Atlas is now streaming on Netflix and with its release, we were able to sit down with director Brad Peyton (Rampage; San Andreas; Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) to talk about his action-packed new sci-fi epic that stars Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy-nominated superstar Jennifer Lopez (The Mother; Shotgun Wedding; Anaconda) in the titular role as Atlas Shepherd.
Without getting into spoilers, Peyton breaks down some of the film's biggest moments, including a pivotal body horror scene where one of the film's stars find themselves in a sticky situation. Plus, he talks about working with Jennifer Lopez, finding the perfect voice for her AI companion, and a whole lot more.
Watch our full video interview with director Brad Peyton below and/or keep scrolling to read the transcript. Plus, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more exclusive content!
ROHAN: We've seen so many different kinds of AI movies over the years, from The Terminator to The Creator last year, and each always has something a little different to say about AI. Some say it can help, others say it can destroy, and your film goes in a slightly different direction. So, what was something you wanted to say about AI with Atlas and about humanity's hypothetical future coexisting alongside AI?
BRAD: Yeah, I think like the movies you’re naming, I'm a big fan of those movies, and I think that initially, my kind of tack or approach with AI was different, because I just don't want to replicate or duplicate what's already been done. So, what I thought was more timely, more nuanced, a little more interesting for the time we're in, is to show both sides of the coin, which is the extremes of how AI could go badly and how it could possibly go positively. I mean, you know, we work with a futurist on this movie, and he talked about the ecology with me, he talked about like, you know, weapons systems, engine systems, AI, obviously, and the thing that I kept coming back to is that AI is a tool. It's not all bad, or all good. Even if it was fully sentient today, the only place it would be all bad or all good is in our imaginations because it would most likely live in the gray zone, and the fact of the matter is, it comes down to how people use it, and how responsible they are with it. So, this movie was about showing that and starting that discussion, as opposed to like, yeah, AI is all bad. They're the bad guys. I wanted to show both sides of it.
ROHAN: What is like directing a superstar like Jennifer Lopez, especially when much of what she's acting opposite in this movie isn't actually there?
BRAD: I mean, I think, it's my responsibility to try to make sure that the cast and all the creatives are there to succeed, and I have to supply them with everything that's in my imagination, so they know what's going to ultimately end up on the screen. So, I, of course, supply her and all the cast, who want it, every design I have, every image I have. I have pre-vis for everybody, a lot of them really prefer not to see that, they just want to sort of be in the emotion of the scene, and a lot of my time was spent sort of developing a way of shooting her where she could be as intuitive as she needed to be. She's a very, very intuitive actor. So, specifically, the biggest sort of difficulty to overcome was her in the Ark suit by herself, like you spoke about.
Now, part of the reason I cast Jen was the fact that she is a global superstar, who is used to going out and performing to stadiums by herself as basically the person who's like leading the charge, so she was a little more naturally adapted to be in a situation like this, where she wasn’t opposite another cast member. I think a lot of actors would have been terrified by that, but she kind of embraced it right away, and then, my approach was, instead of like doing classic coverage, where, okay, I'll shoot two cameras, we'll break them down, I'll shoot two more cameras, we'll break them down. I set up four to five cameras at once and tried to shoot her entire performance or the entire scene in one go, so that she could just emote, get inside the scene, not think about the technical any more than she had to. And so, she really excelled in that environment. So yeah, it was a combination of, you know, casting the right person with the right attributes, and then working with them in order to focus my approach to support them in the best way, which is, ultimately, I think, my kind of number one role as a filmmaker.
ROHAN: Gregory James Cohan is so perfect as the voice of Smith in the film. Can you tell me more about casting him and finding the right voice for that character?
