise. And the film executives at 20th Century Fox weren't interested in sharing with the television department, even though it's the same company. I think there was a perception that you devalued the brand by making too much of it. And so it wasn't until Disney came in that we got another swing at it.
- [04:37]
Adam Rogers
You said that you had an idea immediately. Like, as soon as the FX folks said Haiti, what do you think you were like?
- [04:42]
Noah Hawley
Oh, I mean, not. Not on the phone call, but quickly enough that we sat down in what would have been, I want to say, 2018 and had a conversation about it. And obviously it's evolved a bit since then, but all I ever tried to do in this line of work I found myself in of reinterpreting famous films as television shows is to figure out what the original movie made me feel and why, and then to try to recreate that feeling in the audience telling a completely different story.
- [05:14]
Adam Rogers
And it's a structural challenge too, isn't it, as a storyteller, because you just laid out three acts. And that's true in both those first two movies. That's very different than what you're working with with eight hours of television.
- [05:25]
Noah Hawley
Yeah, I mean, an alien movie is a two hour survival story right at its heart. And it has a certain amount of setup and then a lot of runaway and then a certain amount of fighting back and then the movie is over. That is not what a television show is. A television show is 10, 20, 50 hours of a continuous story about a group of charact who can't all die. In fact, most of them can't die. If you really want to tell stories about these people that an audience invests in. And so then the function of the monster becomes different in a television show than it is in a film, you're starting development.
- [06:00]
Adam Rogers
Before COVID and really before the oligopolies of the super wealthy technologists became as present in our lives, a lot of what happened in real life caught up with what you were laying out as a narrative, as a world building structure. 2018, 2020.
- [06:15]
Noah Hawley
Yeah, I'm for better or wor, like a storyteller. You give me an air date and I'll calibrate our future to that air date. All you gotta do is think one or two steps ahead. Right. I lived in San Francisco during the first dot com boom and I saw the power of tech, the amount of money that went in there and the sort of way it revolutionized American capitalism. And Elon believes in the cyborg future, Right. And then there's other billionaires who believe in the transhuman future. And this is the battle, like, who's right? How are we going to get past this? Or are we all just going to get the measles and perish? And I thought, well, if we're coming to this world at this moment and we know that there's this synth technology, can we be looking at a moment in which the aliens enter our show where humanity is engaged in a different kind of struggle, right, about which technologies are going to create immortality for us, how are we going to transcend this earthly realm that we're on? You know, Tim Oliphant, at the end of the first hour says you used to be food and then you convinced yourself that you weren't food anymore, but you're still food when the monster comes along. However smart you are or whatever, whatever elevated ideas about the future of space travel you have, you're still basically just food.
- [07:26]
Adam Rogers
You also get to see a very specific Earth, seeing the kind of Boulardian skyscraper, seeing the canals and what looks like a post climate change world. You've got some ideas that you're working through, I think, about what the planet looks like as well.
- [07:42]
Noah Hawley
Yeah, it's the hot wet future that we all appear to be inevitably moving toward. And what impact does that have? We know when the temperature goes up, all those tropical move north, all those tropical insects move north. Everything's moving north. Right. And so the planet, 50 years from now, you know, you're going to have to worry about getting some tropical mosquito borne disease in Wyoming. Right. That's a part of it. Without making a statement about it, it's just saying, okay, I think if we accept that reality, then this is what the future would look like.
- [08:16]
Adam Rogers
I was surprised that this show's not only in conversation with alien and aliens, but with another text too, with Peter Pan. So where did that idea come from? Why is that important?
- [08:25]
Noah Hawley
Peter Pan, if you read that book, it's a dark book. Peter, if he had his way, all the adults would die. I mean, there's a moment in the book where he hides in a tree and he's breathing quickly in and out because he believes that every breath he takes kills an adult. Right. And you're like, that is dark. A man child at its most mercurial. Right. And so for me, that metaphor for boy Cavalier as his own Peter Pan, he loves that idea that he has this Neverland. And you know what's interesting, obviously in the Disney version of it and the treatment in film is that we romanticize this child who doesn't grow up. When the reality is that children have the least amount of control of their environment and their world and that it's the act of growing up that gives us some measure of control. And to put these children into adult bodies and then refuse to allow them to grow up, it's really about keeping.
- [09:17]
Adam Rogers
Them, naming them after the Lost Boys. Wendy and the Lost Boys. That's who Peter Pan is trying to draw into his orbit.
- [09:25]
Noah Hawley
Yeah, you have to be who I tell you to be. And I have the naming power over you. Even though you were a person before with parents who named you and a long history. Now I own you and I Control you.
- [09:36]
Adam Rogers
Yeah. That's interesting, that naming.
- [09:37]
Noah Hawley
But isn't it fun? Isn't it fun? We're all kids. Isn't that fun?
- [09:41]
Adam Rogers
You're a novelist also, and you kind of work in genre in the novels, too, in a thriller mode and a mystery solving mode. You've done that with your television work too. And I wonder what compels you, if anything, about that. What do you like about it?
- [09:53]
Noah Hawley
Well, I think genre is what makes morality exciting for an audience. The issues are the same, but the stakes go up. So what kind of people should we be? How are we raising our children to be adults? All these things that I find myself returning to as a storyteller, when you put them in the context of a crime story or a science fiction story, they just get more exciting for an audience. And I've always felt like if you entertain an audience, they give you permission to do more. More with theme, more with character. The way that Alien introduced the Android and the idea that we couldn't even trust the people around us to be people, they didn't belabor it. But it was the shock of the film, which was a film that was already laden with so much shock.
- [10:36]
Adam Rogers
And there's the monstrosity of the monster versus the monstrosity of the company.
- [10:41]
Noah Hawley
Yeah. And, you know, there's a quote in the second film where Sigourney Weaver says, I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't fuck each other over for a percentage. The moral horror of Alien is what made it compelling to me. You know, it's not just what these monsters do to us, it's what we do to each other. Are we worse? Is such a fascinating question.
- [11:02]
Adam Rogers
If, you know, you're working in an alien expanded universe, what becomes core that, you know, you have to preserve to be true to that? And what becomes expendable or what becomes expandable to you?
- [11:14]
Noah Hawley
Well, there's a few things. One of the things that I think is really remarkable about those first two films is how much they are about class. You have Space Truckers in the first film. You have the soldiers in the second film. There really is a sense, a 1970s and early 80s sense, that individuals are working against a system. But then, of course, we never see who's at the top and who's making those decisions. And, you know, my feeling was if we're going to go to Earth, I think we have to meet those people and understand what it is that creates that kind of dystopian world in which people on a spaceship can be going to a planet looking for something, they don't know what it is. And then when they discover it, it's there to kill them. And then when they go back to their company and say, hey, this thing's trying to kill us, the company says, well, that's okay, as long as it survives.
- [12:02]
Adam Rogers
And the corporate sort of oligopolies that become important, too. The Alien movies talk about Weyland Yutani. Now there are more companies, and they're in charge.
- [12:12]
Noah Hawley
This is a moment in Earth history where there are these competing technologies, and Waylon Yutani has invested in the idea that we're going to become more than human by beginning to swap out our biological parts for mechanical parts and thus become stronger, better, faster versions of ourselves, right? And then, of course, the Prodigy Corporation is like, well, that's a very inelegant surgical solution to what could be a very clean and transhuman project.
- [12:38]
Adam Rogers
I want to know this specifically in relation to Boy Cavalier, who's the tech oligarch at the lead of Prodigy, one of the companies that you've put in charge of the planet. Is he actually a super genius or is he just a broligarch?
- [12:49]
Noah Hawley
The answer doesn't have to be either or. It can be both on some level, right? And I think the Dunning Kruger effect applies to smart people also, right? It's not just that stupid people don't know they're stupid. It's smart people don't know they're stupid. I mean, what happens at a certain level of wealth is you start to believe that the genius that made you rich applies to everything. And simultaneously, you stop surrounding yourself with people who might say, yeah, but right now you're only surrounded by people who say, oh, my God, you are a genius. So I think it's the hubris is always the downfall, right? I wrote in one of my books, like, at a certain point of wealth, you just think everything's free. And no one else goes through the world thinking everything's free except the people who can buy the world, you know? And the other danger of it, of course, is that they're fascinating, often transgressive, sometimes charming, funny, either deliberately or inadvertently. They're entertaining and outrageous and outraging, and we can't stop talking about them. And that only makes it worse.
