Minority Report (Film) Steven Spielberg

Development

Dick's story was first optioned by producer and writer Gary Goldman in 1992.[12] He created the initial script for the film with Ron Shusett and Robert Goethals (uncredited).[13] It was supposed to be a sequel to the 1990 Dick adaptation Total Recall, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.[14] However, Carolco Pictures, the production company that produced the film, struggled to secure either funding or Schwarzenegger's interest to progress the project before its bankruptcy in 1995.[15][16] While the remake rights were purchased by Miramax Films in 1997, Shusett and Goldman had removed the Total Recall elements from their script to develop it as a standalone film, Minority Report.

Novelist Jon Cohen was hired in 1997 to adapt the story for a potential film version that would have been directed by Dutch filmmaker Jan de Bont.[17][18] Meanwhile, Cruise and Spielberg, who met and became friends on the set of Cruise's film Risky Business in 1983,[19] had been looking to collaborate for ten years.[20][21] Spielberg was set to direct Cruise in Rain Man, but left to make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.[19] Cruise read Cohen's script, and passed it onto Spielberg, who felt it needed some work. Spielberg was not directly involved in the writing of the script, though he was allowed to decide whether the picture's screenplay was ready to be filmed. When Cohen submitted an acceptable revision, he called Cruise and said, "Yeah, I'll do this version of the script."[18][22] In that version, Witwer creates a false disk which shows Anderton killing him. When Anderton sees the clip, his belief in the infallibility of the precogs' visions convinces him it is true, therefore the precogs have a vision of him killing Witwer. At the end, Anderton shoots Witwer and one of the brother precogs finishes him off, because Witwer had slain his twin.[23] Spielberg was attracted to the story because as both a mystery and a film set 50 years in the future, it allowed him to do "a blending of genres" which intrigued him.[24]

In 1998, the pair joined Minority Report and announced the production as a joint venture of Spielberg's DreamWorks and Amblin Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Cruise's Cruise/Wagner Productions, and De Bont's production company, Blue Tulip, the latter of which had previously worked on Speed 2: Cruise Control.[2] In exchange for directing The Haunting, Spielberg offered to take over directing duties on Minority Report while De Bont was busy with post-production for Twister.[25] Spielberg however stated that despite being credited, De Bont never became involved with the film.[26] Cruise and Spielberg, at the latter's insistence,[27] reportedly agreed to each take 15% of the gross instead of any money up front to try to keep the film's budget under $100 million.[28] Spielberg said he had done the same with name actors in the past to great success: "Tom Hanks took no cash for Saving Private Ryan but he made a lot of money on his profit participation."[27] He made this agreement a prerequisite:[27]

I haven't worked with many movie stars—80 per cent of my films don't have movie stars—and I've told them if they want to work with me I want them to gamble along with me. I haven't taken a salary in 18 years for a movie, so if my film makes no money I get no money. They should be prepared to do the same.

Production was delayed for several years. The original plan was to begin filming after Cruise's Mission: Impossible 2 was finished, but that film ran over schedule, which also allowed Spielberg time to bring in screenwriter Scott Frank to rework Cohen's screenplay.[2][17][29] John August did an uncredited draft to polish the script,[30] and Frank Darabont was also invited to rewrite, but was by then busy with The Majestic.[31] The film closely follows Scott Frank's final script (completed May 16, 2001), and contains much of Cohen's third draft (May 24, 1997).[18] Frank removed the character of Senator Malcolm from Cohen's screenplay, and inserted Burgess, who became the "bad guy". He also rewrote Witwer from a villain to a "good guy", as he was in the short story.[23] In contrast to Spielberg's next science fiction picture, War of the Worlds, which he called "100 percent character" driven, Spielberg said the story for Minority Report became "50 percent character and 50 percent very complicated storytelling with layers and layers of murder mystery and plot."[8] According to film scholar Warren Buckland, Cohen and Frank apparently did not see the Goldman and Schusett screenplay, but instead worked on their own adaptation.[14] Goldman and Schusett, however, claimed the pair used a lot of material from their script, so the issue went through the Writer's Guild arbitration process. They won a partial victory; they were not given writing credits, but were listed as executive producers.[14] The film was delayed again so Spielberg could finish A.I. after the death of his friend Stanley Kubrick.[32] When Spielberg originally signed on to direct, he planned to have an entirely different supporting cast. He offered the role of Witwer to Matt Damon, Iris Hineman to Meryl Streep, Burgess to Ian McKellen, Agatha to Cate Blanchett, and Lara to Jenna Elfman.[33] Streep declined the role,[33] Damon opted out due to scheduling conflicts with Ocean's Eleven,[33][34] and the other roles were recast due to the delays. Spielberg also offered the role of Witwer to Javier Bardem, who turned it down.[35]

