He and his dog Goodyear (Seamus) have it better than most as a former engineer for a power company, Finch has an underground bunker that enjoys electricity created by the giant wind turbines above. Louis, scrounging for food and marking locations “CLEARED” of other human beings who, 15 years after gamma flares have devastated the ozone layer, are few, far between and thoroughly desperate. In the not-too-distant future, Finch (Hanks) tools around the remains of St.

Perhaps not coincidentally, “Cast Away” director Robert Zemeckis is an executive producer here. This isn’t even Hanks’ first man-alone movie now he’s got a robot to talk to instead of a volleyball. Whether it’s toppled shopping carts on a sandy plain, one wheel spinning sadly in the wind (this film’s opening shot) or puckish needle drops commenting on the end of civilization (the film decides it is allowed, greedily and obviously, both “American Pie” and “Road to Nowhere” when it should have chosen only one), writers Craig Luck and Ivor Powell and director Miguel Sapochnik traffic in the thuddingly familiar. After losing so much of 20 - from the lives of friends and loved ones to jobs, gatherings and general interactions - perhaps it’s time for a post-post-apocalyptic cinema, one that imagines a future of humanity following its best instincts, believing in the possibilities of science and technology and working together as a species to create a better world, even if most of reality is pointing in the opposite direction.Īll of which to say is, apart from the pleasurable specifics of Hanks’ and Landry Jones’ performances (to say nothing of Seamus, the film’s scene-stealing canine co-star), you’ve seen all this before. I didn't want Jeff to be just a robot, Jeff needed to be a personality right from the start.When the inevitable story of COVID-19-era cinema is published, the cover image will likely be either a solitary Tilda Swinton in “The Human Voice” or Tom Hanks with a robot and a dog in “Finch,” a film that allows the actor to be alone on set or to share the space only with actor Caleb Landry Jones (“Get Out”), who provides the voice and the motion-capture for the android.īut the bleak, dusty, uninhabited post-apocalyptic wasteland of “Finch,” one can only hope, is a relic of pre-pandemic moviemaking. Maybe it's my own homage to my daughter, because I admire her, but it was also because it felt like that was the right tone. “I found myself stealing things that she says and putting them into the script. “Jeff has this personality and it's curious, and it's kind of stubborn and it's kind of mischievous, and it reminded me a lot of my daughter.” “When I was working with Ivor and Craig, the writers, we all had our own inspirations as to who Jeff was but I found myself constantly thinking about how Jeff isn't just a robot,” he explained. Sapochnik revealed that the biggest inspiration for the character of Jeff was actually his daughter, who is about to turn nine years-old in December. Ortega/Getty Images) 'Jeff needed to be a personality right from the start' SAN DIEGO, CA - JULY 22: Director Miguel Sapochnik attends the 'Game Of Thrones' panel during Comic-Con International 2016 at San Diego Convention Center on Jin San Diego, California. As a very selfish actor, this is the one guy in a movie, with nothing but a dog to play off of and then the robot that he creates almost of his own blood. I began to think of it immediately as a guy who's worried about his dog, nevermind everything else, his dog being a great love of his life. “As soon as the dog comes along, as soon as Goodyear makes his appearance, it becomes a different sort of film. “When I was first reading it I thought, ‘OK, alright, there's a familiar science fiction sort of trope, but what in the world is going to be the new version of what this story is?’” “His daily struggle is one between life and death, between survival and loss,” Hanks said. One of the aspects of the character that attracted Hanks to this role is the “immediately precarious position he is in from the get-go.” “He used to talk about our film, rather than my film or his film, and there's something really special about that because it made it feel like we were, for that short period of time, we were a family, kind of a group of people all with the same end and the same aim, which was to tell a good story.” “From really the moment we met, it was a conversation and an exchange of ideas and it felt like that all the way through,” the director said. Sapochnik described the process of working with Hanks as a collaboration, working together right from the beginning.

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