![]() ![]() In this way, Jones gets to express himself fully as opposed to playing an AI archetype. We’re treating it and shooting it like a drama and then overcoming the problems later on.”įor Hanks, the key to the success of Jeff was freeing him from the cliches of robots in film by making him more dynamic and less rigid in his mannerisms and communication. “The ideal scenario is that after two minutes, you don’t care that it’s a robot anymore. ![]() “We wanted to shoot it in a way where you forget that is a robot,” Sapochnik says. ![]() Instead of it being ‘grounded sci-fi,’ we want it to be a drama that just happens to have a robot in it.” “What we’ve tried to do is keep it real,” says Sapochnik of the creative process. “You didn’t have to project anything onto it other than a simple premise: a guy had a dog, and it’s very dangerous outside, so how do you survive?” “It’s a kind of relationship movie,” Hanks explains. There are genre tropes and influences all throughout the film (the post-apocalypse milieu, the implications of AI, the road movie pacing), but the development of the connections between Finch, Goodyear, and Jeff is what propels the story at all times. One of the ideas that permeated the on-set conversations was that Finch is a family drama first and a sci-fi movie second. “And having the dog in the movie helps because whenever you see a man and a dog, you don’t think science fiction.” “The dog is the heart of the story,” the director says. You have to put them down and it’s just the worst day of your life.” “Dogs teach you what love is and they worship you, and then they die on you. “It’s a love story between a guy and his dog,” explains the Oscar winning actor. Most of the film’s stakes hinge on Finch’s desperate affection for Goodyear, and in that aspect, Hanks found the soul of the film. When you see that there’s a dog in it, it becomes a completely different kind of movie.” And it’s not a sequel! But there is a different sense of what loneliness is. “But there’s no magic, no mutants, no aliens, no biker gangs. “The ‘last man on earth’ is a familiar kind of trope,” says Hanks of the film’s setup. Grappling internally with his own mortality and his love for his dog, he creates Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones), a humanoid robot with advanced AI, to protect the little mutt. ![]() Five years after a solar flare effectively toasts civilization as we know it, robotics engineer Finch Weinberg (Hanks) is fighting for survival with his best and only bud, Goodyear, his insanely cute terrier. The setting felt appropriately post-apocalyptic, but in a way that is sort of wholesome in hindsight. The biggest safety concern on set wasn’t hygiene or social distancing, but the risk of snakes biting at your ankles (one of the first people we were introduced to was a snake wrangler holding a bucket and a long hook). Maskless members of the press were huddled together in a small building, talking to a cavalcade of cast and crew members, including Hanks and director Miguel Sapochnik. So it was again a different world, to say the least, on that dusty, scorching hot, pre-pandemic backlot in Albuquerque over two years ago. Like many film productions that were affected by the pandemic, Finch took an unexpectedly long and twisty path to finally make it to our TV screens. The movie was called “Bios” at the time of the set visit, and has since been brought from Universal to Apple TV+ (it’s available now). For starters, Hanks became one of the very first high-profile COVID-19 cases, and the world shut down just days before the film was finished shooting. A lot has happened since Den of Geek was invited to visit the New Mexico set of Tom Hanks’ dystopian sci-fi movie, Finch, back in March 2019. ![]()
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