REMINISCENCE : Promotion and Release (SPOILER ALERT)

[jo]

I'd say this is close to the reactions of many ( or mine ) --

Our First Impressions From Watching the Reminiscence Trailer
Dept. of Sneaks and Peeks
JUNE 3, 2021JUNE 3, 2021MOVIE TRAILERS/MOVIES
BY UMAPAGAN AMPIKAIPAKAN


One part science fiction noir, one part psychological thriller, Reminiscence feels like it might be the kind of thinking person’s action movie we’ve been craving since Inception. Now, I was going to say that this looks like the movie we’d get if Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ridley Scott had a secret love child, but after listening to Lisa Joy speak about her film, I was convinced that this was an intriguingly distinctive work, and that any such comparison would just be plain lazy. It would be to do it a disservice.



Last night, we were invited to a special press conference at which Lisa Joy shared her inspirations for the movie, which ranged from conversations she’s had with her grandfather, to her experiences being a mother for a first time, to things she’s learned at a class she once took on the science of the mind. It became incredibly clear that Reminiscence was the product of experiences that were very specific to her. That had been processed through her clearly brilliant mind, filtered through some of her Westworld preoccupations, and infused with a pop sci-fi sensibility.

From this quick tease alone, I am already in love with the aesthetic of this movie. The nocturnal world that these characters inhabit feels so well realized and lived in. It’s a vision of the future that feels altogether probable. A mirror to what we’ve already seen Lisa Joy do in Westworld. What’s more, there is also something old fashioned about the way these characters carry themselves. From Rebecca Ferguson’s silhouetted first appearance, to Hugh Jackman’s ragged weariness, I’m getting very strong Kim Novak and James Stewart vibes.


Long story short, this feels like a movie that is laser targeted towards someone like me. So colour me excited.

Check out the Reminiscence trailer below and let us know what you think!


What’s Reminiscence About?

Nick Bannister is a private investigator of the mind who navigates the darkly alluring world of the past by helping his clients access lost memories. Living on the fringes of the sunken Miami coast, his life is forever changed when he takes on a new client, Mae. A simple matter of lost and found becomes a dangerous obsession. As Bannister fights to find the truth about Mae’s disappearance, he uncovers a violent conspiracy, and must ultimately answer the question: how far would you go to hold on to the ones you love?

Who’s Behind the Movie?
Reminiscence is written and directed by Lisa Joy. And If that name sounds familiar, it’s because she is one of the co-creators (read: geniuses) behind HBO’s Westworld. This movie, however, will be her debut directorial feature.


She has also assembled an incredible cast of players including Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson as Nick Bannister and Mae respectively, alongside Thandiwe Newton, Daniel Wu, Cliff Curtis, Oscar nominee Marina de Tavira, Mojean Aria, Brett Cullen, Natalie Martinez, Angela Sarafyan, and Nico Parker.

When Is Reminiscence Coming Out?
Reminiscence is scheduled for a simultaneous release in theaters and on HBO Max in the United States on August 20. It is currently scheduled for release here in Malaysia on October 7.

How many emerging female directors are impressive not only because of their directorial skills...but also because of their writing abilities?

Some impress, sadly because there is an emerging "inclusivity" activism around
Some impress because they are good at CGI-ed blockbusters ( usually assigned to male directors skills set)
Some impress because they try to attempt to tackle violent themes usually best cultivated by male directors

But do they impress because the ability to write the story/script and to direct it into a great movie highlights the all-around skills set.

How will Lisa Joy's debut in feature films be received?

JO

[jo]

From one of the media persons participating in the zoom presentation --

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REMINISCENCE

Reminiscence: Hugh Jackman Reveals Why He Joined Lisa Joy's New Sci-Fi Film
"I only wanted to do the film if Hugh Jackman would be the lead," said director Lisa Joy.


by
Simon Thompson


Posted June 3, 2021, 6:20 p.m.

Reality-bending sci-fi movies utilizing a blend of technology, memories, and dreams are nothing new. However, with Reminiscence, writer and director Lisa Joy has used real-world experiences and game-changing gizmos to bring something new to the genre table.

The filmmaker, who co-created HBO’s Westworld, came up with the idea while visiting family in the north of England.

You can check out the thrilling new trailer for Reminiscence in the video below:


“There was this plaque at my grandparents’ announcing the name of the home that said Suki Lin,” Joy recalled during a press call to launch the first trailer for her feature debut. “As a kid, that always was a subject of great fascination for me. My grandfather would always say that it was just a nice name. When he passed away, I was going through his things, and I found a really old photograph of this beautiful woman, maybe it was from some of his travels from when he was in the United Nations, and on the back, it was labeled Suki Lin. Something about her made such an impression that he named his house after her, and he kept that photo for those years. It made me think about memory, our lives, and the moments that pass by, but that meant something.”

