Hello.
The challenge is to show you that she is a robot
and then see if you still feel she has consciousness.
You've never been outside this building.
We could go together.
Did you programme her to flirt with me?
Maybe she's pretending to like you?
Why would she do that?
Do you think I might be switched off?
It's not up to me.
Why is it up to anyone?
It's not a paranoid technology movie,
it's not anti-AIs, it's not anti-robots.
Often in these narratives, that's what we do.
It's Skynet, it's Terminator, they're going to kill us.
This isn't that.
This is more sympathetic, in a way,
to the AI than to the people that have created it.
'It's quite rare to pick up a script'
and get so sucked into it that you kind of read it the same way
you read a book.
I actually think I kind of had the same experience
that hopefully the audience have now watching the film
for the first time.
You don't know the intentions of the three characters.
It's hard to find.
You're all, of course, the way in, the bridge in,
you are with Caleb,
but then you start to question who the protagonist is.
It's a very intense, psychological sci-fi drama.
Are you ever going to let me out?
There is something lovely about being in a film
and the questions you're asking yourself every day are the questions
that are suddenly being asked in the front page of a newspaper,
you know, about what's right, what is the correct way forward,
where are the ethics involved in creating consciousness
'and all these sort of things,
'even just the Turing test as a notion,
'seeing that be argued about and having some'
sort of understanding of it, cos we got to talk to some cool people
as a result of being in the film.
Of course that's exciting.
It just means you're informed in a different way
than you might be otherwise.
That's one of the great things about being an actor -
you learn stuff about things
you never would have known anything about.
Do you know what the Turing test is?
Yeah. I know what the Turing test is.
It's when a human interacts with a computer...
and if the human doesn't know they're interacting with a computer,
the test is passed.
And what does a pass tell us?
That the computer has artificial intelligence.
Are you building an AI?
I've already built one.
Over the next few days...
you're going to be the human component in the Turing test.
Cos if that test is passed,
you are dead centre of the greatest scientific event
in the history of Man.
If you've created a conscious machine,
it's not the history of Man.
That's the history of gods.
We had a pretty serious rehearsal process.
'That's a bit of a balancing act, cos you don't want to kill the thing
'so there's no room for spontaneity on the day.
'But at the same time, you don't want to have big conversations
'about motivation on the day and suddenly say,
'"Hang on, let's turn this on its head."'
We didn't have the freedom to do that.
What we did was we all said to each other collectively,
"We're going to have about three takes.
"We're going to be aiming for three takes per angle."
So, sort of, get it right.
Get it right and then do two variations.
That was the ideal.
In terms of the process beyond that,
it's all delegated, it's them.
It's what they decide to do.
What they decide between each other as well.
This thing of coaxing a performance...
Not in my experience.
I mean, they...they know what they're doing.
What you want to do is facilitate what they want to do.
'Alex knows what's best for the film.
'So if we're going down a road that isn't going to help the film,
'then he'll put a stop to that pretty quickly.
'If he sees there's a cul-de-sac, he'll just say,
'"Guys, we need to go a different way."'
But then he absolutely left room for things to grow
and was open to things going in different directions
than he expected, and I think expected us
'to provide the unexpected, to a certain degree.
'To keep things interesting, to keep things new
'and to give him options in the edit,
'because it's very important that you never feel totally sure-footed'
in this film.
In the same way that my character Caleb never feels sure-footed.
It's important to maintain that.
I think that...he expected us to do a certain amount of that, I think.
'Working with Domhnall, you know, who I know
'and he always dares to always take new paths and roads.'
As soon as you do the role, you kind of...
you've hopefully done enough preparation work
and gone through all those ideas,
so you're kind of landed with a feeling of who she is.
Then you just have to let go
'and go with it.
'I think Ava, like with all other characters,
'maybe this needed even more work, but she, kind of,'
naturally grew within me, I think.
Alicia would just start a scene in a different head space...
..and all of a sudden you think,
"I really don't know what's going on here,"
or halfway through she would do something and you would think,
"That's quite robotic. Oh, I'm talking to a robot,"
and then she'll drop you in by doing something that makes you think,
"Oh, she's a girl and she's a beautiful girl
"and I'm sat in front of somebody I could be in love with, maybe."
Those little things we were able to manipulate each other, I think,
into maintaining the mystery to.
That was a lot of joy to that.
I'm Caleb.
Hello, Caleb.
Do you have a name?
Yes.
Ava.
I'm pleased to meet you, Ava.
I'm pleased to meet you too.
There's a literal objectification of women
and that's part of what the film is about
and it's very apparent, people even discuss it in the film
in extended scenes at certain points
and ideally, if the film functions,
something is happening to the audience which is equatable
with what is happening to the protagonist,
played by Domhnall Gleeson.
The same bit of imprinting and the same process is happening,
so as he's being seduced, we're being seduced,
and as we're being confused,
he's being confused and we match each other. That's the intention.
That leads us to where the film goes.
There's some sort of strange baton passes,
baton exchanges that happen within the story
that should be invisible, almost, as they're happening
and suddenly you realise, "Hang on, this is all changed."
You shouldn't trust Nathan.
You shouldn't trust anything he says.
I have a dancing background
and it's funny how in a lot of interviews I have for other roles,
people always assume, "As a dancer, how do you approach your role?
"Do you use your dancing background?"
With this one, I was actually able to kind of do it very consciously
and kind of try to find whatever her physicality was.
She created a sort of language of movement that is like us,
it doesn't alienate us by being robotic and clunky,
but also has a sort of floating sense of otherness about it.
I also try to kind of make her a bit more...
perfect, weirdly enough,
cos I think flaws is very human,
so I wanted to bring a very pure kind of pace to her
in the way she moved
and how she talked and give her quite a lot of grace.
There is another element, which is the VFX and the design,
so we had to come up with something and where we got to eventually
was this idea of a mesh
that is machine-like but slightly ethereal.
The way I used to conceptualise it was a spider's web.
In some lighting conditions, you can't see it's there.
You'd walk into it, it'd wrap around your face,
and other times it's picked out perfectly
and you can see all the geometry of the web.
We'd apply that to her,
so that you'd get glimpses of this feminine form
float out of the machinery and then disappear again.
There's lovely moments when she turns
and this light will just pass over her torso
and you see this sculpted midriff and then it vanishes again.
That's seductive too.
I wore this silver suit
that you partly see, but I had to build my
forehead on top of my skull
every morning - it took about four and a half hours
and one hour to take off each day.
That was a challenge,
but it's amazing to be able to get help and transform.
You feel bad for Ava?
HE SIGHS
Feel bad for yourself, man.
One day the AIs are going to look back on us
the same way we look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa.
An upright ape,
living in dust with crude language and tools,
all set for extinction.
My favourite films are elevated genre films,
so they're genre films which get so much more,
that use the genre to tell us something about being human
and to ask really important questions.
Sci-fi is so easily built for that,
because you create something different,
you create something new and you say how do we react to that as humans?
Or you just drop it in the middle
and let humans be humans around it.
I think that that stuff, you can reveal so much about...
..the weirdness of being alive and of having a mind
and having desires and all the rest of it
by adding something new to the mix.
You have to help me.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd