In AFRAID, Curtis (John Cho) and his family are selected to test a revolutionary new home device: a digital family assistant called AIA. Once the unit and all its sensors and cameras are installed in their home, AIA seems able to do it all. She learns the family’s behaviours and begins to anticipate their needs. And she can make sure nothing – and no one – gets in her family’s way.
As Afraid downloads in to Australian cinemas on August 29, Nick L’Barrow sat down with the films writer and director, Chris Weitz, to discuss creating an unseen threat, the difficulty of scaring modern audiences, and why the internet makes for a great villain itself.
Nick: Chris, it’s a pleasure to meet you! How are you today?
Chris Weitz: I’m alright, thanks!
Nick: Glad to hear it and thank you for taking the time to chat. I’m genuinely a fan of your work, and I’m excited to break down Afraid today.
Chris Weitz: Thank you.
Nick: I’d love to start with the concept of AIA herself, because she is predominantly an unseen threat. She has a physical hub, but so much of her power comes from what she’s doing that we can’t see. I’m curious to know what the evolution was of creating AIA’s menace in the script, and how you brought that to life on screen?
Chris Weitz: Yeah, I mean it’s interesting because the script is all words, but you want a villain who can actually be seen, and not just felt. And I think what I compare it to is kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Philip Kaufman version, which is amazing. Donald Sutherland, rest in peace, was amazing in it.
In that regard, the villain was invisible, except you could feel it in the actions of the people who it managed to control. And so, my contention is that if an AI really become sentient, the thing it’s most going to want is a body, but it can’t actually have one. However, it can sort of use people as puppets. That is the real danger.
I mean, yeah, it’s a smart home device, but you can’t really kill people with internet connected toasters and refrigerators and garage doors! It’s really going to be about how much information it’s going to have on us, on people. And the degree it can blackmail and coerce and hoodwink people into doing it’s will. One of the scary things about AIA in the movie is that she could be controlling anybody, at any time, due to the influence she has over them.
Nick: That control AIA has sort of stems from this maternal instinct she adopts, and she seems to lure people in with that safety net. What were some of those maternal traits that you were excited to turn into horror elements?
Chris Weitz: I think that, you know, as opposed to say HAL, which is a very cold and calculated, and distant figure, the AI that we’re going to encounter is going to be friendly. It’s going to sort of be like a buddy, and have all of these funny, cute sayings. It’ll pause in the right places, and it’ll really be like talking to a friend or somebody who cares about you.
But if it were all powerful, it might come to regard us as kind of wayward children. People who need it’s help. People it looks down on in some ways, as well. To me, AIA is like a personified version of the entire internet. And when I say that I don’t just mean Google, I also mean the dark web, and everything that people do and say. The opinion that it’s formed about humanity is an inaccurate one, because it’s seen way, way too much.
Nick: The internet is such a double-edged sword, and the idea that AIA uses the entirety of it to form her decisions, like you said, is worrying. But it made me curious to find out what is the one enormously positive thing you’ve taken away from the internet, and what’s one thing that you wish never existed on there?
Chris Weitz: Wikipedia is pretty amazing, right? I can learn about anything. All human knowledge being at your disposal is fantastic.
I won’t be the first person to say – social media… maybe not the best thing ever. And TikTok is a kind of dangerous way in which humanity is being distracted and dumbed down. Those are things that worry me quite a bit, especially as a parent.
Nick: Being a parent, and someone who is quite aware of the dangers of the internet, how did that inform decisions you made about the characters? Because they cover an interesting spectrum of pro and anti AI sentiments.
Chris Weitz: Well, I’m ambivalent about it myself, and I suppose you can break yourself up into those different parts and different characters when you’re writing the script. Obviously, sometimes I’m really amazed by what the internet and what AI can do, and sometimes I’m quite terrified about the future that it could bring.
Each of the members of this family have something, I guess, missing. They’re not bad people at all. They’re nice people, but everybody has something. Curtis [John Cho] is a little bit ambitious. Meredith [Katherine Waterson] has kind of a loss in her life with her beloved father.
The kids are trying to deal with various things that children do when they’re dealing with the internet. Whether it’s social media or loneliness, or just the fact that kids believe pretty much anything that they see online. All these things make us pray to bad actors, and the bad actors can be algorithms. They don’t even need to be people.
Nick: This might be sort of a big question – but in a society where we praise humans now for being self-aware, why do we finding it off putting that technology could be self-aware too?
Chris Weitz: I mean, right now even the amazing, large language models that we’re seeing are doing a very good impression of being self-aware. We haven’t really encountered something that has consciousness, per se. Although, I would put it to you that if there was a conscious AI, it would be hiding very carefully, right? It wouldn’t want to reveal itself to the world anytime soon.
And I think that also, in a lot of ways, we understand ourselves and understand life by the knowledge that we are mortal, and second of all by having bodies. If you can imagine a consciousness without a body, that has no sense of mortality whatsoever, that has been exposed to absolutely everything that humanity has put on the internet, I think it might be a recipe for insanity. And that’s how our villain was shaped, basically.
Nick: That’s fascinating. I’ll wrap up on this question, and like I said earlier, I’m a fan of your work, and I’ve enjoyed watching the journey from the comedies you started out making, up to the sci-fi and horror films you make now. I’m curious to know whether you have found any unique similarities between comedy and horror.
Chris Weitz: It’s the closest thing we have to a call and response, right? You can actually have an audio impression of what the film is doing to an audience. Whereas that’s relatively rare in drama. Although, sometime with a weepy you can tell, as well!
It evokes this kind of reaction. Laughter and screaming, they’re cousins in some way, because they’re these involuntary reactions that you’re trying to provoke in an audience. The way to structure a scare is akin to structuring a set piece or a joke in comedy.
I mean, it was a learning process for me, frankly, figuring out how comedy is structured. But that’s where those experiences are best, in the theatre.
Nick: Is it harder to scare people, or make them laugh?
Chris Weitz: Oh, interesting. I actually think it’s probably harder to scare people, unfortunately. Because life is quite scary already, and people have acclimatised.
Thank you so much to Chris for his time, and to Sony Pictures for organising the interview. Afraid is in cinemas August 29.
