Reminiscence’s Lisa Joy and Charlie Jane Anders talk about the ‘nightmare’ of nostalgia

Lisa Joy has already explored the downside of wanting to live in an idealized past as a co-creator of Westworld. But in her debut as a feature film director, ReminiscenceJoy delves further into the subject. The thriller saturated with film noir takes place in a post-climate change world where one of the main sources of pleasure is being able to return to the past, with the help of a technology controlled by Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman). and his assistant Watts (Thandiwe Newton).

With the movie in theaters and on the go HBO Max This Friday we talked to Joy about the seduction of memory and why trauma and nostalgia are two sides of the same tarnished coin.

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

I feel like the heart of the movie is the relationship between trauma and nostalgia – these are two types of memories that the characters can’t escape. How are they related in the movie in your mind?

Lisa Joy: God, that’s such an insightful question and I’ve never been asked. Everybody has some trauma [but] some people have a lot more trauma than others, right? But those are the memories that metastasize and torment and threaten them at times, in their strength, to try to swallow them all up and define them. It is a scary type of virus. And it is very painful.

When we look back at nostalgia, we are trying to hold on and hold on to in order to counteract, in some way, the negative. That’s why we cherish memories and why we over-idealize some memories so much, because trauma has a way of digging into our psyche and actually hurting us.

I think it’s a constant battle for people, and it takes incredible strength to be able to recognize the darkness in the world and the darkness of their experiences, but also to say, “That won’t define me. I choose this side of my experience, this side of myself, to define myself as my kind of north star in the future. ”

It feels like a wish fulfillment of sorts, to be able to reproduce a happy memory with perfect clarity, like Nick (Hugh Jackman) does in the movie.

It absolutely is. As a storyteller, I’m supposed to like stories, but for whatever reason, sometimes I yearn for the pure, documentary truth of a moment. The idea that you could actually transport yourself to a time that really nurtured you, to really be there and not just try to swim towards it against time. I really think it would be therapeutic and charming.

I was excited about the idea of ​​a movie that talks about nostalgia in the post-climate change future, because nostalgia is part of what keeps us from tackling climate change. We are nostalgic for coal. We’re nostalgic for the 1950s and being able to drive around in our big, gas-guzzling cars. Do you think having a movie that addresses the danger of nostalgia will help bring that message about climate change home and help us think about how we need to look to the future?

I think it is part of human nature to hardly be able to understand a great tragedy. We cannot process it because it is very difficult. I remember when COVID started. It was like, “Okay, maybe we’ll be locked up for two weeks, and it’s really going to be crazy.” And then a year later, here we are.

[It’s] the same with climate change. We are scared and helpless, and it is easy to turn to denial. And the problem is that we can deny it, but our children cannot. And in 30 years, we will not be able to do it, and people in other countries will not be able to do it, because they will be the hardest hit first.

I didn’t want to do this movie especially [climate change]. There are movies about climate change, [including] amazing documentary movies. I wanted this to be a fact. I’m not even going to discuss it: the waters have risen. As soon as we can really wrap our heads [the idea that] This is the new reality, so maybe we can start [asking], “How are we going to stop it?” In the movie, we consciously put fewer cars on the streets. We deal with architecture in a way that shows how some of the water can be blocked and many of the energy sources converted to solar panels. But you can also see that it is quite late in the game when we are doing it, and many people have suffered, and there are still inequalities in the way the dry land is distributed.

You may feel nostalgic for the past, but the past contains many sins that led us to this moment. So if you are going to feel nostalgic for the good things you have, you should also acknowledge the bad things and try to take steps forward.

I loved a lot of the images and the way you depicted a post-climate change future. Did you talk to scientists? I know you worked with Howard Cummings, the production designer for Westworld.

I spoke mainly to Howard, my production designer, and also to Bruce. [Jones, the visual effects supervisor], trying to build it. But my biggest inspiration came from the world as it is. When it was in preparation, there were floods in Italy. And I was watching how people had hallways and the way they changed their clothes to suit this world. And I spent much of my childhood in Asia looking at floating markets and night markets.

There is beauty in this sunken world, you know People have faced something very difficult and continue to struggle with it. But in my experience, in places like that, there is still love, light, and laughter, even though it’s hard earned.

