REPLICAS (2019) Production Notes
Everything You Need to Know
SYNOPSIS:
After a car accident kills his loving family,
a daring neuroscientist will stop at nothing to bring them back, even if it
means pitting himself against a government-controlled laboratory, a police task
force, and the physical laws of science themselves.
ABOUT THE STORY
Set in the Caribbean with a helicopter roaring into frame, we look bird eye view onto BIODYNE, a secure governmental facility.
WILLIAM FOSTER (40s) is a scientist working in the lab. He is looking at an origami his daughter made taped to his computer. The helicopter drops off a biohazard medical container. Scientists and Technicians are rushing to bring the medical container inside, wearing augmented reality vision gear. William opens the medical container and removes a human head. They are using it to try and replicate the human mind into a synthetic model, known as Subject #345: the robotic human. A device probes the left eye and pushes the skull into the brain. There are other types of creatures floating in containers around the lab. The plan is to take the memories from the biological brain and imprint them into the synthetic brain to replicate the human mind.
Lead Scientist, ED WHITTLE is working on the project, as is SCOTT, who is confident that it will work this time. The imprint is complete. William says, “Energize the body.” #345’s head moves and it asks, “Who are you?” It asks louder, then digs into its own skull and rips its synthetic flesh and tears itself apart. The experiment fails. William gets pressure from his boss, JONES, to find success or look for another job.
William goes home and greets his wife, MONA, and their three children — MATT, SOPHIE, and ZOE. He's a great husband and father. They get into the car for Thanksgiving vacation and hit the road. Ed shows up to house sit. They are heading to a beach house on the other side of the island. While driving through a mountain road in the jungle, there’s a thunderstorm. A large tree limb falls and crashes through the windshield and impales Mona in the chest. The SUV crashes down the mountain. Everyone is dead except William.
He wakes up, in a panic, calls Ed and tells him to come, and to bring the equipment. Ed arrives and is shocked that William hasn’t called the police. Then he realizes what William wants to do: download their memories and get Ed to help him clone their bodies. William says Ed has done it with animals. Ed is freaked out by William's disregard of ethics and laws. Eventually Ed reluctantly helps him, while pressing that it hasn’t worked on humans.
They steal equipment from the lab, and take it to William’s garage. Ed can only get three of the pods. Since they have four people here (his wife and three kids), William has to choose which one of them won’t be cloned. Ed writes the names on pieces of paper and tells William to pick blindly. The one he chooses won’t get to be cloned. It’s Zoe. William downloaded their memories at the crash site onto drives. He will have to delete Zoe’s, but he will also have to delete all memory of Zoe from his family’s minds as well. William stays up day and night and makes it happen. He erases the memory of Zoe and other things from their minds. Ed and William are studying tapes they have on file from past failed experiments on a monkey. They make the necessary adjustments and hope it will work.
The clones begin growing. They act strange. Eventually, they start to take on the characteristics of the people they are supposed to be. Scott tells Jones that William has called in sick the last few days and is holding up work. Jones calls and demands he comes in to work or is fired, even if it is the holidays. William tells Ed he has to leave him here and go to work. He makes an appearance at the lab. On his way home, Ed says he told Matt’s teacher he has the chicken pox. William says he stole all the research data from the lab. The police come to the door and say someone has been stealing batteries from cars. (They needed them to power the equipment.)
At the 21-day mark, Ed comes and says it is time. If they keep them in the pods, they keep aging. William worries though that if they take them out now and their brains aren’t ready, they’ll have the minds of infants. William tells Ed to drain Mona’s pod. He will put her in an induced coma and keep her mind in a blank state. They drain it and Mona looks perfect. She looks like Mona. They drain them all and put them in their beds. Jones calls and asks if William has been avoiding his calls. William lifts Mona’s hand up to his face and doesn’t notice brain waves on the monitor. He tells Jones he will be right in.
