By Ali Moosavi.
When I wrote this film I had no idea [that the advance of AI] would happen so fast…. We have to talk about it and raise the questions; is that the world that we want?”
Writer-director Sophie Barthes was born in France but grew up in South America and The Middle East. She moved to New York in 2001 to attend the Columbia University School of the Arts. Barthes’ short film Happiness, which tells the story of a woman who purchases a box of happiness and cannot decide if she should open it, was shown at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and earned her a place in the Sundance Institute‘s Screenwriters Lab, where she wrote the screenplay for her first feature film, Cold Souls (2009). In that film Paul Giamatti plays a version of himself and, in order to stop the turmoil he is causing in a play he’s appearing in, decides to deposit his soul (which looks like a chickpea!) in a special lab. Barthes’ second feature was an adaptation of Gustave Flaubert‘s novel Madame Bovary (2014). Her latest film is The Pod Generation in which Chiwetel Ejofor and Emilia Clarke play a couple with very different outlooks on life. Ejofor is a nature lover who hates anything artificial while Clarke has a more cold and logical mind and welcomes any artificial developments if they make her life easier. Their differences come to a head when she becomes pregnant and, not wanting to take a maternity break which could affect her career, decides to use a pod which acts as an artificial womb for childbearing and delivery. Both Cold Souls and The Pod Generation look at provocative issues in a humorous way.
Film International spoke with Sophie Barthes about her work.
How did the idea for The Pod Generation originate?
It started many years ago when I was expecting my first child. I had a lot of dreams and I wrote them in a diary. All the dreams that you’ve seen in the film are like the dreams that I had. So I think it’s a combination of this and loving Brave New World as a teenager and wanting to explore a theme concerning commodification of everything in my first film. So all these things came together and I had the idea to write a sort of satire about the artificial womb.
Do you think, as you’ve explored in the film, some women may find the idea of not having to carry this fetus for 35 weeks and not having stretch marks and weight gain attractive?
Sure, it seems very convenient and a great solution but my film has a satiric look at how childbirth can be solved. I don’t know what we lose in the process when we want to solve everything through technology. I think that’s why I wanted to make this film because at first it looks like a great idea. But then you start to think about the implications and the real consequences of this kind of advancement and what it means ethically, philosophically and for us as human beings. Sometimes the exponentiality of progress doesn’t match the ethical implications or the laws and regulations do not match how fast the technology is developing in a lot of fields. I don’t have the answers but I wanted to raise all these questions in the form of a satire.
For some couples it might seem attractive to use an artificial womb like the one in the film. You feed the unborn child with music and read audio books to it and shield it from harmful viruses and can even select the sex of the baby. Do you think this concept could happen in the near future?
I’m sure it’s going to happen and in ten years there will be artificial wombs because already we are able to do in-vitro fertilization, so what we’re missing are the middle months. I have no doubts that the technology is going to get there. Now the question is do we have this debate before the technology exists to try to regulate and understand the implications for us as human beings or are we waiting for the technology to happen and then we’re going to scramble and try to assess what it means for us. That’s what the film was trying to look at in a playful way. I’m not anti-technology for everything; technology could be a wonderful thing. But you just have to remember the Greek myth of Icarus which like all the Greek mythology is based on hubris. We think we can reinvent or control nature but the amount of control we have on things is very limited and we’re trying to reach too high and too far and we are not ready as a species to go that far. For me the big philosophical question is what are we ready to give away from ourselves as human beings for convenience.
It’s a combination of [my dreams] and loving Brave New World as a teenager and wanting to explore a theme concerning commodification of everything in my first film, Cold Souls.”
There is a sentence in the movie that says uterus is the political issue of our times.
I think it’s always been the case that women have this incredible power to give birth and men have not been fully understanding that power and that’s maybe why most societies have been patriarchies and there are very few matriarchies in the history of humanity. So the film is trying to have some subversive and strange sentences that are a bit shocking for us to discuss what is feminism. Is it something that should empower women to become more the woman they are or the women they want to be or does feminism mean you have to be completely equal to men? I think that’s the debate of modern feminism and my intuition is that we should help women to be the woman they want to be. If they want to be a woman who has a child naturally, we should support them and help them in society to achieve that and women that don’t want to have children is fine too but I feel the danger with some form of extreme feminism is to just say we have to be completely equal with men and I think the equality in biological terms means nothing because we have a different hormonal makeup and have different desires. We are biologically very different but we need more parity than equality. We need constitutional equality and rules and laws that makes us equal as human beings. But in everything that’s linked to careers or reproduction I think it’s more parity. For example, if I decide to be a mother and have a child, I want to have the same career opportunities and prospects that a man who is not giving birth has but I still want to give birth if that’s something that’s important to me. I want my employer and the society around me to support me in that choice. The idea of the film is just to make the debate more complex because I think you lose a lot of the complexity of the debate if you just say we should be equal. It doesn’t mean anything because after millions of years of evolution we are different beings but what is important is how everyone gets what they want and still be different.
