Born from the fusion of the original script for ``I, Robot'' and Isaac Asimov's novel.

The road to making “Hardwired” into a movie

The third script that Disney bought was ``Hardwired.'' The story is as follows: ``A detective (not yet a detective) named Del Spooner is called to a murder scene in a high-tech building, where a dying Arrival has been left behind by a hologram of the deceased.The suspects are robots, cyborgs, and computers. , it was someone in a hologram...'' This is an Agatha Christie-style locked room mystery.

Disney selected Bryan Singer to write and direct the film and began rewriting it with Vinter, but it once again fell into development hell. As a result, the story, in which the Marines fight monsters on a space station, was completely unconventional, and the decision was made to cancel the project.

In 1999, 20th Century Fox purchased "Hardwired." The company was looking for a robot-themed movie (*2) and was considering Alex Proyas, who directed Dark City (1998), as the director. In fact, Proyas had been personally working on making `` I am a Robot '' into a movie (*3) even before this story came to him. However, Asimov's original work was a loosely connected series of nine independent short stories, and as there was no clear story that threaded through the whole story, it was difficult to adapt it into a screenplay.

*2 Actually, around this time, Hollywood studios continued to make movies with humanoid themes. For example, Columbia Pictures and Touchstone Pictures released Isaac Asimov's `` Andrew NDR114 '' (1999), and Warner Bros. and Hidden Figures released Spielberg's `` AI '' (2001). The background to these plans seems to have been the influence of bipedal robots such as Honda's P2 (96), P3 (97), and ASIMO (00).

I first realized this in June 2004 when I went to interview ``I, Robot'' at the request of 20th Century Fox Films. But the press conference was held at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science and Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, rather than the typical movie studio or hotel. There are only two Japanese reporters: the author and Yoshifumi Hosoya, who lives in the United States. I had a solo interview with production designer Patrick Tatopoulos, and since I had some time before the next event, I went to the DARPA Grand Challenge with the guidance of Professor Takeo Kanade , the director of the institute (only Japanese people were given preferential treatment). We were given a tour of the laboratory, including the fully autonomous unmanned car Sandstorm and autonomous small helicopter that participated.

In the evening, the venue was moved to the Carnegie Science Center, where a commemorative ceremony for the Robot Hall of Fame was held. The Robot Hall of Fame was conceived by Dean James H. Morris in 2003 to commemorate robots who have made significant contributions to robotics, both real and fictional. This year's Hall of Fame inductees included ASIMO, Astro Boy, C-3PO, Robbie from Forbidden Planet (56), and Shakey , an artificial intelligence robot from Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International).

Then, ASIMO actually appeared, and Professor Kanade said, ``The ASIMO developed by Honda attracted the support of the judges as one of the most successful humanoids ever.''Looking back, ASIMO's development from P2 ignited the current craze for humanoid and entertainment robots."

However, since then, the only Japanese robots that have been inducted into the Hall of Fame have been AIBO and SCARA at Yamanashi University in 2006, and all the rest have been Western robots.

*3 The scenario for "I, Robot" was written by science fiction author and screenwriter Harlan Ellison in 1978 for Warner Bros., and was published as the book " I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay. " However, it has not reached crank-in. Of course, Proyas also read this scenario, but it is not reflected in this work.

Isaac Asimov's influence

And the development of "Hardwired" begins. While respecting Winter's plot, Proyas organized the story into a simple story in which Detective Spooner investigates a murder by a robot in a futuristic city.

“I, Robot” (C)2017 Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved.

In 2000, Fox officially acquired the film rights to ``I am a Robot,'' and a plan was made to combine this with ``Hardwired.'' In this case, the ``Three Principles of Robotics'', which are common knowledge to science fiction fans, will play a large role in the story. What are these three principles?

Article 1: Robots must not harm humans. Furthermore, we must not cause harm to humans by overlooking such risks.

Article 2: Robots must obey orders given to humans. However, this shall not apply if the order given violates Article 1.

Article 3: Robots must protect themselves unless there is a risk of violating Articles 1 and 2 above.

It was proposed in 1940 by John W. Campbell Jr., a science fiction writer and editor-in-chief of Us Science Fiction magazine, embodying elements inherent in Asimov's works. From the following year, Asimov began writing based on this idea.

Therefore, the main theme of this film is the Three Principles, and I decided to explain them at the beginning of the movie and throughout the movie for people who don't know about them. However, rather than directly reflecting the nine stories of ``I am a Robot,'' Proyas considered the positioning of ``a new 10th story.''

Having said that, this does not mean that the original work was completely ignored. The names of characters such as robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin (Bridget Moynahan) (*4) and Dr. Alfred Lanning (James Cromwell), who creates the robot Sunny and dies mysteriously, are taken from Asimov's original work. And so is the name of the company they work for, US Robotics (*5).

There is also a scene in the movie where Detective Spooner (Will Smith) and Dr. Calvin search for Sonny, the suspect who killed Dr. Lanning, among the 1,000 NS-5 robots lined up neatly at the US Robotics factory. do. This scene is probably inspired by the original story, "The Lost Robot."

Also, the setting of ``detective, robot, murder case'' is similar to Asimov's original works such as ` `City of Steel '' (53), `` The Naked Sun '' (56), and `` Robots at Dawn (1) (2) '' (83). You can feel the influence of the feature-length series starring Detective Elijah Bayley and R. Daniel Oliveau.

However, since 20th Century Fox acquired the film rights to ``Steel City'' in 2011, Proyas has never mentioned the influence of this series in interviews, and has only said that the motif is ``I am a robot.'' It is supposed to be.

*4 Dr. Calvin in the original story is set to be 75 years old, so he has been revised to be much younger.



*5 To begin with, the word robotics itself was coined by Asimov.

fleshing out the characters