2036: Origin Unknown is released today, starring Katee Sackhoff as Mack, a mission controller at a pared-back NASA whose input is required when something is discovered on the surface of Mars. It’s the brainchild of writer/director/producer Hasraf “HaZ” Dulull, who started out as a Visual Effects artist on feature films such as The Dark Knight and Prince of Persia, before moving into a VFX Supervisor role where he was nominated for several VES awards for shows such as Planet Dinosaur (BBC) and America The Story of US (Discovery). In recent times, he’s been VFX Producer on shows such as Poldark Season 1 and The Aliens on Channel 4. Shortly before release, he chatted with Paul Simpson…

As well as watching 2036: Origin Unknown, I’ve been looking at the short films you made that are up on YouTube – and I need to know what happens next on SYNC!

All of my short films are pretty much proof of concept; I don’t make films so I can enter them in festivals. That proof of concept that you saw is the icing on the cake of a much bigger project. There’s a feature film version of SYNC that’s in development at the moment. I can’t really give too much away, but it’s based on the short film. The studios saw that and went, “Wow what’s next?” I like to leave it open as to what people think happens next.

It’s kind of the way I ended Origin Unknown and also the way I finished The Beyond.

There feels like elements of your short film IRIS in Origin as well…

Well spotted!

IRIS feels like a proof of concept that took the idea down the Aliens route, whereas Origin Unknown went the Interstellar route…

I’m surprised you didn’t mention 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I think every SF film in the last 50 years owes something to that. But where did the idea for 2036 come from initially?

You’re going to laugh when I tell you. In 2013, I was working in visual effects as a visual effects supervisor and I decided I was going to make a short film myself on my laptop, about the human brain, and put it out there. Overnight Project Kronos went viral. I got calls from studios, and they asked what else had I got? So I had to come up with some more proofs of concept, and what I came up was a project called Pathfinder, which is based on a robot that NASA sent many years ago.

I was queuing up in Tesco one day and I noticed that there were no actual human checkout people – it was all self service, and the only human being was someone who worked there in case you had issues with your card or your bag. I thought this was interesting. When I was in college, I worked part-time in a supermarket – also Tesco’s – and I remember one of my favourite things was being on the checkout. I would always talk to my customers, and there’d be regulars. I miss that. We don’t have that any more.

I thought, “What if NASA did that?” In order to reduce the cost of space exploration and eliminate human error in space missions and space launches, what if they replaced NASA staff with AI-driven controllers. They can run 15 to 20 missions at one time, and they can make decisions for us. They keep a few human supervisors in case certain protocols come up. One of the protocols I came up with was Origin Unknown – if they came across something that was not in their database or their programming, they would have to bring on a human to investigate it.

I gather you had quite a lot of discussion with Katee Sackhoff about her character, Mack; looking at the other characters, the other humans, were they quite deliberately less well fleshed out or is it more that we just see certain facets of them in this story but they have their own story going on that you knew the details of that was intersecting with this?

You’ve nailed it in the last one. That’s exactly what it was. Each of them has their own story – Mack’s sister, Lena, has her own backstory. She is the head of the space agency: when they did the big culling, firing everyone, she kept her sister on, which is why Mack doesn’t feel she should be doing this job. All her colleagues have been fired and the only reason she’s there is her big sister is the head of the space agency.

There’s some imposter syndrome in Mack as well, which comes across in some of the conversations with ARTi.

Oh yeah. Basically Mack hates technology, she hates AI with a passion. That’s why the relationship is like that in the beginning: Mack is a bitch towards ARTi, and ARTI’s like, “It ain’t my fault that I’m better than you guys. You have to deal with it.”

The whole idea of that story is eventually you have to face your demons and sometime if you overcome demons, and work at the very thing that you hate, you find that you both eventually need each other. Mack needed ARTi in a way, because ARTi was able to think in a more logical way and was technologically more advanced, obviously, but ARTi needed Mack because she had something ARTi doesn’t have – human intuition and gut instinct.

There’s a lot of moments in the movie where you realise that this is basically like a Turing Test – but ARTi is doing the Turing Test on Mack.

Did you have the idea of the final twists from the start, or was that something that came up during the script preparation?

It was always planned to be that way. As you know, when you’re shooting a movie, things change, and when you’re editing, things change. I think the ending changed a lot in the edit because when you write an ending, it may read well on paper and everyone has their own version in their head of what it’s going to be like, but it’s not till you shoot the thing that you think, “What if it was this?”