Technology

After E.T., Spielberg started to consult experts, and put more scientific research into his science fiction films.[36] In 1999, he invited fifteen experts convened by Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand to a hotel in Santa Monica for a three-day "think tank". He wanted to consult with the group to create a plausible "future reality" for the year 2054 as opposed to a more traditional "science fiction" setting.[37] Dubbed the "think tank summit",[38] the experts included architect Peter Calthorpe, author Douglas Coupland, urbanist and journalist Joel Garreau, computer scientist Neil Gershenfeld, biomedical researcher Shaun Jones, computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architecture dean William J. Mitchell.[37][39] Production designer Alex McDowell kept what was nicknamed the "2054 bible", an 80-page guide created in preproduction which listed all the aspects of the future world: architectural, socio-economic, political, and technological.[38] While the discussions did not change key elements in the film, they were influential in the creation of some of the more utopian aspects, though John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for the film, described it as "much grayer and more ambiguous" than what was envisioned in 1999.[40] Underkoffler, who designed most of Anderton's interface after Spielberg told him to make it "like conducting an orchestra", said "it would be hard to identify anything [in the movie] that had no grounding in reality."[38] McDowell teamed up with architect Greg Lynn to work on some of the technical aspects of the production design. Lynn praised his work, saying that a "lot of those things Alex cooked up for Minority Report, like the 3-D screens, have become real."[41]

Spielberg described his ideas for the film's technology to Roger Ebert before its release:

I wanted all the toys to come true someday. I want there to be a transportation system that doesn't emit toxins into the atmosphere. And the newspaper that updates itself ... The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.[20]

Filming

Minority Report was the first film to have an entirely digital production design.[41] Termed "previz", as an abbreviation of previsualization (a term borrowed from the film's narrative), production designer Alex McDowell said the system allowed them to use Photoshop in place of painters, and employ 3D animation programs (Maya and XSI) to create a simulated set, which could be filled with digital actors then used to block out shots in advance. The technology also allowed the tie-in video game and special effects companies to cull data from the previous system before the film was finished, which they used to establish parameters for their visuals. When Spielberg quickly became a fan, McDowell said "It became pretty clear that [he] wouldn't read an illustration as a finished piece, but if you did it in Photoshop and created a photorealistic environment he focused differently on it."[41]

Filming took place from March 22 to July 18, 2001,[33] in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Los Angeles.[43] Film locations included the Ronald Reagan Building (as PreCrime headquarters) and Georgetown.[43] The skyline of Rosslyn, Virginia is visible when Anderton flies across the Potomac River. A quick shot of Indian Field Creek, which crosses the Colonial Parkway in Yorktown, Virginia, is seen as John takes Agatha to his wife's house.[44][42] During production, Spielberg made regular appearances on a video-only webcam based in the craft services truck, both alone[45] and with Tom Cruise; together they conferred publicly with Ron Howard and Russell Crowe via a similar webcam on the set of A Beautiful Mind in New York.[46]

The location of the small, uncharted island in the last shot of the film is Butter Island off North Haven, Maine in the Penobscot Bay.[47]

