Chris + Paul Weitz explain ‘Murderbot’

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:14It's The Treatment, which you can also hear at KCRW.com slash The Treatment. I haven't had these two gentlemen as a team before me in about 20 years. The writers, directors, Paul and Chris White, are back together on a new project for Apple TV+. The show is Murderbot. First of all, guys, thanks so much for being back. Thanks, Elvis. Thanks, Elvis. See you again. And the show is really, really funny. It's really, really funny. And this thing that you guys tend to do where everything is kind of a comedy of manners and that you can turn colonialization and wanton savagery and gore into something out of Thackeray.

0:57Well, it is really funny, essentially. Depending on one's point of view. Yeah, Chris kept describing it as a comedy of manners and now he can explain to me what he meant.

1:11I'm not sure I actually even know what a comedy of manners is, but I did insist it was a comedy of manners in space. And that was its sort of distinguishing feature, although that's not how he pitched it to Apple. Because I don't think they would have. It's Jeeves and Bertie Worcester in space, I think, was how he pitched it to Apple. Oh, my God. Of course. I'll buy the second season already. In its way, it's kind of a character mystery. There's an evolution of character. this thing, this creature, this hybrid, this android, whatever you're calling them these days, who, do we say who or that? I think you can say who because it's a person.

1:47It would call itself it, but it also knows that it's a person. It's not a human, though. Let's ask chat GPT how it prefers to be called. Yeah, thank you, because nobody needs me on this show anyway. Let's get chat GPT to ask all the questions. But I feel like what it's about, and I want to ask you guys, is it's really the story of the protagonist, played by Alexander Skarsgård, learning what it is. Yeah. But it learns what it is in proximity to things, which I think is a really interesting sort of twist on the original material. One thing that Martha Wells did, the author of the books, which is great, is not do the trope of the robot that wants to become human.

2:30It inverts it entirely. It's very much aware, it thinks, of what humans are like and has no desire whatsoever to be like that. So a lot of it is about what it isn't as much as what it is in terms of Murderbot figuring itself out. It continues to want to figure out who it is, basically. We also saw it as a coming-of-age story in some ways. It's kind of a mash-up of a bunch of things because there's also a noir element to it. It's Philip Marlowe, who seems to be hard-bitten and cynical but keeps on doing kind of the right thing. There's a mystery as to why all this stuff is going down. Also, it feels a little bit like Chinatown, too, in that there's corruption involved.

3:12There's also this sort of look at utopia. There's a lot in it. it's all very light on its feet which is I think you're laughing Paul I'm just laughing because of the Chinatown reference because one way it's like Chinatown is that there's a yech element to it you know the stuff going on between John Euston and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown is not particularly savory yeah so that's why I was laughing yech which is our mad magazine influence also very important influence here well no part of this is that like early on Murtabot is says that it's worried about being infected by the sort of human messiness and sloppiness of this group of people that it's trying to protect.

3:57And it sort of does become slightly infected by it over the course of dealing with them and over the course of sort of becoming something. But eventually it's not fatal. It doesn't become human in the end, even though as an audience, I think everybody's used to the idea of rooting for everybody to be together and to be the same. I think that in terms of the book, I actually do think that there's a lot thematically in the book that's what you're talking about. And one of the themes that one's really drawn to is this idea that you shouldn't tell something else what to be. And that is, to me, the whole journey of this.

4:34Well, now we said what it isn't. Maybe I ask you guys to describe a little bit what the show is for people, because it's kind of hard for me to do. The show, I mean, is based on these amazing books by Martha Wells. And so the show is about a machine-cloned human hybrid whose job it is to protect usually mining expeditions. It's rented, it's owned by a corporation and rented out and usually treated like a piece of equipment at best. And then it figures out how to hack its own governor module, which is the thing that prevents it from acting in its own interest or with its own decisions. And it could kill everybody around it and sort of hijack a ship and go off into space.