That was one of the things that me and [co-writer] Gary Hall worked on first: we figured out the endgame and worked backwards from that.

You say the ending changed during the process; you had someone different reading in ARTi opposite Katee – and then Steven Cree came in to voice the lines. Did the way you got him to perform the lines in that overdub become different after hearing the way Katee reacted with ARTi?

No. It’s a very good question, and it was one of our biggest concerns – we knew we would get such good stuff from Katee on the day, that we hoped it was going to work when we brought the actor in later [to play ARTi]. What was very interesting is Steven Cree has done this sort of work before – he worked on an animated film called Brave, and he is very similar to Katee.

I love improv – that’s how The Beyond was made. It’s still very grounded and real because the characters are naturally doing what they should be doing, they’re not scripted in that way.

Katee embraces improvisation – a lot of the nuances are her. I’d say to her, “Keep doing that, keep being Mack, push the nuances.” Steven was very similar. He would watch the cut of the movie we had, and study the timings. When he came in to studio, he brought his own nuances to it, which worked really well, as opposed to us using a physical voice actor who would just read it line by line. He couldn’t interact with the other actor, that was the only difference, but both of them loving improv helped tremendously.

Which of course sometimes could be a recipe for disaster!

It worked out fine, because the actors really embraced it. We had a really good script, and also the script was written in a way that allowed it to be moulded in several different ways on the day. It  wasn’t written in a way that meant if we didn’t say a particular line, we were screwed.

What was the biggest challenge for you both of preparing the film, and as a producer/director?

The biggest challenge for us was we had to shoot this movie in 10 days. That was a super big challenge. We only had Katee for 10 days, so we had to film it in 10 days. I had to prep it way in advance, storyboard everything out.

I spent about six months with Katee before the shoot, going through the script and acting it out. It was always a challenge from Day 1 – how do we get the best performance in 10 days? I remember on Day 1, I think she was full of adrenaline and she did 26 pages. We’re all like, “What? What just happened?” At that point, my First AD came to me and said, “You know those concerns we had about 10 days? I think we’ll be ok!”

Before Katee was officially signed on to the project, she read the script and loved the idea. It was something different she’d never read, and it was really far-out stuff, proper 2001 far-out stuff. We got on a Skype call and she said, “Why should I play this character of Mack?” I said, “I’ll be honest with you – I’ve seen you as a badass as Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica; in Riddick next to Vin Diesel you kick arse. In this movie, you’re not a kick arse type of girl – if anything you’re a vulnerable human being, who’s weak, you’ve got issues, and you’re a bit of a bitch in the first act of the movie.” She was like, “Wow, never done that before.”

The challenge was to do something that wasn’t a typical Katee Sackhoff sci-fi film. That meant that we kept everything super grounded. There are moments where Katee was laughing at the character, or struggling with solving a problem – like when they’re trying to land the probe. There are sister issues with Lena, there’s potential tension between her and Stirling. These are all human traits.

We sort of threw science fiction out of the window at that point and made it a straightforward hardcore drama about this woman who’s fighting with her inner demons and trying to deal with this character ARTi. At that point, the way we overcame the challenge of ARTi was we didn’t treat him as a robot at all – we treated him as a character, and we made a scale model of ARTi’s head so Katee could reference the eye lines and feel like she was interacting with something with a personality.

What’s the area you’re proudest of?

I got to make Katee cry, hardcore cry. I was really proud of that. All my previous short films and my first film were very visual effects-driven, but I didn’t want to just be seen as the Visual Effects Guy who’ll make things look good. That scene, when she cried, I was really proud.

On the page, she had a little mini-monologue which she then on set rewrote with me. That was great collaboration. We talked about it the night before – what does the audience need to see here? I said we needed the audience to see Mack super vulnerable and really breaking down. All the barriers are down and she realises that we as humanity have fucked up bigtime – and that was me telling the audience we are fucking up. I was proud that we were able to capture that.

There are loads of things of course, but that was one of the big things for me.

2036 Origin Unknown is available now  on iTunes, other platforms and DVD www.2036OriginUnknownTheMovie.com

Read our interview with Katee Sackhoff here

Thanks to Rebecca Cherry at AR:PR for help in arranging this interview, and Haz Dulull for the images.