The idea of fully revisiting memories for a moment is the fork in the road where the reality and the fiction of Reminiscence part ways.

The movie, described as a science fiction drama thriller, boasts an impressive ensemble cast, led by former The Greatest Showman co-stars Hugh Jackman and Rebecca Ferguson with Thandiwe Newton and Daniel Wu. Jackman plays ’a private investigator of the mind’ called Bannister, who helps people access faded and forgotten memories. When a new client, Ferguson’s Mae, comes on the scene, a search for memories opens a Pandora’s box of problems blending obsession, conspiracy, and a search for truth.


Reminiscence is set in a flooded Miami of the future but exactly when isn’t clear. “That was intentional for me because the future is catching up to us so quickly,’ Joy explained. The first trailer for Reminiscence showcases how the movie toys with tropes and embraces various genres, including film noir.

Joy added, “I wanted this film, at its core, to be relatable and present and, in a way, analog. I even asked for the colors in the set design to be warm-hued.”

Jackman signed up for the project without having seen a finished script. “I only wanted to do the film if Hugh Jackman would be the lead,” Joy admitted, revealing she emailed him and pitched him the idea at his home in New York.

In a move that sounds like a page ripped out James Cameron’s moviemaking playbook, one of the big selling points for the actor was that Joy was having an entirely new kind of tech created for the film. Instead of adding the visualized memories in post-production, the creation manifested the images for the actors to play to.

Jackman enthused, “When I first saw it, even though she’d explained it to me, it broke my heart that audiences might not believe that it was real, and go, ‘Oh, this is so extraordinary it must have been created on a computer.’ It’s just another example of how brilliant Lisa is to work with because of her empathy for actors and understanding that this is not just sci-fi; this is memory and humanity. This is our reaction to all these memories that are playing out. For us, it was technically so much easier.”

“It was magnificent,” Newton added. “I remember that up until we started filming, we weren’t sure that it was necessarily going to work because it had never been used before. I was supposed to be this hard-nosed character who had seen it all, done at all, and was jaded, but there we were on set with what I can only describe as like an art installation.”

“Hugh and Rebecca could literally use the technology as they were acting. Very often, as actors, you’re standing on stages with blue or green screens. Of course, it’s magical because you get to see the final product, but it is hard to keep the freshness of realism alive. Here we were able to interact with the newest form of technology available. I was also excited for Lisa because she had this idea, she had this dream, and forced a few people to make it happen. That’s not easy.”

Reminiscence’s first trailer also highlights the film’s action sequences, many of which involve Jackman and Daniel Wu.

“I’ve worked with many Chinese directors before, I’ve worked with a handful of female Chinese directors, but I’ve never worked with a Chinese American female director,” Wu mused. “We had so much fun creating this character. I’ve played villains before but not a villain like this where he’s so three-dimensional and human, but at the same time, evil. This is probably the first time you’ve seen a Chinese guy with a southern accent on screen.”

Joy added, “It was wonderful working with Daniel on this and creating a Chinese American character. That involved speaking my kind of Chinese, the dumbed-down Chinglish version that I learned at home. Daniel has this perfect accent, but we worked on changing his speaking to be this organic blend that happens when you are raised in a country but also speak the language of your parents.”

“And I learned so many new curses from Daniel,” the filmmaker concluded. “I’m going to use them one day. They’re so good. I only had innocent swear words until now, like calling somebody a butt.”

Reminiscence lands in theaters and on HBO Max on August 20th.

[jo]

[jo]

Very resonant with movie fans!

Not realizing that weaving these three elements together make for a different storyline

[jo]

[sohmerwood]

Just curious: has anyone heard if Warner’s decided to open the movie only in theatres? That was what was said at the end of the trailer.

[jo]

There have been announcements for both a theatrical screening and on HBO-MAX on August 20. At least in the USA.

In other countries where HBO-MAX is not yet operational ( there was an announcement that it was coming in parts of Europe but nobody knows if that has happened) -- it will be in theaters only.