Westworld it is also about people trying to escape an idealized past, except that it is an idealized media past, rather than their own memories. And Westworld also has something like extreme wealth and extreme exploitation. Do you feel like you were exploring some of the same ideas but in a different way?

Yes. I think a lot of these ideas are just things that we have to deal with all the time, right? For someone who is a first generation half-breed [daughter of immigrants], I wasn’t born with a lot of money and all that … I say, “The good old days for many people weren’t the good old days for me and my family.” Nostalgia for good times for some people is my idea of ​​a fucking nightmare.

And that’s what Westworld also underlined. Everyone goes to the park to have a good time, just to let their ID out, and in the meantime, Dolores and Maeve are sitting there like, “Oh, I’m in hell. I’m in hell where I can see what their minds want. ”

Same with Reminiscence. There is never enough time in a movie to explore all the subjective experiences of the world, but I try to look at something from a somewhat different lens. As in the noir, it’s often about the infallible hero and mischievous femme fatale leading you astray. So I wanted to take those tropes and those ideas and present them as what we’re used to them being. [in] those old black and white movies we’re nostalgic for, and then look under them and say: But this is what it really could have been.

Because no hero is [infallible]and no woman is really [a femme fatale]. If you look beyond that layer, you may find a different narrative all together.

The way you used the themes of film noir storytelling, which is often about trauma, and specifically generational trauma, really caught my eye. Like, a lot of the noir was shaped by WWII. In Reminiscence, Nick and other characters are veterans of a war we keep hearing about. Was it important to you that there were not just specific personal traumas, but shared generational traumas?

It was important to me and it also seemed realistic to me. We are at a time in history where I think most of us want to be good people, but my God, sometimes it’s really hard to figure out how to do it. For example, there are so many levels of feelings and considerations, and that is incredibly difficult.

One of the things this movie is about is that we can try to be good. We can strive to be the best humans, the best lovers, the best friends that we can be, but we’re going to screw up a lot because we’re human. And it’s a bit about learning to forgive ourselves and forgive others and knowing that it is a journey. Love is a journey and life is a journey, where we just try to do better and love better and love more courageously. I think that’s the best we can hope for. And recognizing our fallibility, that there is no pure hero or pure villain or pure sexy lady, allows us to have more open conversations, be more vulnerable and truer, and ultimately feel more understood.

Were there specific noir inspirations that you relied on?

Out of the past it was a great influence. And also, thematically, Vertigo.

The blindness, the inability to discover something right in front of him. I wanted to take it, as someone who really appreciates classic bones and all the great works that come out of the noir, I wanted to say: OK, what is my turn?

In the old black [films], the dark is when things go wrong. In the dark, serious crimes happen. [But] In this world, darkness is when people can go out and live their lives, because it is so hot. [And] Crime and true darkness, moral darkness, occur in the scorching light of day. So it is an inverted world that is meant to reflect how our world is changing.

So I started by asking you about nostalgia and trauma, and another thing that really caught my attention in the movie is that there are limitations in memory reproduction technology. A person cannot revisit the same event too many times and it is possible to get caught up in a painful memory. Is this another way of talking about the pitfalls of our relationship with memory?

I worked in a prosecutor’s office for a while. I worked on family violence and I think some of it influenced my feelings in memory. Seeing the victims of violence get really traumatized by reproducing these things, but also feeling it through this fog. Somehow, the fog of trauma haunted them more than just being able to remember [the] brutal details and logically say: “That’s what happened, and now it’s done.” [Because of] the emotional toll it took became something bigger.

And in the meantime, the other thing that frustrated me was the unreliability of the witnesses. It is very difficult to get a reliable witness, because when you are in the moment, people change their stories over time. They add and interpolate. And sometimes I thought, “God, you’re an unreliable storyteller. You are seeing and remembering this through all kinds of assumptions. “A crime has been committed [and] this person is scarred and yet I cannot get an objective description of it. That was so difficult and so frustrating that I thought, “It would be great if we could put it in a tank.” [and] see what the hell happened. “And then not having to traumatize this person on the stand, trying to defend his version of a memory and how he felt, when everyone else says,” Was it a man in a green coat or a man in a brown coat? ”I just wish there was an easier way to go through memory in cases like that.

Reminiscence opens in theaters and on HBO Max on August 20.

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