This theme of natural versus artificial and what science can lead to in the future is explored in both The Pod Generation and Cold Souls. This idea seems to fascinate you and I understand your first short film was about a woman who gets a box full of happiness.
Oh yes, my short film is about a factory worker who buys a box containing happiness and she doesn’t know what to do with it, so she decides not to open the box and returns the box to the store. I think maybe I’m obsessed with this idea of commodification of everything in America, that everything can be marketed or is for sale or has a capitalist endeavor. Maybe because I come from a country and a place where there’s more emphasis put into how you develop yourself as a human being in terms of soul or immaterial things and I feel sometimes America is a very materialistic society where success is measured in terms of how much money you have, how big is your house and so on. Every philosopher and every religion say that material things are not the things that are going to make you happy. What’s going to make you happy is immaterial things. It’s love and being surrounded by people that love you and the love you give back to people. Everyone knows that intuitively but somehow we’ve fallen into this pattern of thinking that things that are going to make us happier are material things so maybe all my films are a little bit obsessed with this theme but it’s all subconscious like you’re not sure why you write certain things or why themes come to you or maybe it’s my experience living in New York for twenty years and feeling a bit like an outsider in that society. I’m not sure, maybe a psychoanalyst would know!
You put a lot of thought into the alternatives, for example the idea of a totally objective and sexless computer therapist seems not a bad idea!
Actually it’s funny because when you write science fiction you think you are very far ahead but this already exists. When I was writing they were testing this kind of artificial intelligence therapy with students in Stanford and the students were saying they prefer the artificial therapy because they don’t feel judged by a human being and they’re freer. That’s why I made the therapist a little bit crazy when she says oh we don’t analyze dreams because it serves no purpose, though dreams are the material that you are analyzed in psychoanalysis because they are the language of the subconscious. In 1966 they developed the first chatbot and its name was Eliza like in the film and I went online and played with this chat box. This was three years ago when I was writing the script and before ChatGPT, and the answers were very silly and you could never have dialectical or philosophical conversation with the bot. But when the film came out at Sundance in January, I felt oh my God, this is so outdated already because ChatGPT exists. For sure they’re going to develop it and they’re going to replace a lot of therapists with artificial therapy and it’s like every technological advancement, there is good thinking about it and there’s terrifying things about it and ultimately I don’t know if it’s a very good idea to have a machine analyzing your soul.
Was Cold Souls really inspired by you thinking about Woody Allen giving up his soul?!
Yes! it was a dream again. It was my subconscious. I had just watched his movie Sleeper and I was reading Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul which is a an incredible book about the subconscious and then I had this dream that Woody Allen was in front of me with a little box and when he meets the doctor they look at his soul and his soul was as a little chickpea and in the dream I thought Oh my God, Woody Allen who made all those movies had a chickpea soul, so what is mine going to look like and when I opened the box the dream ended so I never saw the shape of my soul! Then I thought I’m going to write a short film and ended writing a feature and was lucky that Paul Giamatti said yes and it was a beautiful beginner’s luck. It was my first screenplay and it was so wonderful to work with Paul.
One of the topics which is attracting a lot of attention now is AI and specifically use of AI in motion pictures, which is one of the factors that has led to the actors’ strike. How do you see the future of AI in cinema?
I understand the strike and why we need to stand up against this right now because there are no regulations around all this and a few individuals in Silicon Valley are taking big decisions about the future of humanity. At Tribeca Film Festival I watched the first fully generated artificial intelligence short film and the technology is not quite there yet but for sure it’s going to catch up and in five years you are probably going to be able to make a Marvel movie with AI-created actors’ images and voices. For instance from my film you could take just three seconds of Emilia Clark’s voice and you could have a fully generated voice in French for the dubbed version in France. So the person who was doing the dubbing job is losing their job and a lot of people will lose their jobs which is part of advancement and progress and there’s nothing we could do about it but none of the people deciding about this technology have been elected by citizens to do what they’re doing. I think that’s why the strike is so important because this needs to be regulated and there needs to be a debate. When I wrote this film I had no idea this would happen so fast. I didn’t know ChatGPT was going to come that fast and would be so good because people were making fun of AI a year before because the chat bots were ridiculous. We have to talk about it and raise the questions; is that the world that we want? The same is with the artificial womb; that thing is going to exist and then what are we going to do about it? It’s going to be very useful for people that cannot have children but for couples that can have children and are just doing it out of convenience, is it desirable? is it fair to the child not to be carried in a real womb? I don’t have the answers but I think the people looking at laws and regulations should ask themselves all those questions.