In countries still under pandemic restrictions -- hopefully, there will delayed streaming on HBO-GO unless cinemas are eventually allowed to open --





Where none of these apply -- I guess we will have to wait for a home video (Blu-Ray/DVD) release

My main regret is maybe not being to see this movie on IMAX

Jo

[jo]

The rationale as to how Lisa Joy was inspired to write the story of REMINISCENCE will appeal strongly to women --

awfj.org/blog/2021/06/03/lisa-joy-on-reminiscence-dreams-and-hugh-jackman-rachel-west-interviews/

Lisa Joy on REMINISCENCE, Dreams and Hugh Jackman – Rachel West interviews
June 3, 2021 Rachel West Hugh Jackman, lisa joy, rebecca ferguson, Reminiscence, Thandie Newton
Westworld co-creator Lisa Joy is making the jump to the big screen with her feature film directorial debut Reminiscence. Starring Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson and Thandie Newton, the sci-fi thriller explores memory, perception, and dreams according to Joy, who also penned the script.

Set in Miami in the not-too-distant future, the city has become a partially sunken ruin surrounded by walls to keep flood waters at bay and stifling heat has driven residents to nocturnal living. It is here in this sinking coastal city that Nick Bannister (Jackman) makes his living as a “private investigator of the mind”. With technology and skills he honed as an interrogator during the war, Nick and his business partner Watts (Newton) help clients access and relive their lost memories, allowing them to re-experience their past in a full sensory experience. Eventually, new client Mae (Ferguson) shows up in Nick’s life and the jaded investigator falls deeply in love with her, until one day, she vanishes. Determined to find out what happened to her, Nick embarks on a dangerous journey into the past to discover more about the woman and the memory of her he so desperately clings to.

Inspired by her own personal family history, Joy opened up about her process in bringing the story to life in a virtual Q&A in advance of the film’s August release.

Following the death of her grandfather and the process of sifting through his old mementos made Joy “start to think about memory and our lives in general and the moments that passed by and maybe disappear.”

For Joy, the idea of life’s brief encounters – the ones don’t necessarily stand on their own as momentous occasions but shape our futures and who we become – is something that stuck with the filmmaker. The root of Reminiscence was formed through the idea of “something that changed us and touched us and how nice it would be to be able to go back to those memories fully for a moment, to live that life and feel the way you felt when you experienced them.”

While discovering elements of her grandfather’s past, Joy was also getting ready to welcome her first child, leading her to contemplate small moments in life.

“Around the same time, I was pregnant with my first child and I finished writing Reminiscence shortly after giving birth,” Joy explains. “And I remember holding her in my arms and any parent knows the sort of delirium that sets in when it’s almost like being drunk. You’re so tired. I’m rocking back and forth and smelling her little head and you have that special smell. And I thought, ‘I wish I could bottle this because she’s not going to smell like this [forever]’.”

“It’s those small moments that mean everything,” Joy says. She continues, “As exhausted as I was, that this was just a magical moment and more meaningful than college graduation or awards or fancy dates that people memorialize. That gave me the idea of how much of life that we value is in those small moments and how it’s universal, those moments of love and connection and beauty that you have. And what is the most amazing thing be to be able to revisit them?”

With the concept for Reminiscence in place, Joy spent her waking hours writing the script with one particular actor in mind – Hugh Jackman.

“I just knew when I was writing it, I knew it was him and I just couldn’t imagine anyone else. And then I was incredibly lucky because once Hugh said he was in, I knew I had to find his mate [in Ferguson]. And all I needed was somebody who could do tragedy, who could seduce but also be vulnerable, be witty and sing,” she says, adding, “It was like casting five different people.”

With Jackman’s character addicted to exploring the past for answers, Reminiscence also touches on the idea of perception and how one’s persona is shaped through the eyes of others, both in reality and in dreams. As Nick heads down the memory rabbit hole, he starts to piece together the Mae he is chasing might be closer to a dream, distorted by his own love-sick distorted perception.

“Everybody always wants their dreams to come true, but sometimes it takes a lifetime and a process of constantly reexamining what those dreams should be,” she explains. “I think kind of a peace and tranquility in who you are emerges ultimately when you learn to chase the right dream. You know, there are so many things that can sway us, each of us, that when we chase those things, they lead us astray. And Nick in this is chasing perhaps a dream. He doesn’t know anymore who this woman was.”

Nick’s obsession is born out of love and although facts that contradict his perception of Mae crop up on his investigation, he remains blind to her flaws and the darker elements of her persona.

“They often say that love is a kind of blindness, but I think love is the opposite,” Joy says. “Love is being able to fully see someone, their flaws and their virtues and still want to be with them. And then in a way, the blindness emerges when you choose to love that person.”

She continues, adding, “I think if you dream the right dream, you can find things that stand the test of time and find the right kind of blindness to live your life.”

Reminiscence opens in cinemas and on HBO Max on August 27.

[jo]

Amazing how the trailer is creating different audience expectations, and many correlating it with Inception.

This one thinks it is all in the Hugh character's mind and memory...including the image of Miami underwater.

But they are loving the sci-fi elements and believe Hugh will deliver the movie.

One thing, though -- they both agree it has to be seen in theaters...and if possible, on IMAX.

Jo

[jo]

Another fanart from the same artist --

/photo/1

[jo]

[jo]

I think I posted parts of this interview (by Lisa's first screenwriting mentor) sometime ago... but now that we have seen the trailer - it is interesting to look back at what inspiration Lisa Joy had when she approached writing the script --

Scott: Here’s a description of the plot: “An ‘archaeologist’ whose technology allows you to relive your past, abuses his own science to find the love of his life.”

This is set in the near‑future. It’s a fascinating science fiction, crime‑thriller script with a very strong emotional core to it. What was the inspiration for this idea?


Lisa: I think it was floating around in my mind. It’s hard to say where inspiration comes from. I remember I was in New York, and I just woke up one morning and I was like, “Oh, I think I have an idea.” It had been something that I was kicking around as an idea for a TV show for awhile.

But at the time, I’d actually found out that I was pregnant, and it was hard for me to staff and everything. The Writers Guild does not have maternity leave, and I was scared that I’d worked so hard to get into this career and what if it was all over.

Suddenly, when I’m thinking of this idea, I was like, “I have absolutely nothing to lose. I might as well write this exactly the way that I want to write it, with no thoughts about ‘sellability’ and no thoughts about appealing to certain people. I’m just going to write something that amuses myself, because there’s really nothing else for me to do for the next nine months.”

It’s a mix of some of the things I love. I love the movies To Have and Have Not, Blade Runner, Eternal Sunshine, and the novel “Slaughterhouse Five.” If you took all of those things, and some of my favorite poems, and put them in a blender, I think you’d see a lot of those influences and the kinds of themes and world that I wanted to explore.

Many of those who responded to the trailer mention INCEPTION as the inspiration. Not so, in this long-ago interview with Lisa Joy.

[jo]

The full (very long) interview --

gointothestory.blcklst.com/go-into-the-story-interview-lisa-joy-896b92235428



More Excerpts --

SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT*****SPOILER ALERT

Lisa Joy got her start as a Hollywood writer working for the ABC television series “Pushing Daisies,” then as writer-producer on the USA series “Burn Notice.” She wrote the spec script “Reminiscence” which made the 2013 Black List and sold to Legendary Pictures for a reported $1.25M. In addition, she (along with her husband Jonathan Nolan) is creator and co-executive producer of the HBO series “Westworld”.

Scott: I never realized you had been so private about your writing back then. I guess that class was when you took your first step‑out of the little private sphere of writing, yes?

Lisa: That was it. I’m still private. My husband and I are both writers. We’re co‑writing “Westworld,” but I never showed him “Reminiscence” until I sent it out to my agent.

Scott: Seriously.

Lisa: I don’t know. [laughs] It’s terrifying for me, frankly. I thought about writing under a pseudonym, but then I figured no one really knows who I am anyway, it doesn’t matter.

Jo's Note : Lisa's husband is Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher Nolan. The brothers co-wrote the script of THE PRESTIGE, some of the Dark Knight series, etc.

Some may have thought that Lisa co-wrote REMINISCENCE with husband Jonathan Nolan, but not so. In the interview, there is a cute story about Jonathan, then Lisa's boyfriend, giving Lisa a screenwriting software tool as a birthday gift.

It’s funny because there are scripts I’ve worked on, this one that I’m now using for the idea for “Westworld,” I worked on it for over seven years I would say, and never got it to quite the place I wanted to.

For “Reminiscence,” most of the time I spent on it in pregnancy trimesters. It was the first trimester I thought of it. My second trimester I finished the script. I just wrote in this delirious burst, and edited it for a while. We took it out and within two days it had sold.


Scott: The central idea of “Reminiscence”, that there’s this technology which exists in the near‑future where people can experience a startlingly real re-experience of events in the past, was that the very first thing you had for the story?


Lisa: Yeah, that was the core of the idea, the high‑concept hook. It came from a place where I’ve always been fascinated by memory. I think some poet said this, maybe, Billy Collins, I’m not sure, but he said that his biggest sins are cynicism and sentimentalism.