At the BIODYNE lab, William checks on test subject #345, which looks dead in the eyes. He grabs a spare device and runs out. He calls Ed who comes over and William says he has figured it out. He says Mona’ s mind is a blank slate. The brain doesn’t know it is looking for its body. That was #345’s problem. He connects the device to Mona. He caresses her face and asks, “Who are you, Mona?” Her hand starts to twitch. But William says it is working. He just has to shut it down for now because she can’t wake up like this.
William showers, shaves and cleans up. He unhooks his family from the IVs. He has to remove all traces of Zoe from the house, including re-doing her room. He sobs as he does it. Then he gives them what they need to wake up. He goes to see Mona and she isn’t there. He finds her in the kitchen with Matt and Sophie acting like it is a regular day having breakfast. But they aren’t normal. Mona goes for a run and is running at super speeds, as fast as a gazelle. She feels a hole in her chest and can’t figure out what it is.
William is called into work for an emergency. Ed says they have to get #345 working and they are in deep shit if anyone finds out what they have done. They repair #345 and William secretly plans to load his own neural map into #345. It will be him in there. They will make a data scan of his body and combine it with his neural data. Ed says it might work.
William comes home and Mona says things don’t seem right with her. She has lost parts of her memory about their vacation and things. And the children are remembering an accident. William sedates the children and erases those specific memories. Mona finds him and demands to know what he is doing. He tells her about the accident and that he brought them back to life. They are all Replicas. William meets with Ed to do the procedure on him and tells Ed that Mona knows what they did.
William goes home, but can’t get into the system. His password has been changed. William takes his replica family to get a Christmas tree, but they forget to buy presents. William has to rush out to grab gifts.
He goes to see Ed and notices he has a new Mercedes in his driveway. He asks Ed about the password and Ed says it hasn’t changed. After William leaves, Ed goes into the system and changes it. William has stolen Ed’s key card. He goes to the lab and logs in and files are missing. He roams the place and finds dead animals and his family’s real bodies in the coolers including Zoe.
He goes home and Sophie asks who Zoe is. Her name is written in the closet. Mona says she doesn’t remember having a spare bedroom. Jones shows up at the house and tells William he knows what is going on and that Ed is in on this. The company has plans to clone skilled military people for a super army. He needs William’s knowledge. He will make him a partner and he will be filthy rich. He says these people aren’t his family and there is going to be a fire and they will all die except him. Jones puts guards at the house so William doesn’t try anything. Mona demands answers. He tells her about Zoe. He tells them all to pack. It is Christmas Eve. They have to go. William destroys the equipment he used to clone his family, causes a diversion for the armed guards outside, gets his family in the car and they take off. The house explodes as they drive away.
A chase ensues, but they can’t escape. William believes Ed implanted tracking devices in his clone family. He takes them to the medical room and hooks Sophie up to a machine. He says if the trackers are powered by the nervous system he can fry them with the electrodes of the heart paddles. He does Matt next. Jones’s men are coming as the family races to a boat at the pier. There are no keys. A helicopter is chasing them. Jones’s men capture Mona and the kids and take them back to the lab.
William follows and Jones says he better show them everything he knows or his family will be killed. Jones shoots Ed and kills him when Ed can’t get William to go along with him. William agrees, but unbeknownst to Jones, he has programed the superhuman synthetic robot #345 with his own brain. #345 kills the guards and attacks Jones. As Jones is dying, William says he is going to make a deal with him. A woman asks if there was human cloning going on at his facility and he says no, covering all of it up.
The film ends on a new day, as we find William and his family playing on the beach and having a picnic. A little girl runs to them. It is a cloned version of Zoe.