I want to ask you about your working relationship with your regular cinematographer, Andrij Parek, who is also your partner. That must be a special working relationship.
Well he’s not letting me use any other DP! I love working with Andrij. He has his own career that is much more advanced than mine. He won an Emmy for directing episodes of Succession and he is nominated for another directing Emmy for Succession and he’s now directing episodes of House of the Dragon. So his career has exploded in a way and I’m lucky that he still wants to shoot my films and I love working with him. He has worked with a lot of female directors. He’s a very interesting DP to work with because he has such a reverence and love for light and composition and he’s very subtle in his approach. He always makes it easy for actors because he doesn’t like to block the action; he just lights it in a way that the actors are very free to move around and think that’s his signature. Like in the Succession pilot you could feel that sense of freedom that the actors had and the camera was very fluid and immersive and I think that’s what he’s very good at. He has a sixth sense about where the camera should be at all times and he’s like Maradona who always knew where the ball was in the soccer field! For me it’s incredible because I have only made three films and I love to surround myself with people that are much more qualified and better at doing their craft. I love working with Andrij and hopefully he’s going to shoot my next film too which is going to be about Edward Hopper and it’s very interesting because Hopper had such an incredible sense of light.
You write your scripts and direct. Which one do you find more creatively satisfying?
They’re very different aspect of your brain. I love them both. I love the loneliness of writing where you’re on your own world and can create whatever you want and then the beauty of directing is the contact with other human beings and making films is a collective labor. It’s just surrounding yourself with people that you respect immensely creatively and intellectually and aesthetically. I’m not making that many films because I also had to raise my child and Andrij was always traveling and shooting and so I made the conscious decision that I wanted to see my kid growing up. Therefore I’ve made a film every five years or so but now that she’s older hopefully I will be able to direct more and but it’s a very magical thing. I think as a director you are blessed being able to do this job. I take it very seriously. It’s a lot of responsibility when you direct and actors are defenseless if you’re a bad director. You can really damage their performances, so there’s a lot of pressure. As a writer you have less pressure because either people like the transcript or they don’t and you do all the work by yourself. But once you’re on set, you do feel the pressure to deliver and the time constraint and the amount of money it costs, so there’s a lot of adrenaline. For me sometimes it feels like we are all sailing on a boat and there is this beautiful feeling of community with the team. But sometimes things can go wrong and you can’t predict anything. It’s like the life of the circus!
The Pod Generation and Cold Souls shared a lot of similar themes, but Madame Bovary was something totally different. How did that come about?
That script was sent by my agency. Maybe they thought being a French director in New York, I was qualified to make it! At beginning I said no I’m not touching this because it was one of my favorite books. I love Flaubert and this book is difficult to adapt and a lot of filmmakers have tried to adapt it, including Chabrol and Minnelli, and I said no. But then I kept thinking about it because I love Flaubert so much and when you make a film you spend 3-4 years in the company of that book or that writer and I thought it would be so wonderful to spend all this time researching about Flaubert and immersing myself in it. I was also feeling very nostalgic about France at that time and I wanted to go back and shoot there. So I then said yes. It was a difficult one. It’s set at the birth of consumerism and Flaubert was like a visionary. He saw that capitalism was just starting in the 19th century and it’s about this woman getting into a lot of trouble because of her love of consumerism which is a form of displaced anxiety. So I think there’s a common thread in those three films and of course Madame Bovary is a much darker story. I think we’re all a little bit Bovary like; we all want things that we cannot have, As Flaubert says: We all have this in ourselves as human beings, the constant need for satisfaction. The wise thing would be to detach yourself from this and be happy with what you have, but it’s very hard to do.
Ali Moosavi has worked in documentary television and has written for Film Magazine (Iran), Cine-Eye (London), and Film International (Sweden). He contributed to the second volume of The Directory of World Cinema: Iran (Intellect, 2015).