5:25But it realizes that it would soon be hunted down. And what would it do anyway? So what it stumbles upon is that it can access the entertainment feeds, meaning all these shows, including this sort of wonderful schlocky show called Sanctuary Moon. And it just becomes obsessed with watching its own TV shows, basically. Yeah, so basically it's going to continue doing its job and pretending to be under the control of the humans it's protecting while just watching a lot of soap operas. And that's its sort of middle term plan, basically. But this gets kind of screwed up by the fact that it's next. The people supposed to protect are actually, for once, not a bunch of greedy psychopaths.

6:06They are from a kind of consensually ruled, somewhat commune-like set of planets called the Preservation Alliance. And they start to treat Murderbot like a person, which makes for trouble because it really doesn't want to deal with their emotions. It doesn't want to deal with any kind of entanglements. and furthermore they're they're kind of out of their depth because something very dangerous and terrible is happening on this planet uh where they find themselves and murder bot has to protect them while at the same time in theory not exposing the fact that it it has its own free will that's our elevator pitch that's 25 words or less barry dillard love it it's the treatment my guests are paul and chris weiss the new project for apple tv plus it's murder bot there is this thing that But we've talked about sort of fantasy things that appeal to all of us before, like the Elwick books.

7:01They have a sense of play about carnage. Yeah. And this has that, too. No, it's true. They share a deep cynicism of human nature and somebody who's incredibly good at killing people, but who questions their own actions to some degree. I mean, the thing about carnage in Martha's universe is that as opposed to just sort of moving on or high-fiving, Martha's human characters actually suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. They are traumatized by violence. And that has resonance in the books that are coming up, which was a really interesting aspect for us as well. Because in spite of the fact that there is violence and sometimes it's kind of funny in the sense that it's abrupt and unexpected, at the same time, there's a level of psychological realism to the characters that I think isn't always present in science fiction.

7:51No, in fact, there's a moment that's as chilling as anything I've ever seen, which I don't want to give away, but there's a panoply of reactions to this moment of violence that really is sort of, A, tells us what these characters have endured here to for, but also what this moment of violence is like in real time. And I just thought that was a really terrific beat that really, I think, informs the show as much as anything else. Thanks. And one of the characters burst into hysterical laughter upon saying this violence, which is Sabrina Wu's character. And they came up with the idea of what if I started laughing?

8:24And that is, it's interesting because in seeing some people's reactions to it, some people actually brought up their own sort of inappropriate reactions to getting in a car accident or being around violent situations. So to some degree, it's sort of trusting people and the actors playing the stuff to have their own reactions to it. That also reminds me of that moment of hysteria from the first Alien, the famous sort of gut buster. and the reactions there. And also it reminds us too that these people are all working people and people literally in their trenches to sweating. And I just thought that was a great sort of, for me, point of reference too.

9:03You know, I think Alien is a movie that does so many things well, but it has that kind of, although I think it was made in the 80s, it has that kind of 70s sense of working people in their culture and a sort of a natural reaction to something terrible. There is a kind of a workshop feeling to that. And that was a great thing that we were able to do with our cast, who got along so well that they really were able to vibe in their characters in that sort of way. But it also felt to me incredibly great in Modern that there's a couple of scenes, sort of these two women of color who represent authority going toe to toe.

9:41I thought it was extraordinary to watch. I mean, like I said, it's a show that accomplishes so much. And those beats to me, I was exhilarated by them. I think the idea with that and some other things that might be kind of considered whatever, progressive or woke or something, it's like to do it casually because we're in space in the far future. And a lot of the things that we are kind of plagued with now have been kind of figured out. Or at least that is the least of people's concern. They're mostly about getting as much money as possible. So, yeah, that was a really fun scene. just kind of post-facto to think, oh, that was actually kind of cool.

10:16But it wasn't like we had kind of massive plans to do it that way in order to demonstrate something. And like, again, it's in Martha's world, you know, there are probably majority of female characters as opposed to male characters. So in terms of the sci-fi without, you know, ever kind of trumpeting it, it's just a world in which things have organized themselves in a slightly different way. And also So there are books that appeal to the aromantic, asexual community, to people who are neuroatypical. But it's not trying to be an allegory in any way. This is just the way that things have kind of fallen out.

10:56That's what I was saying before we started, and that the books feel in their way kind of reported. They're not really commenting on what's happening. It's just this relation of incidents. And I think what's great about the show is that we really get a sense of who these people are right away. Chris loves when I make this reference, but one of the things I was thinking of early on was the Peanuts gang and how like immediately you know who they are. Like you got to be murder bot. Oh, boy. Was partly like he has it has a Charlie Brown aspect of depression and a Snoopy aspect of being able to do things such as.

11:30Fly around on a doghouse. I'm stressing this too far. Fantasizing like Snoopy does. I mean, there's a moment in the series, which is definitely from like Charlie Brown Christmas, which is each of the characters dancing in their own particular way. And somehow they just knew how that was going to be for each of their characters. What's interesting, too, is that you tied together by at some point when we go off these characters, someone would say, you know, he can hear us. Just so that that character's presence is always there. Yeah. Well, they continually forget that Murderbot is an extremely sophisticated surveillance device amongst other things.

12:08Like the ones in our pockets. Exactly. We are, in fact, constantly being watched by intelligences, by machine intelligences. But they forget. And so they tend to kind of let it all hang out, much to Murderbot's dismay. And there are several times where you realize that Murderbot is watching all of them on several kind of surveillance cameras at once. And it doesn't even want to. It's being forced to watch this show, which is much more messy and boring and upsetting than the one that it would choose to watch, which is Sanctuary Moon. Well, now we've been reminded the show is being produced by Apple TV+.

12:46It's on Apple TV+. It's Murderbot. It's creators, adapters. Paul and Chris Weitz are here. We're going to take a break this morning. Come stay with us. This is The Treatment.

13:14As I was just saying, it's hard not to give too much of Murder, Bottle, away, but we can talk about the joy of it. This creator is Paul and Chris Weiss. This show is on Apple TV+. This is the treatment. I guess one of the things I was thinking, too, when we were talking about this a bit before we started, is making the voiceover work. And what Skarsgård does as an actor is so interesting because a character who doesn't normally inflect, he brings so many different changes on disgust and disdain. Alexander was very keen on not expressing too much and not sort of revealing too much emotionally with his performance, but really going for it in terms of its internal monologue.

13:52And then it was a process of literally doing every line, I mean, frequently like 100 times or so because Alexander likes to work. Yeah, I mean, we had many, many voiceover sessions after shooting. We recorded during shooting and sometimes in good enough kind of audio that we could have used it. but eventually that all sort of felt like slug dialogue because once we had the footage cut together and took a look at it we wanted to get it just right Alex is always kind of bouncing around the world and we one of the great things was being able to go to Copenhagen just to record voiceover with him which is like the most uh like glamorous thing that has happened in a long time uh flying into Copenhagen uh yeah it was a lot of work and and in retrospect you know it all happens in this kind of rush of work.

14:43And it's not that we didn't think Alex was really good, but it's amazing to see the kind of modulation of his performance from moment to moment and episode to episode, especially knowing that a lot of it was shot out of sequence. And he's kind of there in the right place at the right time in terms of his expression and the way that he's comporting himself all the time. I think what's interesting too is that that's where his vanity comes out. You can see his sort of sense of self and that becomes more and more pronounced over the course of the show with the voiceover, which I think it's interesting that voiceover offers so much not only in terms of sort of exposition but in terms of inflection what that tells us about how his vanity sort of spikes as he's around these awful people.

15:31Yeah, I mean personally I can say that I'm much funnier inside my own head than I am when I'm trying to make comedy. and you know we all have this like amazing internal monologue going which is incredibly dramatic and exciting and we're able to imagine we said the right thing in the right situation and then there's certain moments where and murder bots may able to do this without having to deal with anybody treating it like a person so it's all it's had and then there's certain moments where it forgets that it says something out loud and gets itself in trouble and also So there's a moment after which, after the point at which it's been discovered that it has hacked its governor module and has freedom of choice.