I believe the same thing could probably be said for me in that I honestly sometimes wake up at night so full of nostalgia for random things and moments in my life. Nostalgia’s its own kind of drug. There’s something beautiful about thinking back on a moment, and yet so tantalizingly frustrating about it, too…

It’s like when you look back at memory, you’re seeing things only in peripheral vision. Everything’s a little bit hazy, and you remember how special that moment was, but you can’t quite grasp it again with the same solidity you once experienced it. I thought, “What if you could?” I remember back in high school reading about the brain, and psychology has always been something that’s fascinated me.

I remember somebody told me when people have their brains operated on, sometimes when you touch certain parts of it with an electrical charge, it triggers memories. I don’t know how real that is. But for me it was an evocative enough thought.
What if every moment you ever experienced is still there locked inside you? Not just the thought of that moment, not just the memory of it, but the actual sensation of being in that moment. What if your own brain could be a time machine and take you back to a moment and immerse you fully in it?

What would you do with that power? How would you use it? How would you abuse it? What would the world look like? How would the world change? Out of those questions grew the script.



Scott: What’s fascinating about it is we always look for high concepts, strong concepts, and this one for a science‑fiction story is a terrific one. But also, it has an innate emotional and psychological element to it.
The idea that people would choose to pay money to have these reminiscing experiences, some of them even preferring to live in the past, suggests they are fundamentally connected to regret, or grief, or lust, or nostalgia, whatever. So what starts off as a technological idea really is a very human one.



Lisa: Yeah. For me, I’m always so interested in the emotional core and the character work of anything I write. I’ve written in a lot of different genres, I would say. But the thing that is first and foremost to me is, “Do I love the character? Do I empathize with them?” I even think you have to love and empathize with the villains you write, especially them, in a way. Otherwise it just becomes caricature.

For me it would be hard to write something where there wasn’t an emotional core to it. Memory has so much of that built into it. It’s a very ubiquitous human trait — to wonder about the past… the people you left behind… the things that could have been.

In physics they talk about time as being just another dimension. We think of it as very linear because that’s how we experience it. But what if you didn’t have to experience it in a linear fashion?

If you could go back as an old man to relive holding your child for the first time, or your wedding night, or talking to your parents again. If you could just relive that moment in all its fullness, would it be any less real or any less valuable than say sitting at the kitchen table eating some Cheerios in the present day? That’s one of the things that I wanted to explore.


Scott: One of the interesting themes of the story is time. You have the protagonist, a man called Bannister, and that’s the way in which he’s an archaeologist, he’s skilled in guiding clients into their memories and digging back through these layers of time back into their past. In fact, at one point he says, “I’m just a keeper of lost moments.” How would you describe Bannister as a character? What are his core issues?


Lisa: Bannister is a character who is a kind man, but it’s hard to see that kindness because he’s so buttoned up. Because of his job, because he’s so good at what he does…there’s an art to being an archaeologist, you have to give people the right prompt to lead people back into their memories.

But because he’s so good at that, and he’s seen so many people and the reasons that they go back in time to experience things, it’s given him a cynicism. It’s kept him at arm’s length from the rest of the world.
When he sees young lovers walk down the street, he knows that probably in five years they’ll be in the tank one of them thinking about the other. It’s made him a little bit jaded because he knows how ephemeral joy can be, how ephemeral love can be, and because of that he keeps life at a distance.

You get the feeling there’s something broken in him, something a little disconnected with the rest of the world, and something achingly lonely. He’s looking for a memory that’s worth keeping.

Scott: That dovetails right into the Mae character who becomes the object of Bannister’s rather obsessive pursuit. How would you describe her character?


Lisa: I was heavily influenced by classic noirs for the script and Mae’s character is no exception. Many noirs create very strong nuanced roles for women; but some noirs still have a bit of that femme fatale / damsel or sinner / saint dichotomy.
I wanted to work within the noir style, but subvert it a bit and flesh out the nuances in the female character to portray a complex and modern portrait of a woman.

I wrote this movie from Bannister’s perspective, a male perspective. This is a unique opportunity to write as a man observing a woman, to literally study the kind of masculine gaze it’s from. Bannister is an archaeologist and “archaeology” I think is the right word for how we find Mae’s character. It’s a dig. You have to search for who she really is.

I remember thinking about that in Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock had explored some of those themes. This is my meditation on that. You see her through Bannister’s eyes, and you see her as one thing. But what I wanted to do was to give her, her full depth as a character too. To peel back layer after layer and to go on this discovery with him, and as we learn more and more about Mae, we also learn more about Bannister — and the somewhat unreliable lens through which he views the world and Mae.

