If you've been hanging out in dark digital places that focus on brain-machine interfaces, quantum theory, neural networks, and other mind/meld explorations, you've likely come across clips from MindGamers—a new sci-fi movie opening this week—but under a different name.
The film was conceived as DxM until it was purchased and re-branded as MindGamers. But marketing tactics aside, the film has a compelling story and stylish aesthetic. At its core, it has what filmmakers Joanne Reay and Andrew Goth call "grounded sci-fi"—meaning the neuro-tech in the movie could eventually become reality, in some form or another.
Whether the humans of tomorrow will be as glamorous as the diverse, pierced, and inked cast of MindGamers remains to be seen. But the film's premise is plausible and akin to this brain-machine skills transfer interface PCMag saw at Hughes Research Lab last year. Project Apollo at ArtCenter is also a good example of the connected sensory wearables featured in the movie.
The young cast play super smart students at the DxM Academy, who—as a condition of entry to the school—wear BioTags that are controlled by creepy-smooth scientist Kreutz (Sam Neill). The plot concerns a wireless neural network that becomes re-configured into a platform for human-to-human transfer of advanced motor skills. Not surprisingly, dark forces lurk in the shadows.
Writer/producer Reay and writer/director Goth have a long-running creative partnership. Reay worked at BBC Films for many years before turning independent, and collaborated with Goth on his debut as director, Everybody Loves Sunshine (released in the US as B.U.S.T.E.D.). It starred David Bowie and Goldie, won several awards, and was selected as the opening film for the Tokyo Film Festival in 1999.
Since then, the two filmmakers have delved into thriller/horror land with Cold and Dark, the gothic western genre with Gallowwalkers starring Wesley Snipes, and now MindGamers.
We had a chance to sit down with them recently at the Red Bull Media House in Santa Monica, California. The energy drink company is based in Vienna but has been not-so-quietly amassing a modern media empire of high-octane content producers, including Terra Mater Film Studios, which produced MindGamers.
Firstly, Joanne, can you explain the nomenclature shift from DxM to MindGamers?
[JR] DxM was always meant to be one of the puzzles of the film—so you could extrapolate its meaning as you watched the movie unfold. Perhaps it stood for 'Deus ex Machina' or 'dimension x mind,' maybe 'dimension x mass.' But in the end, in the fantastic world of marketing, the movie it became streamlined and simplified into MindGamers.
Before we get to MindGamers, Andrew, give us a 'directing David Bowie' anecdote from your debut film, Everybody Loves Sunshine.
[AG] Directing David Bowie was so easy. He knew exactly what to do. It was a pleasure. The weird thing was that he wanted to read for the part, he wanted to show us that it was possible to turn off the potent David Bowie image and be just another actor.
How did he do that?
[JR] We went to his Isolar Management offices in New York, got there early for our meeting at 11 a.m., and waited and waited. I kept going up to the receptionist and saying, 'Did you tell David we're here?' and she said, 'Yes, I promise you he knows you're here.' So we sat back down. Then, suddenly, a guy who'd been sitting opposite us, gets up, puts down his newspaper and walks over. It was HIM. He'd completely changed his appearance, and was wearing original 1970s sunglasses. He wanted to prove you could be sat in the room with David Bowie and not know.
Amazing.
[AG] Right? But that's exactly how it happened. And he was a force of good throughout the making of the movie.
Let's segue to the mind-blowing themes behind MindGamers. There's transhumanism, consciousness hacking, neurobiology—the lot. Have you always been into these ideas?
[AG] Science fiction has always been something I've absolutely loved. I grew up in Manchester, England, and my mum was the only female electrical engineer at Metrovicks, the British arm of the US company Westinghouse, in the sixties. She took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey and I was blown away. Then, cut to now, with quantum computers coming online, Ray Kurzweil's predictions on the Singularity, it's all moving towards those concepts very fast.
In fact, I flew into Geneva on the day the Hadron Collider experiment was scheduled, and I remember the pilot saying, 'We might not be taking off tomorrow from the same place we land today,' as if a black hole could have opened up by then as a result of the colliding forces. That was it—we started writing MindGamers that day. We wanted to create an 'infinite possibility' film.
And, for once, the tech isn't evil, just very clever.
[JR] We wanted to do what we called 'a good machine movie.' Instead of starting in a world where everything is fine and technology arrives and everything goes to hell, in MindGamers, technology, through the manifestation of Enoch, the central neural network computer in the film, intervenes, re-setting humanity's path via the single unified field.
The movie's locations are incredible. Tell us about finding the futuristic Campus WU at the New University, Vienna, designed by many architects from around the world—including the late Zaha Hadid—under the aegis of Laura P. Spinadel's BUSarchitektur.
[AG] It was an amazing find. Vienna is a classical city. All the buildings are from 1800s. But we were driving around with the location scout and suddenly came across this amazing inspirational futuristic architecture and it just screamed 'DxM' to us. We pulled the car over and went in; it was still being built. In fact, when we came to shoot the film, the paint was still fresh on the building, and the first real-life students had just arrived.
So what's next for you both?
[JR] We're shooting our next project here in L.A. at the end of the year. It's a bigger, more star-driven vehicle—a super thriller.
MindGamers hits theaters and on demand on March 28; those who see it on March 28 can take part in a "One Thousand Minds Connected Live" event, during which moviegoers will don a headset backed by Qusp technology PCMag profiled last year. Tickets can be purchased online; a complete list of theater locations are on the Fathom Events website.