- [13:50]
Adam Rogers
So you do introduce also the Imagino. You've got a spaceship here, so you know, the Sulaco, the Nostromo, and now there's Imagino. And in the first episode, there's some great elision of like, yeah, yeah, there's an alien spaceship, but you know what happens on one of those? And that gets expanded on more. But I'm just wondering what you get from having the ship as a factor.
- [14:07]
Noah Hawley
Well, I don't think it's alien without a ship. And that visual world, that is the Alien brand. And the biggest challenge that I had was, okay, not only does most of the show take place not on a ship, but it's not even the Weyland Yutani Corporation. So that aesthetic which is so iconic, is it just everywhere, or is Prodigy a different aesthetic? And since I was looking at those movies from 1979 and 86, I had to make the choice, is the technology this retrofuturism, or am I going to embrace the sort of Prometheus holographic world? And I thought, well, if I do that, I'm not making Alien. People are tuning in to see Alien. And if it isn't dripping metal chains in a sweaty cargo room, then it's.
- [14:51]
Adam Rogers
Not even, what are we even doing here, man?
- [14:54]
Noah Hawley
Exactly. We went back to the original blueprints to the degree that Ridley Scott was a little surprised at how much we embraced the aesthetic of the Nostromo in the Maginot. But the aesthetic of that world, the white on whiteness of it, you know, in contrast with the sort of industrial sense of it. I mean, that. That is alien to me. And when we built that bridge, when we built that comms room, and you walk into them, it's a really fascinating thing that happens because for me as a child and now an adult filmmaker, I mean, time collapses. You're basically walking into the movie Alien in a way that was so profound that the entire crew gets giddy. Not only are you making it, but you're inside of it.
- [15:37]
Adam Rogers
It's not just world building for me as a viewer, it's world building for people making it, too.
- [15:41]
Noah Hawley
There's an exercise that I've certainly been engaged in since Fargo in which I am in dialogue with the movies that I love, but it's not in just an imitative or a carbon copy. It's trying to tell an original story within an existing franchise. You get the best of both worlds if you do it right. You get something people love, and then they get a whole new version of it. And my hope is that that feels like a gift.
- [16:11]
Adam Rogers
You've also added a promise unfulfilled by the pluralizing of the title in the second movie, because there are other kinds of aliens in this Alien universe that.
- [16:21]
Noah Hawley
Goes straight to this idea of. My job is to Recreate in you the feelings you felt watching the movie Alien. And I can't do it with the xenomorph. I can't make you have that voyage of discovery where you're like, wait, so it's an egg and then it's a facehugger, and then it's a chest burster and then it's a xenomorph. You know that you know all those steps now, but you don't know with these other creatures how they reproduce, what they eat, all the disgusting things that you know will make you feel, I hope, those moments of panic and revulsion that you felt watching the original movie.
- [17:00]
Adam Rogers
So those are Noah's straight ahead storytelling reasons for adding new monsters to the Alien canon. But the show also adds another new life form, the hybrids. Human minds uploaded into synthetic bodies. And I want to turn to co executive producer and writer Migizi Pensano to talk about those. He comes to Alien with a lot of reverence.
- [17:18]
Migizi Pensano
When the call first came, I said no, because I was too reverent and the show felt too big to sort of be a part of. But when I opened my computer after I'd said no, boldly I opened my computer and the making of Alien was the last thing I had been watching the day before. And I was like, man, I love this series and there's no way I can't be a part of it. So then I started begging after I said no.
- [17:44]
Adam Rogers
Right, you first resisted the warriors call to battle, but then were forced to pick up the.
- [17:48]
Migizi Pensano
Yeah, classic hero's journey stuff.
- [17:50]
Adam Rogers
So within the structure of Alien Earth, there's the introduction to the idea of the hybrid of kids brains in synthetic bodies. Can you talk about what those are inside this universe?