As a female screenwriter a lot of people say, “It’s harder for a female protagonist to open movies,” or “women can’t write men” or whatever. In my mind, that’s just all nonsense. You should ignore all that. What you should do is just write a character. Write a full, beautiful character that you fall in love with, man or woman. That’s how you get something true. Something that resonates.


October 14, 2013

Scott: In any science fiction story set in a different time or a different planet, there’s a certain amount of world‑building the writer needs to do. You’ve got that going on in “Reminiscence” with driverless cars, designer drugs, memory‑tank technology and whatnot.

But there’s a whole culture you develop around all of those technologies which is really interesting. Businesses like that Memorabilia Inc., a kind of chain store where people can go and get their memories fix. You’ve got these odd sort of New Orleans style funeral practices. Advertising in the sky, all this stuff. It feels very real and it’s quite entertaining. How did you go about creating that world?


Lisa: I had the luxury of time, in a way, where I sat down and I was writing the script spec, I was writing it to my own taste. Honestly, before I went into any theme, I would just close my eyes and sit there for quite awhile and think, “What is it like to move through this world?”

If it was boring me, I would say, “That’s not good enough.” I think the world that was created has bits of things that I love and find fascinating.

I’ve just taken little bits of culture that I witnessed when I traveled to Asia, or when I look at different parts of the United States, or when I’m in Europe, or anywhere, and I just take tons of things that seem strange to me at the time and just follow them through, strange but beautiful. That’s what I did.

I read this thing recently about how New York is built on the rubble of blasted European cities from World War II, and that if you were to dig down beneath say, FDR Drive, you’d find the landfill was composed of fragments of cathedrals, buildings and homes destroyed in the Blitz.

That’s how the archaeology of scripts sometimes works is that you have all these little pieces of the cities you’ve been to and the people you’ve seen. That part of creating the world of screenplays is to piece them back together, these broken Lego bits and create something all your own.

Scott: From a nuts and bolts perspective, much of the story is about creating a thread of clues Bannister has got to follow which in effect constructs the plot. I’m wondering how much of that came intuitively and how much do you think derived from your time working on TV with a series like “Burn Notice,” going from clue to clue, commercial break to commercial break.



Lisa: The most important one of the things about TV is it goes at such a pace that sometimes it can become predictable in some ways because you even know when the ad break is coming and what’s going to happen. You can just feel those rhythms. A part of it is it become intuitive.

But you also want to subvert that a little bit and make sure you throw in some surprises in TV and in film, keep things experimental a little bit and moving forward. I would say that from TV I learned the rigors of keep the story moving. Make sure something new is happening. Make sure you’re discovering new things at each turn. But not exactly in the same six act structure that TV would have necessarily.

To me, I wanted it to be more organic so there would be room for surprises that would surprise me. That I’d, if I stumbled across something and it seemed like a little bit of a digression, in TV I would normally cut that out, because frankly, you just don’t have time for network TV specifically. You have 52 pages.

Unless it’s really important, you just don’t have time for it on network TV. In the feature, you have a little more time to explore things and take small digressions, which you might not immediately understand the importance of those digressions, but later on I think they add to the fullness of the universe and help take a script to new level.
I tend to think that part of structure is learned. After writing and reading a lot of scripts, you start to get a feeling for: “Oh, God, the hero needs to be driving something forward at this point. He’s meandering around too much.” I guess its craft, and you just keep practicing until it becomes intuitive.

But I also think that part of it is like music. Not everybody’s a musician, but when you first hear a song, there’s a kind of “a priori” sense for the rhythm and flow of it. How things crescendo into a peak. Decrescendo into conclusion. When the chorus will come back and give you something to hang onto. When it’s going to really get going and have you swaying or clapping along.

Screenplays and music have that in common. Sometimes I don’t know why it doesn’t work, but I just know it doesn’t sound right. It’s not singing right, if that makes sense.




Scott: You mentioned the word “complicated” earlier in terms of your structure. You’ve got these reminiscing events and you have flashbacks, yet they’re distinct. I think in the script you say they have a distinctly different look.

Lisa: Right.
Scott: There are several of them. How challenging was that for you? How many to use? When to use them? How to use them? Did you do a lot of rewriting on that or did that lay out pretty easily for you?


Lisa: I did a lot of thinking on it beforehand, it wasn’t as much rewriting as it was a long and heavy meditation period beforehand.