LEAD CREDITS
The much anticipated Sci-Fi thriller written by Chad St. John ( London Has Fallen ) comes to the big screen starring Keanu Reeves ( John Wick, The Matrix trilogy , Speed ), Alice Eve ( Before We Go, Star Trek, She’s Out Of My League ), Thomas Middleditch ( Silicon Valley) and John Ortiz ( Silver Linings Playbook, American Gangster ) directed by talented director Jeffrey Nachmanoff ( Traitor ) and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura ( Transformers franchise, G.I. Joe, Red, Salt) Stephen Hamel ( Passengers ), Keanu Reeves, Mark Gao ( Transporter Refueled, 24 Hours To Live) and Luis Riefkohl.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
The story behind Replicas came to life through an idea that producing partner Stephen Hamel shared with Keanu Reeves. Both had an enthusiasm for telling a story that raised interesting questions, while still playing in the genre of which both are huge fans. As Hamel describes, “Replicas was born from my interest in the benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as ethical limitations of using such technologies. Specifically, that human beings may eventually be able to transfer their consciousness from one body to another.”
The goal was to create a dynamic where the hero (Keanu) is faced with both enormous intellectual and emotional stakes, simultaneously. In this convergence, Hamel felt there was something deeply moving and perturbing. Once he wrote the story, he brought together their core team, including genre producer icon Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, to further develop the project, and help produce the film. After finding genre writer Chad St. John, who had the same thoughts and a great alignment with the producers (a story that tackles science vs. ethics) it quickly turned into a script. Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, Nachmanoff adds, “has a long history of involvement with science fiction and with Keanu, dating back to The Matrix and Constantine . He has a very strong understanding of how to make this kind of movie and he was invaluable in helping us shape the story, particularly at the script and editing stage.” Nachmanoff came on board shortly after to direct and of course the movie was on its way with the Start of Principle Photography set in Puerto Rico on July 10th 2016.
“As a fan of grounded science fiction, this story really appealed to me,” explains Nachmanoff. “The idea of taking a serious idea and turning it into commercial entertainment has always appealed to me. I believe we are approaching a time, in the not too distant future, when we will indeed be able to unlock some of the mysteries of how the brain functions. This will raise increasingly thorny ethical dilemmas – where is the line between AI and human consciousness? Is there a threshold for prolonging human life? Should there be? I found these underlying questions provocative, but most of all I liked the characters and the story and I was excited to tell it,” says Nachmanoff. Reeves adds to this: “Part of the film’s entertainment is that there is something to speak about.”
Nachmanoff continues, “One could say that the movie is a modern-day twist on the Frankenstein myth – a man of science uses his skills to defy the laws of nature with unintended consequences.” Tonally it was an interesting world to play in. The subject matter could be perceived as quite dark, but the new technological sci-fi element created an interesting balance. “Much of the film takes place at night so there is a certain Gothic darkness to the tone of the movie. But we were shooting in the tropics where it is very lush, green and alive. I wanted to embrace both of those worlds to create a visual palette that would put a fresh spin on the thriller genre.
The cinematographer, Checco Varese, took bold risks with the lighting and letting settings be a bit more dramatic, particularly in the basement where William is growing the pods,” Nachmanoff adds. Regarding the production design, “I wanted William’s world to feel a bit messy and chaotic; so Johnny (our production designer) and his team built environments with texture and detail. The idea was to convey the feeling of a chemistry experiment in the basement.
A big part of that was the design and construction of the clone pods which were built by Rafy Perez, our SFX supervisor.” Puerto Rico had a lot of local crew and the whole team was pleasantly surprised with how hard everyone was working to create this world. “Before we started the shoot, we all assumed that these would be too complicated to create in Puerto Rico and would need to be built and shipped from LA or someplace on the mainland. But Rafy simply blew us away with his inventiveness and ability. The pods each weighed over 500 lbs. when filled with water and our actress actually was in the pod for the filming. Turns out Alice Eve can hold her breath a really long time!” says Nachmanoff. With the production being set in Puerto Rico, the team had its unique challenges. They came to set with the recent passing of the Zika outbreak that had hit Puerto Rico’s tourism industry, but the spirit and energy remained high and the team quickly learned of the strong tradition of Independent Filmmaking. As Nachmanoff states, “This was not the easiest shoot, but the crew rose to the challenge. With the exception of our production designer (Johnny Breedt) who is South African and our DP (Checco Varese) who is Peruvian, almost everybody else was local. A mixture of English and Spanish was spoken on set but in the end everybody managed to communicate very well.”