- [17:59]
Migizi Pensano
It's human consciousness transplanted into a synthetic body with the idea that this is a way to extend human life, that an organic body is fragile and temporary, whereas a synthetic body could in theory, last forever. That's what a Hybrid is.
- [18:18]
Adam Rogers
Characters in the show have multiple opinions about what the hybrids actually are and whether they have the soul of the kid or not, whether they're human still or something different. Were there different conversations about how to play it or what people thought about what they were supposed to be?
- [18:34]
Migizi Pensano
The idea of what a hybrid is on Alien Earth varies from character to character, but person to person, actor to actor, director to director. My personal opinion on the humanity of a hybrid is that I just wrote them as humans when we were making adjustments to the script. They're just people, people with their own wants and needs. And goals and all of that. And so the way that you approach it is that you're just writing these kids. You're writing these characters not as the sort of synthetic bodies or the way that they're perceived, but you sort of melt that away and you get down to the fact that these are kids going through this new experience that nobody before them has ever been through. And the sort of terror and horror and wonder of that, of being exceptionally strong, that kind of thing is always where the focus was. It was always on the humanity of the hybrids. And for me, personally, I never thought of those characters as anything but human, anything but children.
- [19:29]
Adam Rogers
So does that mean you wrote them differently than you would have written kirsch?
- [19:33]
Migizi Pensano
100%. The kids are a human consciousness, and Kirsch developed entirely synthetically. The benefit of writing science fiction right now is that we have all this stuff to build on. So you get a chance when you're looking at somebody like Kirsch to be like, well, we have Asimov's Three Laws safe. And we're like, do we have that in our world? Or does he have different parameters about what are sort of sacrosanct limits that he has? But I'm not giving you any answers to that. I certainly have some of my own. But the writing of the hybrids was very much, for lack of a less cheesy term, their inner child was always front and center.
- [20:09]
Adam Rogers
How they were written inside the story. Boy, Cavalier's sales pitch for this product is that they're better than a human body in some way. Like, he sees the machines as better. In some important way, he sees them.
- [20:23]
Migizi Pensano
As the next step of evolution.
- [20:24]
Adam Rogers
So you believe him? I have a perhaps cynical distrust of billionaire tech oligarchs. I don't know where I might have got that, but I don't know if I'm supposed to think like, oh, yeah, no, he wants to sell a trillion dollar robot body.
- [20:36]
Migizi Pensano
I'm not speaking on behalf of the show when I say this, but for myself, I will take a billionaire or trillionaire's word at face value, because to get, you know, mildly political, I think it's. The world has found itself in the position it's in right now because people are always continually stunned by how terrible billionaires and trillionaires could be, especially when they're in power. And I'm like, they told you the whole time what they're actually wanting. I believe that Boyd Cavalier believes itself. He thinks he's telling the truth at.
- [21:08]
Adam Rogers
All times, but then he gets distracted by the existence of not Just the kind of alien that fan of the movies remember, but a bunch of them. Oh, yeah, there's a new shinier toy.
- [21:16]
Migizi Pensano
Yeah.
- [21:17]
Adam Rogers
For the same reasons as they think that that's. There's something transhuman in the alien.
- [21:22]
Migizi Pensano
I wouldn't say transhuman, but there's a level of knowledge that's outside of himself. There's something that is alien and from a different world that would intrigue anybody, especially a guy who. He's cracked human consciousness and he's like, all right, well, let's crack this. Let's see what this thing has to say. It's very much a distraction. I think he's still enamored of the hybrids and what he's done with that, I think it's still an incredible ego stroke for him. But I think that he's, as you said, it's like, ooh, shiny. There's a new thing, and it's a thing to crack. It's another world to conquer.
- [21:53]
Adam Rogers
While boy Cavalier might be patting himself on the back thinking he's cracked the code on the hybrids. And then moving on to new alien toys, the hybrids themselves have to contend with the complexity of their own existence. So who better to give us some insight into the mind of a hybrid than Wendy herself, actress Sidney Chandler, who really couldn't wait to play this role.
