Jonathan Nolan Saw This Coming

There aren't many people, I would say, in film and TV

who have so consistently approached tech and science and AI

with the consistency and the breadth that you have.

You have stuck with these themes and I'm wondering why.

What is it about that genre, so to speak?

It's a very flattering way of maybe saying

that I get a little stuck or repetitive.

[Katie chuckles]

No, I don't. Come on.

AI, in particular, and I think it started, for me,

I wrote a film for my brother and David Heyman

at Warner Bros, that never got made.

It had enough overlap with Inception

and then with Person of Interest

that we never quite circled back to it.

But it was about AI. It was about AI is a bad guy.

And it didn't go, but I got fascinated by the subject.

I did a lot of research. I did a lot of looking into it.

The next hit, for me,

was the robot characters in Interstellar,

which were being developed just shortly after that.

Yeah.

And I was like, Wouldn't we fun to write robots?

The tension of the robot crew member,

pretty much any version of this,

is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone

and they have a secret agenda, but what if they didn't?

What if they were just all of the virtues

that we found the most beautiful, right?

They were brave, self-sacrificing,

sarcastic and funny, amazing leaders.

Mm-hmm.

What if they just embodied those values

the whole way through, and maybe you'd give the audience

a slightly, discomfort at first,

then this kind of interesting feeling of like,

Oh, okay, that's one path, right?

Right.

It's not written that the path has to be this sort of,

I think a lot of that is rooted

in sort of the usual human kind of xenophobia.

Movies about Terminators sell more tickets, right?

Right, right.

But yeah, I got fascinated with TARS and CASE,

the two robot characters in there,

but they're very much sort of not the peanut gallery,

but they're very much peripheral characters.

With Person of Interest, it was an opportunity to go back

to revisit that idea I'd that gotten.

I'm fascinated with

where you have this fire hose of data that's out there.

What if something could pick through it

and find patterns and find meaning?

An idea that proved, certainly,

to be very prescient, I must say.

[Jonathan chuckles]

I'm Katie Drummond,

the global editorial director of WIRED.

And I'm hosting our new podcast series, The Big Interview.

You can find The Big Interview

in the same place you find Uncanny Valley,

so subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.