Remembering back on the hardest day of the shoot, Nachamoff reflects that it had to be the stunt-heavy day in the rain at night. “We were shooting the scene down by the river where the family dies in the car crash. It was summertime, so we only had a limited number of hours of darkness. Plus, we were working with minors who had to be finished by midnight. The location was in the jungle, so everybody was covered in bug spray. The location was hard to access, even though we had built a road to move equipment to the river’s edge. It was so muddy, we had to transport actors to and from set on ATVS. Additionally, we had to do a stunt where we threw a van into the river. Keanu had to walk in the water carrying a child. At the same time, the scene called for rain so the SFX team was pumping water from the river into giant hoses, which were attached to rain heads atop a seventy-foot crane. Unbeknownst to them, there were tiny shellfish in the water that clogged the rain heads. So, the whole rig had to be lowered to the ground and they painstakingly opened and cleared out every rain head – a process that took two precious hours. Meanwhile a few of the actors were sick and one threw up that night. By the time the sun came up, everybody was ready to go home.” Reeves adds that he liked that moment; it was the pivotal point for his character to go on this journey, while going through “the real emotional highs in terms of trying to bring them back and trying to keep it a secret and how your safe space becomes this secret lab. I loved that journey.”
Replicas will be a timely film for audiences. For Keanu Reeves fans, it’s a chance to see him in a different role than just pure action. This film is a family story at its core, as Hamel explains, but it’s also a sci-fi thriller, so fans of that genre will still really enjoy it. Nachmanoff adds that a lot of movies look at scientific advances with fear, i.e. Skynet in the Terminator franchise. This movie takes a slightly different point of view in that the science is neither good nor bad in and of itself. It is more of a classic story about human nature and forces us to ask the question: what would you do if you were in William’s shoes? Who wouldn’t try to save his or her family?
THE CAST
Jeffrey Nachmanoff is a director known for his work on genre movies that are character driven and deliver a message. He has a skill for getting emotionally truthful performances from his cast in a grounded yet supernatural way, and working with the right talent was important to him and the producers.
“Keanu has a phenomenal work ethic. I knew his reputation for preparing for physical roles (such as the stunts in John Wick) but I was impressed at how that preparation extends even into the research for a role like this. He was constantly reading up on neuro-science and bringing new ideas for scenes and for the science underlying our story. Obviously, we can’t yet map the human mind, but there is a tremendous amount of existing research on the function of the brain and Keanu read a great deal about it,” says Nachmanoff .
Stephen Hamel adds, “In Replicas there was an opportunity for Keanu to play a compelling character in a story that we felt had not yet been told in this way. I love movies that ask lots questions. Movies that oblige the viewer to be confronted with severe ethical and emotional dilemmas, while delivering a very entertaining experience. Replicas does exactly that.”
For Keanu Reeves, playing a role in this type of genre is different from his previous work. It was the complexity and traumatic events of the character William that intrigued his acting instincts: “I’m playing a husband and scientist who loses his family. As we all have lost people in our lives, there is something very relatable there. And then the tormenting thought of - how can you bring them back - was definitely the connector that made this character attractive and powerful to play,” says Reeves.
The choices that were made for each role came together nicely. Casting director Sharon Bialy did a stellar job scouting local talent in Puerto Rico. “Working with the rest of the cast was an amazing experience too. Puerto Rico has very talented actors who were always giving their best,” says Nachmanoff.
Adding some lightheartedness in a more serious sci-fi genre was a conscious choice, and who better to do this than Thomas Middleditch. “He proved to be a great partner and his part provides some much needed levity to the film,” Reeves says. Nachmanoff adds: “He was a great improviser and a lot of his comic asides in the movie are things he came up with spur of the moment. At the same time, he impressed me with his dramatic chops as well.”