16:15It's out in the open. It's out of the closet as a person with free will where it doesn't constrain its disdain for the crew as much. So it behaves a little differently towards them externally as well. I guess I wondered what your first conversations with him were like, because I think it's a really hard thing to pull off just because so much of it is nuance in terms of not only vocal inflection on the voiceover, but in the room as well. Because, again, that starts to creep out the more he's around humans. It's almost like watching John Cleese at a certain point. He does everything but sort of like glare at him.

16:58Alexander is somebody who has this sort of exterior, which you might make judgments about, like, oh, he's really good looking, tall, handsome dude. And he probably likes being that. And he doesn't mind it, I think, but it's not in any way the essence of who he is as a person, Alexander. He's very idiosyncratic, eccentric, is eager to do things that are embarrassing to the normal person. And he's also really cerebral. So actually the thing was, as we were talking about it with him, we can see kind of like flashes of this character. Oh, because one of the things about him as an actor is he's not afraid as an actor to voice the kinds of things that we wouldn't expect to see coming from somebody who looks like that.

17:41Yeah. His affinity for saying so in this kind of infantile with a deadpan is really kind of perfect for this, isn't it? Yeah, I think he actually seeks that out. He seeks it out not just in terms of performance, in terms of what he says, but he seeks out uncomfortable positions to put himself in as an actor. Really? Well, like if you look at Infinity Pool, right, the weird contortions that he has put through in that. And then, you know, he was about to go off and do something where he turns into a kind of a tree creature as well. I remember having this discussion with him when he was like, do you think I should wax my body?

18:23I mean, in order to play Murderbot. And I said, well, listen, man, it might make like 2 % difference in the perception of the character. Like, I'm not going to force you to do this. He's like, yeah, I should wax. And then he had to do it every week for months on end, I think quite painfully. He was quite happy when he could stop doing that. the fact that he so often in this show gets too close to people. I mean, there's this sort of thing of that creature not understanding what proximity does. You immediately make people uncomfortable by getting too close to them. And there seems to be some perverse glee as an actor he takes in sort of doing that.

19:04We can feel that in performance terms. It's an interesting thing about Alex, and maybe it is because he's so cute, that he's actually, he knows he's just got a lot to play with, right? He's not going to lose the interest of the audience if he does something that is embarrassing or looks kind of silly or looks ungainly. Having said that, the whole performance is kind of a gamble because he was not with our collusion early on. He said, I don't want to sort of show him that I'm thawing towards anyone because then the tension is going to be gone, basically. The framing feels like a feature film to me.

19:38And the production, it feels really lived in in a way that doesn't feel like it's aping things that have come before it. which I feel like is really hard to do in doing science fiction and fantasy, because so much of that is referring to this and this and this and that and that. And it's actually felt like in this sort of way that some things won't change in the future. And so rather than trying to sort of come up with some thing that would be a supplicant, you just, well, let's just say there's a table. And not pretend that it has to float in space or something. This fascinating combination of sort of futuristic thinking in the practical, in production terms, informs the show.

20:15We had a really great production designer, Su Chen, who did Shang-Chi and is capable of doing things in a variety of budget levels. But she was great in terms of hiring a whole team that were kind of storytellers. And the thing was to be creative without sort of being self-conscious or too fabulous and to try to navigate something that was conscious of other cliches but not falling into them, hopefully. Yeah, I mean, there's so many versions of this that have been done so well. Sort of the world of Alien is one I know. Star Wars, obviously. Star Trek, there are all kinds of aesthetics that you have to be conscious of and try to be different from without bending over backwards too far.

21:00And in ways, it's kind of the analogy as to the way that people speak in the show, which is it's pretty slangy and in everyday speech. There's the occasional God or. Yeah. There's the occasional neologism, but not not much. And yeah. So the idea is, yeah, there are tables in space and chairs in space. And also that this group, the reason that they have Murtabot is because they got the cheapest security unit and that has to sort of extend to everything. So they have an extruded environment that they're living in while they're exploring this planet for mining rights. So it's all kind of crappy looking, but they're kind of hippies.