I wanted to talk about memory’s fallibility and subjectivity. The thing about the archaeologist’s reminiscence machine is that when you go back in those memories, they are accurate. You are just pushing a button in your brain, and the exact replica of that memory is coming up. You don’t get the kind of subjective bias that you do in an organic memory.

Organic memories are fuzzy. They’re hazy, and you can get confused about did that really happen or was that something somebody told me? Did I embellish it over the years? Did I turn it to suit my purposes? Did I tell this memory as a funny anecdote so many times that the little embellishments I’ve added have now become fused in my mind to the actual memory?

You do lie to yourself about your own past, and I think you do invariably lie to yourself about your own past. They can be white lies, or they can be more malicious lies. But the way in which we think about the past is not honest.

It cannot be honest because our brain just does not conjure it back up with that level of detail, we fill in the blanks. We fill them out to suit our purposes.

I wanted to be able to juxtapose from the way Bannister remembered things for himself, or the way things actually went to illustrate that point and understand the Bannister character in terms of the lies that he told himself about the past.

SPOILER: Click to show

Scott: One final question about the script. The conventional last two words of a script: The End. Not in “Reminiscence.” In your script, you end with the words: “The Middle.”

Lisa: Right. The thing that influenced me structurally in writing “Reminiscence” was a format of a Rondel poem. In that poem, the first two lines of the first stanza are refrains, and they repeat at the last two lines of the second stanza and the third stanza. Basically, you have a poem progression where certain lines are echoed and tweaked in their repetition.

In a way, the structural underpinnings for “Reminiscence” are borrowed from that sort of poem. Because for me that kind of poem works like a memory, where certain memories tug you back again and again. I wanted to mimic that in the structure of the screenplay.

The last two lines, the words, of the screenplay wanted to point out that that was the structure that was happening, and to point out that an ending is not always an ending.

[jo]

We have been warned by Hugh himself

Reminiscence (2021) Poster
Reminiscence (2021)

Parents Guide

Certification
MPAA Rated PG-13 for strong violence, drug material throughout, sexual content and some strong language
Certification
United States:PG-13 (certificate #52921)


Sex & Nudity
Violence & Gore
Profanity
Alcohol, Drugs & Smoking
Frightening & Intense Scenes

[jo]

Wolverine II

[jo]

A little more detailed background --


www.slashfilm.com/reminiscence-details/

Everything You Need to Know About ‘Reminiscence’: Hugh Jackman, Director Lisa Joy, and More Pull Back the Curtain on Their Sci-fi Noir

Posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2021 by Ben Pearson


Reminiscence details
Since its premiere, HBO’s Westworld inspired its audience to become internet detectives, lighting up Reddit boards and social media with theories as they tried to solve the mysteries co-creator Lisa Joy helped concoct. Joy knows that viewers will want to get ahead of a mystery any time one is at the heart of a story. In her first feature film, the science fiction mystery film Reminiscence, hints about the plot can be found in the movie’s score, which is composed by Westworld‘s Ramin Djawadi.

The music is “incredibly important,” Joy explained during a press event yesterday ahead of the debut of the film’s first trailer. Each of the film’s main characters has a theme, and if you listen closely, there are clues in the score to help guide you to what’s really going on in this obsessive mystery tale.

We learned a lot more about Reminiscence from Joy and stars Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, and Daniel Wu. Here’s what you need to know.


A House and a Name
Reminiscence came about at an “interesting crossroads” in Joy’s life. At her grandparents’ home in the English countryside, there was a plaque on the stone house “announcing the name of the home, as if it were some kind of grand manor,” which she had been curious about since her childhood. In the wake of her grandfather’s death, she visited his home and among his belongings she stumbled across a photo of a beautiful woman with a name inscribed on the back – the same name that was on the plaque. The realization that her grandfather had this relationship that meant so much to him that he named his house after this woman but never spoke of her to the rest of his family made Joy “start to think about memory and our lives in general, and the moments that pass by and maybe disappear,” and “how nice it would be to be able to go back to those memories fully for a moment.”


A Wholly New Sci-fi World
Wrapping that core idea in trappings of action, thriller, noir, and science fiction, Joy came up with the idea for Reminiscence, which is set in the near future in a half-flooded Miami. The water has risen and there are walls in place to block more from encroaching onto what’s left. The story takes place in the aftermath of a war, and there’s an international community of people left within the city’s borders, disassociated from their past. Because it’s so hot during the day, all of the daylight hours have turned into siestas, and the city is now nocturnal.