- [22:12]
Sidney Chandler
I got sent the first three scripts, and I stayed up, I think, till about 3am Reading and rereading the scripts. And so that night I booked a flight to Canada. Cause I knew Noah was there filming Fargo. And the next morning called my agent, who is now used to me being very impulsive, and I said, you know, whereabouts in Canada could I potentially find Noah? And do you think he would let me take him to dinner and talk about this show?
- [22:44]
Adam Rogers
You made that call first before flying to Canada. You didn't just fly randomly to Canada and then plan to explore the greater North American. Yeah, okay.
- [22:52]
Sidney Chandler
Yeah. But I did buy the flight, and it could have very well not worked out in my favor, but Noah thankfully agreed to meet with me. We sat down and talked alien and talked the character and why I fell in love with her so deeply. And I'm a huge sci fi nerd, and so is he. And so we had a great, great conversation. Then I came back to Austin and did my auditions. And in that found out that me and Noah are neighbors in Austin. So I did not have to fly to Canada. But it was worth it.
- [23:25]
Adam Rogers
You said you were a sci fi fan. You knew the alien universe. You were already into it.
- [23:29]
Sidney Chandler
The first Alien film is one that I have watched and rewatched ever since I was a kid. And it's funny because I used to have night terrors as a kid. And a lot of the time it would take the form of our beautiful Zeno. And so while filming, you know, you're filming 2, 3, 4, 5 in the morning, and you're being chased by, you know, one alien or another, it becomes really scary. I had moments where I jumped back into my little, you know, childhood self, and it's like, oh, my gosh, we are in danger right now. So that was really fun. That was really fun.
- [24:06]
Adam Rogers
You're also playing a person who. Because you're playing a hybrid who's a kid, but in an adult body, there's a real disjunction between, like, inner self and external presentation. So how do you think about playing that as a. Just as an acting challenge?
- [24:20]
Sidney Chandler
It was really interesting because once I started digging into Wendy more, I kind of started to see the body and then the mind as two different characters. And they were kind of like two of the same magnets. And they were pushing really close to each other. And you could get them super, super close, but they weren't quite touching. There was that force just pushing them far apart. And for Wendy, especially in the beginning, it was like she survived in that space between the two magnets. Like, that's where she wakes up, and it's this void and this hollowness that. That doesn't quite make sense. And so it's these two forces trying to mesh, you know? And how does the personality and conscious or subconscious mannerisms enter into something that's synthetic? And how does the synthetic body take a hold of a mind? Which one comes on top?
- [25:14]
Adam Rogers
Was there intentionality about what you were gonna do physically? Or does it. Or does the physical stuff just have to emerge from where you're from, your mindset?
- [25:21]
Sidney Chandler
Right.
- [25:22]
Adam Rogers
Is there a specific twitch that you can adopt? You know, I'm not trying to be reductionist about it, but I really do wanna know. So thoughtful about.
- [25:28]
Sidney Chandler
Yeah, it was really interesting, actually, because during pre production, we worked with an awesome movement coach. And we initially started kind of at the base level. What would the body move like without a personality put into it? You know, what is the most balanced way to stand? The most efficient eye line? Just different movements. And then we started to play with, okay, now let's your personality kind of leak into that. Even before character just let Sidney's personality leak into that. Her mannerisms or an emotion. What does that feel like? And the more we started to play with it, and with Noah's blessing, too, the more we started to focus not so much on the mechanics of the body, but more so the aspect of what is it to be a child? And that became much more visceral, I think, for all of us.
- [26:25]
Adam Rogers
So when you were doing prep, what kind of preparation did you actually do to get into a child mindset?
- [26:29]
Sidney Chandler
So we worked with a child psychologist, and it was great because we would start with, you know, military training in the morning and stunts, and then jump into playing ukulele and painting rocks and smashing pots. And so it was just a really well rounded day. It was really enjoyable. And. And when we worked with the child psychologist, it was really, really beautiful because she asked us to be as honest and authentic as possible and to not hide any emotions. And I remember one day we were singing some song in our circle, and one of the actors, I won't say who, just stood up and walked away and sat down and left. You know, we asked, what are you doing? She's like, I don't want to do it anymore. It was the most childlike acting I'd ever seen. You know, it started to help us. It opened all of us up of like, oh, that is correct. You know, as adults, we hide so much because society tells us to. But with kids, if you're not enjoying painting rocks or whatever it is, you might step away because that's how you're genuinely feeling. And so that was a really big lesson that we all took while studying kids, is to be as honest as possible.
