While Lisa Joy’s new feature directorial debut Reminiscence isn’t a crossover to her co-created HBO series Westworld, one could easily argue that they’re distant cousins.
Both are set in near dystopian futures, where technology reigns and people yearn to be in another reality, not simply their humdrum present day.
In the Warner Bros. movie, which hits theaters and HBO Max tomorrow, Hugh Jackman plays Nick Bannister, a detective of memories of sorts. He runs a facility where he’s able to transport clients to their past experiences.
You can listen to our conversation with Joy below on the latest episode of Hero Nation:
Joy talks about her seven year journey with her screenplay for Reminiscence; a project she first pitched at Berlin, as Deadline told you, receiving multiple bids. Ultimately Warners winning.
In addition to teasing Westworld season 4, we also speak with Joy about the Amazon series she’s executive producing with her Westworld husband Jonathan Nolan, The Peripheral, which is based on the William Gibson novel.
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“It’s dealing with futurism like many of his books do, and the here and now,” says Joy, “That helped me find an axis point with it.”
The sci-fi drama thriller series centers on Flynne Fisher, a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken family in a forgotten corner of tomorrow’s America. Flynne is smart, ambitious, and doomed. She has no future. Until the future comes calling for her. The book is Gibson’s hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind, and what lies beyond.
And the trick to anchoring complex, psychedelic storylines which mesmerize Joy?
“As long as you can bring humanity to the characters to where they are –if they’re aliens, robots or talking vegetables,” says the filmmaker, “Someone, somewhere will feel a little less alone in the world and a little more like there’s another talking vegetable like them.”
We also talk today about how Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings is about to take over the world, Anthony Mackie locking down Captain America 4 and the next legal face-off between Johnny Depp and Aquaman‘s Amber Heard.
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