As for Alice Eve, Stephen Hamel says, “We were lucky to have Alice join our team. She is somebody who lives in the genre world. She provided a warmth and humanity which is so important in the film.” Nachmanoff jokingly adds “she is also really good at holding her breath for a long time and a very good sport about getting into a clone pod. Her ‘birthing’ scene is one of my favorites.”
John Ortiz is a terrific actor who has been in so many great movies over the years. Nachmanoff says, “It was great to have a chance to work with him and let him go full villain for a change. He is beloved in Puerto Rico – we couldn’t get through a meal there without somebody asking for an autograph.”
THE LOCATIONS AND THE DESIGN
“When we came to Puerto Rico to make this movie the island was reeling from the twin blows of the Zika outbreak that had hit their tourism industry, and a financial crisis which left the economy in tatters. But the spirit and energy of the Puerto Ricans remained undaunted” (Jeffrey Nachmanoff). While the shoot had its challenges, the beauty of Puerto Rico shined through, and turned out to be the perfect location for a “Caribbean” look. Its lush, vibrant greenery gave it the tropical look it needed. At the same time, this movie needed to feel authentic yet somewhat separated from the real world, says production designer Johnny Breedt ( Eye in The Sky, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom ). Nachmanoff adds, “I felt that if we want the audience to buy into the sci-fi premise of this movie, it was important to create a sufficiently impressive visual environment for BIODYNE” (the lab). That meant building and designing a set to the standards of a Hollywood movie, even though Puerto Rico didn’t have existing stages big enough to do so.
After a great deal of searching, the production decided to shoot in an abandoned office building. This didn’t come without complications, when it turned out that the roof leaked, production had to hire a roof repair while shooting. With 6 weeks of production prep, there wasn’t enough time to finish the lab by the time production started, which meant that the art department had to work around the clock to complete the set, and production had to schedule those scenes at the end of the shoot. “The paint was still drying when we shot there,” Nachmanoff recalls.
“We had to contend with the usual array of production challenges plus a few new ones, such as insects in the jungle and indigenous frogs (called coquilles) who were so loud they interfered with dialogue recording. At one point during the production a fire at a power plant knocked out the entire electrical grid for Puerto Rico for almost two days. Hotels were evacuated, the Internet was down. But we kept shooting (using a generator), in spite of the fact that many crew members went home to houses lit by candles with no working A/C in the tropical heat. It was that type of hard work and perseverance that really impressed me about the crew.”
Although there were some challenges in the pre-production and production phases, it paid off. The look and design was exactly what Nachmanoff was trying to convey. The movie has its own style. “I think Jeffrey and Checco (Cinematographer) created a nice interplay type of dance with the audience, letting them in when it’s intimate and then using some kind of graphic novel fun cinema angles when it’s more of a sci-fi genre movie. This, along with a unique color palette, created a style of its own compared to previous work I’ve done,” Reeves shares.
CREATION OF THE ROBOT
The fun visual opportunity that spoke the most to the VFX team and Jeffrey Nachmanoff was developing a fully CGI robot. The robot became a fundamental character in the movie and needed to look distinct. “We have seen a lot of humanoid robots in film and TV, so it’s not easy to do something new. I was very inspired by the movie Ex Machina in which they created this fantastic sense of a robot by using additive VFX to the actress. Instead of copying their great creation, we switched to a fully CGI model, which evolved over the course of many drawings and multiple artists” (Nachmanoff).
The design and development process began with Trevor Harder ( Underworld, Ghost Rider ) who is based in Montreal. His designs made the Robot come to life. “The designs were then constructed at Maldito Maus in Argentina and then the bulk of the robot was moved to Reaktor in Puerto Rico to add the finishing touches. They say it takes a village.” (Nachmanoff).