- [27:45]
Adam Rogers
You spent a little bit of time with the actress who played the child version of you, too. So what were the circumstances of that and what was that like as an exercise?
- [27:53]
Sidney Chandler
Yeah, no, it was awesome. Noah's really, really incredible with his casting. She reminded me of me when I was younger to an extent.
- [28:01]
Adam Rogers
That's impressive casting.
- [28:02]
Sidney Chandler
Yeah, we had some really, really awesome conversations about, you know, everything but the job, me and her, but just watching her own mannerisms a bit, you know, because she is the first introduction to our character. The way she spoke, the way she held her head a bit to the side when she was thinking about something. I just pocketed a few of those. It was really, really wonderful working with her and working with all of the kids. Again, they remind you how incredibly open and honest and brave kids are. If they're in one conversation, that's their whole world. That's their one focus. They're so present, and then on a dime, something happens behind them, and that becomes Their whole world, they forget everything else that happened a few minutes before, so they're insanely present. They're the best acting coaches, to be honest. So that was just. It was so lovely working with them.
- [28:53]
Adam Rogers
You have this scene of your character's consciousness being transferred, basically, like, going from one body to the other. What do you think that Wendy is thinking as she undergoes that process and kind of wakes up in this new form?
- [29:08]
Sidney Chandler
That's interesting, because I spent a lot of time thinking about that question, and the things that popped out to me were, you know, maybe Marcy was similar to me and had really bad eyesight. When you wake up in this body, your eyes are 2020. My curiosity, and I think for Wendy as well, would be, is my skin still warm or is it cold? Can I feel the breeze on my face or do I not feel that? Does my body get itchy? I don't know. And then as far as waking up, I mean, I think to almost be, like, coming out of anesthesia, maybe, you know, that space of you were in the deep, deep dark, and now there's light, and you have no idea what to expect. So it would be kind of like being born, really born again.
- [29:59]
Adam Rogers
She also goes searching for her brother very quickly, and that's a link to family and humanity on this arc that the show now sets her off on. But also, right in front of her, Kirsch says, stop calling her human. So is she starting to think about that? What connects her to humanity or what doesn't?
- [30:16]
Sidney Chandler
I mean, theoretically, if I took your mind and placed it into a synthetic body, you wake up and I ask, you know, what is your name? And you share your name, and I say, okay, well, that's not actually you. How would you respond to that? Of course it's me. What are you talking about? Of course it's me. I'm responding to you. And I think that's how Wendy takes it. And all of these adults think it's the thing to do, to call her inhuman or not her anymore. And I don't think she takes that in. She doesn't allow herself to take that in, if you will. I think she's very good at compartmentalizing and her focus and her only focus is her brother. And I think that's one of her biggest strengths as well as one of her weaknesses, is being able to compartmentalize as well as she does.
- [31:03]
Adam Rogers
Yeah, you have to get old before you start having the real existential crises of whether the meat is anything. Yes. But it might just be, too. That she's a kid. I mean, that's the thing. We're supposed to keep remembering that it's a kid in there. And so the responses are always gonna be tilted toward. That's a childlike response.
- [31:23]
Sidney Chandler
And again, they are so adapt. She gets quite comfortable quite quickly because she has to. This is her situation now. And I realized she wouldn't be one to be overthinking. She lets things occur as they come. And so I had to allow myself to lean into that freedom and release the pressure a bit. And what's fascinating to me is watching all of the Lost Boys. Everyone is so unique. Their idea of a child and the idea of the body and their characters, they're all insanely unique children. We are not all the same. And I think that came from Noah giving us the freedom to explore and to not feel like we had to fit into a box, which I'm really thankful for. I think it allows the story to be as human as possible.