Although it takes place in an imagined future world of advanced technology, Minority Report attempts to embody a more "realistic" depiction of the future.[48] Spielberg decided that to be more credible, the setting had to keep both elements of the present and ones which specialists expected would be forthcoming. Thus Washington, D.C., as depicted in the movie keeps well-known buildings such as the Capitol and the Washington Monument, as well as a section of modern buildings on the other side of the Potomac River. Production designer Alex McDowell was hired based on his work in Fight Club and his storyboards for a film version of Fahrenheit 451 which would have starred Mel Gibson. McDowell studied modern architecture, and his sets contain many curves, circular shapes, and reflective materials. Costume designer Deborah L. Scott decided to make the clothes worn by the characters as simple as possible, so as not to make the depiction of the future seem dated.[49]

The stunt crew was the same one used in Cruise's Mission: Impossible 2, and was responsible for complex action scenes. These included the auto factory chase scene, filmed in a real facility using props such as a welding robot, and the fight between Anderton and the jetpack-clad officers, filmed in an alley set built on the Warner Bros. studio lot.[50] Industrial Light & Magic did most of the special effects, while PDI/DreamWorks was responsible for the Spyder robots,[51] making it their final live-action visual effects job before solely working with DreamWorks Animation shortly afterwards. PDI visual effects supervisor Henry LaBounta took inspiration from deep sea jellyfish while creating the Spyder robots: "Their tentacles have these bioluminescent little lights that kind of run through their tentacles and that just looks so cool. So I got back to the studio and talked to the artists and I said, ‘We’re gonna do some radiating jellyfish bioluminescent lights on the bottom of this spider, and try that.’"[52] Pixel Liberation Front handled previsualization animatics. The holographic projections and the prison facility were filmed by several roving cameras which surrounded the actors, and the scene where Anderton gets off his car and runs along the Maglev vehicles was filmed on stationary props, which were later replaced by computer-generated vehicles.[53]

Storyline differences

The Philip K. Dick story only gives you a springboard that really doesn't have a second or third act. Most of the movie is not in the Philip K. Dick story – to the chagrin of the Philip K. Dick fans, I'm sure.

— Steven Spielberg, June 2002[12]

Like most film adaptations of Dick's works,[12] many aspects of his story were changed in their transition to film, such as the addition of Lamar Burgess and the change in setting from New York City to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Northern Virginia. The character of John Anderton was changed from a balding and out-of-shape old man to an athletic officer in his 40s to fit its portrayer and the film's action scenes.[54] The film adds two stories of tragic families; Anderton's, and that of the three pre-cogs.[55] In the short story, Anderton is married with no children, while in the film, he is the divorced father of a kidnapped son, who is most likely deceased.[56]

Although it is implied, but unclear in the film whether Agatha is related to the twin pre-cogs, her family was shattered when Burgess murdered her mother, Anne Lively.[57] The precogs were intellectually disabled and deformed individuals in the story, but in the film, they are the genetically mutated offspring of drug addicts.[58][59]

Anderton's future murder and the reasons for the conspiracy were changed from a general who wants to discredit PreCrime to regain some military funding, to a man who murdered a precog's mother to preserve PreCrime. The subsequent murders and plot developed from this change. The film's ending also differs from the short story's. In Dick's story, Anderton prevents the closure of the PreCrime division, however, in the movie Anderton successfully brings about the end of the organization.[60] Other aspects were updated to include current technology. For instance in the story, Anderton uses a punch card machine to interpret the precogs' visions; in the movie, he uses a virtual reality interface.[61]

Themes

The main theme of Minority Report is the classic philosophical debate of free will versus determinism.[62][63] Other themes explored by the film include involuntary commitment, the nature of political and legal systems in a high technology-advanced society,[64] the rights of privacy in a media-dominated world,[38] and the nature of self-perception.[65] The film also continues to follow Spielberg's tradition of depicting broken families,[66][67] which he has said is motivated by his parents' divorce when he was a child.[27]