In Time Creator Andrew Niccol Gives the Rich Eternal Youth

Wednesday, 16 November 2011 12:30

In Time Creator Andrew Niccol Gives the Rich Eternal Youth

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Photo: Stephen Vaughan

NAME Andrew Niccol

GIG Writer and director of In Time, a thriller about a world where science allows the rich to stay young forever.

BEFORE THAT Wrote and directed Lord of War, S1m0ne, and Gattaca. Wrote The Truman Show.

NEXT UP Adapting Stephenie Meyer’s first post-Twilight book, the alien allegory The Host.

Constructing the future
It’s so much easier to comment on today by going into tomorrow. It’s a Trojan-horse technique for slipping ideas past people. Then they don’t see them coming.
Unearthing the past
I’m interested in how we relate to technology, and I’m always more interested in the humanity than the hardware. We pulled out a record player the other day, and my kids were fascinated. My son is 8 years old, but we gave him an old typewriter, and he’d never seen one before. It was just fantastic.
Point of his movie
The obsession with youth is hardly unfamiliar. We can’t switch an aging gene off, but people certainly go to extremes to stay young. That’s why we thought it was logical to set the movie in LA. We don’t say it’s Los Angeles, but we don’t say it’s not. We thought, “Ah, it’s appropriate.”
Anachronism
When I write a script, I write a script. The last thing I do is put it into a computer. If you actually have the physicality of writing down the words, you take it in.
Work process
Screenplays are very formulaic, and there’s a rhythm to them, like music. Even if I haven’t written all of the scenes, I put them in a really long list and stick the pages together in a 6-foot strip. And I color-code characters or ideas to see that they’re flowing in a rhythmic way through the movie. If the color coding is off, then the movie’s generally off.
Business process
You can make expensive movies that are conventional, or you can make unconventional movies that are cheap. But it’s no surprise why In Time got made: No one in the movie is over 25, and there’s a ticking clock in every scene, so they didn’t even read the script. They just said, “Where do I sign?”