Andrew Nic­col: ​‘There was no war for our pri­va­cy, we gave our­selves away’

Andrew Niccol’s new film Anon is a future who­dun­nit set in a world where every sec­ond of our lives is cap­tured via implants in our heads and uploaded to a giant data­base called ​‘The Ether’. Mali­cious tech and pri­va­cy are recur­ring themes in the New Zealand filmmaker’s work: he’s best known for writ­ing and co-pro­duc­ing The Tru­man Show as well as writ­ing and direct­ing iden­ti­ty theft puz­zler Gat­ta­ca and drone bomb­ing tale Good Kill. Here Nic­col explains why he’s con­cerned about mass sur­veil­lance in today’s soci­ety and shares his thoughts on the biggest data sto­ry of the year.

LWLies: Anon offers up a fright­en­ing world where peo­ple have no anonymi­ty or pri­va­cy. Do you think this is a like­ly future?

Nic­col: I think it’s a like­ly present. Look around. Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. That’s what exists. We give away so much of our­selves. One of the things I was inter­est­ed in explor­ing is how there was no war for our pri­va­cy. We just said, ​‘It’s cool.’ For con­ve­nience, it’s all yours. Right now you and I are geo-tag­ging. Peo­ple know exact­ly where we are. D’you wan­na know how Google knows you’re hav­ing an affair? Your phone is geo-tag­ging, there’s anoth­er per­son phone is in the same hotel in the same room also geo-tag­ging, some­one who you shouldn’t be with and there’s no oth­er rea­son, at 3am, that you’d be there.

When you were mak­ing Anon did you do much research into what the future of sur­veil­lance might involve?

As a film­mak­er I’m lucky that I can just leap over all the tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems. We’re liv­ing in a real­ly ugly age because we’re car­ry­ing around these devices and everyone’s walk­ing down the street look­ing at that. But we are life-log­ging already and we’ve got all these social net­works. You go to a con­cert and everybody’s record­ing it and nobody actu­al­ly watch­es the band any more. There are some per­form­ers who won’t per­form live any more because they’re just look­ing down at a sea of cameras.

And there are some like Jack White who say, ​‘You can come but you’ve got to put your phone away.’

Exact­ly, there are even now coun­ter­mea­sures to that very activ­i­ty. But we are life-log­ging, there is no ques­tion about it. I can’t go to my kid’s school con­cert with­out 50 phones [being used in the audi­ence]. In fact, as a coun­ter­mea­sure the school said, ​‘We’ve got one per­son who’s going to video it, if you want a copy you can have one.’ Because nobody even looks back at what they video, so you’ve got tonnes and tonnes of data that you’re nev­er referencing.

What is it about these kind of sto­ries that appeals to you?

I mean, I’m obvi­ous­ly some kind of voyeur. I did this film with Ethan Hawke, Good Kill, about the drone pro­gramme. And a friend said, ​‘I don’t under­stand why you’re doing this con­tem­po­rary film.’ There was an arti­cle about the drone pro­gramme and some­one wrote, ​‘It’s more Tru­man Show than Ter­mi­na­tor.’ I guess there’s some­thing about that ​‘eye of god’ thing that I’m inter­est­ed in.

There’s ambiva­lence in the atti­tude of Anon towards this spec­u­la­tive future. On one side pri­va­cy is gone, but on the oth­er there is very lit­tle crime.

Right. That’s the inter­est­ing thing for Clive Owen’s char­ac­ter. He thinks that crime is over because all he’s doing is watch­ing the ends of people’s lives. Right now, you stab me with that pen and I die, they’re just going to replay the last moments of my life and the cor­re­spond­ing moments of yours, there you go. Case solved. But then it gets to the point that he can­not believe his own eyes as he’s being hacked and that’s an inter­est­ing thing too. As I said, there are mea­sures and coun­ter­mea­sures. To beat the sys­tem, the Girl (Aman­da Seyfried) is edit­ing people’s live, hack­ing human beings, hack­ing into someone’s psy­che, which to me was an inter­est­ing turn.

I won­dered if you had been influ­enced by aug­ment­ed real­i­ty apps.

There’s things that will auto­mat­i­cal­ly trans­late lan­guages for you. I know it’s all there but I’ve just tak­en a leap for­ward and put it in your head. Of course that’s one of the great things, you can do facial recog­ni­tion and I can recog­nise what that book is, I can find out about the author, I can find out about these beau­ti­ful tools. That’s the seduc­tion of it. If you buy into it, it means you’re buy­ing into the whole thing, which equals Cam­bridge Analytica.

What’s your take on the whole Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca saga?

I always knew it was there. You can’t opt out. You think you can opt out. You can’t. If you knew the things that Google knows about you, it might give you pause. If you have Gmail it reads every sin­gle word of every Gmail to sell you stuff. I have a friend at Google who gave his phone to his daugh­ter and she start­ed look­ing up My Lit­tle Pony and then he can’t stop get­ting ads for My Lit­tle Pony. He takes it into Google head­quar­ters and says, ​‘Can you fix this for us?’ and they say, ​‘No, because the algo­rithm is too strong, it’ll just have to wear off.’ So they can’t con­trol their own algorithm.

There don’t seem to be that many film­mak­ers inves­ti­gat­ing these areas. Do film­mak­ers have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to look at these issues?

I think for me the rea­son that I keep com­ing back to it, is that it keeps com­ing at me. We’re liv­ing in such a tech­no­log­i­cal age, to say noth­ing about it would be strange to me. It’s unavoidable.

Have you been tempt­ed by VR?

I have a lot of aug­ment­ed real­i­ty in the film because I think it’s so amaz­ing that I could fill this room with rats, if you hat­ed rats. I think there’s some­thing amaz­ing about putting it in your head. For­get the gog­gles, I’ve just gone inside your body. In my mind I don’t real­ly make futur­is­tic films, I feel it’s like a par­al­lel present. I don’t real­ly feel like they’re overt­ly futur­is­tic because I don’t want peo­ple to emo­tion­al­ly check out and say, ​‘This is noth­ing to do with me,’ because hope­ful­ly it is some­thing to do with them.

Anon is in cin­e­mas 11 May. Read the LWLies review.