- [32:13]
Adam Rogers
That's an interesting take from Sidney, right? That you get a more human story from these fundamentally inhuman things. Or I'm wrong. Even before there was a Silicon Valley, really, transhumanists and techno optimists were saying that we're all just one download away from digital immortality. No, brains aren't digital. They're meat. And even if it were possible, even if you could somehow screenshot all the electrochemical networking that goes on in someone's head and transfer it to a different head, some AI thinkers believe that any machine intelligence, by definition, would. Would fundamentally differ from a human one. So let's go back to Noah Hawley on that. Human future.
- [32:50]
Noah Hawley
Science fiction has this eternal question that it asks, which is, does humanity deserve to survive? And so if the question is, does humanity deserve to survive? Then my question is, well, who's more human than a child? They're concentratedly human. And so this idea that came to me was, well, maybe they tried it, but adult minds are too fixed, right? And they're like, well, let's try it on kids, right? And they found that, lo and behold, child minds are flexible and they can make the trip. And so when I put those things together, then this exploration of what does it mean to be human and does humanity deserve to survive? Now, it's an interesting conversation. For me, the kind of critical question of the series is, is Wendy gonna choose human or other? Because she has a choice, right? And you feel the pull between Tim Oliphant's synthetic character and Dame Sylvia's human character. You know, you got a synthetic daddy and a Human mommy. And each one is saying, really, you should be like me is the right choice. And Wendy and the others are struggling with that. Should they become more human or should they become less human?
- [33:55]
Adam Rogers
So that's a really interesting notion here, that Wendy and the Lost Boys have choice. Because at the end of the second Alien movie, at the end of Alien, Sigourney Weaver, Ripley has to become essentially more than human. She has to put on the loader suit. She becomes a cyborg in order to fight the monster or else she'll die. Newt will die. She doesn't have a choice there. But in this story, the more than human, technologically enhanced characters, the hybrids, really do have choice around who they can be and what they can become.
- [34:18]
Noah Hawley
It's a choice that every child faces of what adult to become. Right. Am I going to still act like a human and respect the human boundaries of behavior, the social mores, or am I going to say I'm not human? So none of that applies to me. I don't have to be good, the human version of good or bad. You know, I'm allowed to create my own species.
- [34:42]
Adam Rogers
The hybrid bodies can still emote. They still feel connections to family. Wendy feels a connection to her brother.
- [34:49]
Noah Hawley
Yeah, synths.
- [34:50]
Adam Rogers
And the hybrids can obviously pass a Turing test. You know, they can pass four people. So what's the gating factor for? What says that's human, that's not?
- [34:57]
Noah Hawley
That's the challenge of it. We had a lot of conversations about sweat on set, right? In Thailand, it's 115 degrees. Can they sweat? My memory of the movie is that Ian Holm sweated, so I'm okay with that. Can they cry? Yeah. I think there's certain biological functions that like the feeling that you're breathing. If you were put into a synthetic body that didn't breathe, you would panic. Or the sense of a heartbeat. Like it's not actually doing anything, but you need it in order to feel human. I think the question with the Tim Oliphant conversation he and I had a lot of the time was, well, you know, probably you've got this programming from your founder. You can't harm a human, et cetera. Whether we're doing those specific three rules or not, you gotta figure there is some programming in there as to like, you know, don't kill the boss. And maybe his ego is fragile enough that it's like, don't yell at the boss. Don't challenge the boss. And so I would talk to Tim. Like, when Boy Cavalier dresses you down, maybe you've been programmed with a smile response, right? So where someone else would be angry, you're smiling in this weird, hostile kind of way. All of those elements were really choices that have to be made, and that's part of the fun of world building.
- [36:09]
Adam Rogers
Well, pals, normally I would say that's all we've got, but episode two of FX's Alien Earth dropped today too. So go watch that if you haven't, and then scuttle back to Alien Earth, the official podcast that's us. I I can promise Hybrids deployed for some die Harding around Prodigy Tower, Windy hunting for aliens or brothers, whichever. And Lost Boys versus Space Monsters. Make sure to rate, review and follow this podcast wherever your pods are. Casts are potted anyway, you get it. I'm Adam Rogers. I'll meet you back here after you've watched episode two and next week after the show.