BRAD: I love that you asked the question, because the story behind this is phenomenal. So, basically, we had - we knew we needed someone to just be in the scenes opposite her, a nd they sent me like ten different tapes, and when I heard Greg, I was like, well, this is how I picture Smith now. What we were doing was we weren't casting the voice, we were just casting someone to be there on the day to help read the scenes with her. So, Greg came on to the movie as literally like a day player, like just a person who shows up, gets in the booth and just talks to her during the scenes. However, because he sounded the way I pictured him, I just treated Greg, like another member of the cast. I talked about Smith's arc, I talked about how he communicates with her in terms of this scene versus the middle of the movie versus the end of the movie, and by about halfway through the production, I realized, as soon as everybody sees this movie cut together, they're gonna fall in love with this voice, because everybody would come up and be like, he's great, where did you find him?
And I didn't say anything to Greg, because I was like, listen, it's a big deal, you know, there's sort of an expectation that we're going to recast by the time we get into post, but I knew it wasn't going to happen, because he's perfect. He's like pitch perfect in the role, so I felt really lucky, and it felt really good to be able to give this guy this massive break in his career, simply because he's perfect. The way he looked at his job was I'm here to support Jennifer Lopez. I'm just here to help her, and then one day I said to him, well, lucky for you, that's also what Smith is here to do. He's literally in this movie, just to help Atlas, so there was a lot of just luck coming together to make that all happen, and it's really fortunate. The movie benefits in a big way, because he was there for the whole ride, he was there from minute one.
ROHAN: I don't want to spoil the scene for our readers, but you get to delve into a bit of body horror in the third act with a critical scene involving Sterling K. Brown. How did that come together and how much of what we're seeing is practical?
BRAD: Well, first of all, I love that we're going to ask and answer this question without giving away what the scene is, this is very enjoyable for me. So, we had to ask his permission, and then he said, yes, you can do that to me, but please do it for as short a period of time as possible, and I was like, no problem. So, I set up three cameras, we used the mechanism on his face, and then we got it within 90 seconds, and so, what I loved about it was, I knew it was going to get a visceral reaction, and it did. Every single time we play that scene for an audience, it got a visceral reaction, and it's probably that scene that ended up making me fall in love with horror a little more, because I was like, oh, I get the joy of doing this. I mean, now I sound like a crazy person, but there is like this sort of joy in doing scenes like that, because they are visceral, they make you feel something like right away, and so it was also important to show how heroic Sterling is and how villainous Simu is.
I felt really lucky because this cast is like, top to bottom, amazing. I definitely felt like I was surrounded by movie stars, because at this point, you know, Sterling hadn't been nominated for the Academy Award, but meeting him and working with him. I was like, oh, this guy's a movie star. Simu, obviously in the Marvel Universe, movie star, Jen, movie star. So, it was really fun to be able to go in with all of those guys and sort of maximize their characters, play around with them, and yeah, invent moments like that, because they're real game. They really want to show up and do their best work possible. So, it was really fun.
ROHAN: This movie has a very standalone feel to it, which is refreshing for a sci-fi film - as a director, do you find that freeing when you don't necessarily have to worry about setting up a larger universe?
BRAD: Yeah, I mean, I felt like I had to set up the story and set up the world in the sense of, you know, what has happened, or at least allude to what has happened before the story kicks off. So, that's where you sort of see like the rebellion of AI and the first very quick little opening title sequence. But, I am very focused on just executing the narrative of the first movie, I don't fall into the trap of oh, this is a franchise. It could be, absolutely, like this is a world that I would be open to exploring a lot more. I have other ideas.
For me, the only time I would go and attempt to do something like that where you're sort of setting up more of an ongoing thing would be if I took on like a piece of IP like GI Joe or Gears of War or something like that, which are projects that I've always dreamed of doing and I would look at those and go okay, there are so many angles into this project or there are so many pieces of material that already exist. I have to treat this in some ways like the big huge Chapter One of this world. Atlas is more about I'm going to treat this like a standalone movie, and if we need to build out further from here, I want to make this chapter and this piece incredibly satisfying. So, that's my singular focus when I go in to do a movie like this.
Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it.
Atlas is now streaming on Netflix!