21:37So they do graffiti all over it. And, you know, without worrying if they're going to have to pay for it. It's a treatment. We're talking about the IKEA of the future with my guest, the creators of Murderbot, which is on Apple TV+. Paul and Chris Weiss have been away too long since they've been here. One, I hate to use the word sort of impishness, but there's a sense of fun. and so much of the stuff you guys have done together that is so often missing from, I mean, the satire usually announces itself as satire so often in science fiction, fantasy, and that it's so textural to this that extends what you're talking about, Paul, with the look and the way everything feels like it's got handprints all over it.

22:15Because that sense of play also exists in the books too. That's what attracted you to it? I have been thinking a little bit about how this is somewhat based off our kind of friendship as kids, everything from watching Second City television together to just cracking each other up. I think that in Martha's world, people still have a sense of humor in the far future. There's still kind of pathos, but also bathos. You know, there's still people being a bit over the top. And I think part of that is casting as well, because I want to say just how great our crew is. Noma de Mensahui and David S. Melchin, Sabrina Wu and Tatiana Jones.

22:53and Tamara Podemski and Akshay Khanna. So there are moments that are just out of their sense of character and allowing those things in rather than saying, that's not what's in the script. There's a really fun moment, which is kind of a prop gag almost, or a dressing gag in which we were rehearsing a bit with David S. Melchin, in which he's kind of about to interrogate Murderbot, and he turns around, and David had gotten the wrong chair, one that didn't swivel in an impressive way. And instead it like scraped on the ground because there were no wheels. And we just decided to stick with that because like in this moment where he's going to try to be, to grill Murderbot over the coals, he can't quite pull off the cool turnaround in a cool swivel chair.

23:39And it's just trying to balance all of those things where, yes, it's sort of hard sci-fi. Yeah, we're dealing with these big issues of what is a person? What are humans? what is space capitalism going to be like, but also always having this perverse sense of people still being people. I feel like in subtextual terms, there's a whole lot going on in this, that the alacrity and the humor of it doesn't upend. I mean, it's a lot to balance, and I was really taken by it. Thanks so much. It's not pretentious, I don't think. It's pop entertainment. I mean, it's meant to be really fun, actually, And sort of what it's putting forward then by implication is you can have something that's fun that has layers to it.

24:25And so that's where sort of Murderbot's love of, you know, not sort of high quality award winning entertainment is something that I personally can identify with. No, it's a consumer. Finally, I mean, it's part of a consumer culture. It feels like it's in subtextual terms. It would make sense for it to have no taste. because you look at it's a third generation sort of machine that knows it's a heartbeat away from being obsolete and sort of finds some relief in this sort of stuff that's cranked out for, I mean, some part of its DNA, if it's partially human or whatever, is sort of built towards consuming blindly.

25:03I mean, again, I thought that was just such a great sort of thing. Of course it wouldn't have any taste. Of course it's so powerful that it's almost reality TV or reality TV. these sort of things that you can sort of just take up and not have a thought about. Well, to defend Murderbust's taste for a moment. Let's hear it. I mean, I think that it has exactly the taste that it needs, right? And so the sense that most, if not all, of the other members of the crew think that Sanctuary Moon is absolutely terrible. We are not convinced, Paul and I, ourselves, that Sanctuary Moon is a bad show. Oh, really?

25:38Yeah, I'm not sure. It might be a great show. in other words you should say who the cast of sanctuary moon oh well this is one reason why we are why it is a good show uh john show it's all people who we work with before um john show duanda wise clark greg jack mcbrayer who we hadn't worked with but is alexander's best friend um but uh yeah so so to to get people who are really uh can lend a lot of subtlety to these over-the-top moments in that show seems cool um but but also i do think that like human behavior in general is oftentimes over the top. Like if you catch somebody in a real moment of, of sort of, uh, distress, or frankly, just if you weren't putting a camera on them, you know, brushing their teeth in the bathroom, you know, you'd be like, that person's overacting, um, like they're in some crazy ass drama.