During the war, technology was developed to interrogate enemies – technology that allowed people to fully relive their memories. Nick Bannister (Jackman) was an interrogator during the conflict, but now uses that technology to help people access lost memories or relive their favorites in a world that relies on nostalgia to help them get through the misery of each day. Bannister, whom Jackman refers to as “a fairly broken man” when we first meet him, runs a struggling business with his pal Watts (Thandiwe Newton), described by Joy as “the toughest lady there was” and a soulful, stoic friend to the protagonist.


Future Noir
One day, a mysterious woman named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson) walks into their office looking for a set of keys, and a torrid love affair sparks between Nick and Mae. “He’s not expecting anyone to rock him” the way Mae does, Jackman said, pointing out that his character falls for her – hard. But soon into this whirlwind romance, Mae disappears and Nick becomes obsessed with finding her. Joy said Nick goes into “a very dark world where he tries to investigate what happened to her, who she really was, and what she really wanted.”


That aspect sounds like – well, it sounds like a lot of movies, but the first recent film that came to mind was David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake, which starred Andrew Garfield as a loser who becomes obsessed with a missing girl. “As [Nick] goes down into this dark path of the underworld,” Jackman said, “he’s constantly getting fed information that should make him doubt, but he’s so sure in his gut that their love was real.”



A Mysterious Cast
As for the Mae character, she’s something of a cypher in the movie. “One of the first things we talked about was questioning your persona: the whole idea of who we really are,” Ferguson explained of her early meetings with Joy about the role. Notions of perception and identity were paramount to unlocking her depiction of Mae. “We are seeing this character build through the eyes of really every other character but herself, and I found that really challenging.”

On Nick’s quest to find Mae, he encounters St. Joe (Daniel Wu), a Chinese-American kingpin living in New Orleans. Wu says it will probably be the first time you see a Chinese guy with a Southern accent on screen, and after he was hired, Joy tweaked the character specifically for Wu’s strengths. “I wanted to use his physicality and soulfulness,” she said, describing him as a “formidable force, while also allowing us to see that the portrait of good and evil is never so black and white.” Wu filled in some of his character’s backstory: while Nick Bannister was interrogating people during the war, St. Joe was a victim. He was interned, escaped internment, and “out of survival, built up this world in New Orleans where he could be the boss and be the king of that world.” His character offers poor people an escape through the crime that he sells.


The Future is Real
Oh, and that hologram technology seen in the trailer? Apparently that’s real. Newton said it’s a “new piece of technology that was innovated for this project,” and she described it as almost an “art installation” – but one where the actors “could literally use the technology as they were acting.” Jackman expressed his own wonder at seeing that tech in action, saying that when he first saw it, “it broke my heart that audiences might not believe that this is real.”

And again, be sure to keep an ear out for Djawadi’s score. “We play with noir tropes in it, but I want it to be really updated – I wanted it to reflect the kind of swagger that Nick Bannister has,” Joy explained, mentioning that clues are seeded within the music.

As to exactly how far into the future this movie is supposed to take place, Joy wouldn’t go on the record. “I don’t actually say explicitly what year in the future it is, and that was really intentional for me because the future is catching up to us so quickly, she said. “I didn’t want it to feel like sci-fi set indefinitely far away. I wanted this to be really relatable and really present…I wanted the colors to be warm-hued instead of those cool lights.” She wrote this script in 2018, but themes like rising waters and the wealth disparity in America have only become more relevant since then. But filtering the story through a sci-fi lens was very important to her.

“Science fiction is metaphor on a grand scale for the things that we are experiencing in this world – for the tremors we feel underneath our feet that we know are going to become quakes at any moment.”

Reminiscence arrives in theaters and will be available on HBO Max on August 20, 2021.

[jo]

So many tweets eagerly anticipating REMINISCENCE!

[jo]

Intriguing -- seems to be right word to describe most reactions!

[jo]

And there are those intrigued by the romance angle --

Translated from Italian by Google

We recovered from the trailer for #Reminiscence ? **Eyes**

No **Face with hand over mouth**

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

Marina won an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress in ROMA!

[jo]

3 Million Views/33 thousand LIKES/2300 Comments on the WarnerBros Youtube site --






Expand to FULL SCREEN!

[jo]

Maybe it was at the EcoLodge --

where Hugh was spending time when he showed up at the MEDIA ZOOM CALL for REMINISCENCE, with a chicken in tow?


Jo

[njr]

Jun 6, 2021 9:00:32 GMT -5 jo said:

Maybe it was at the EcoLodge --

where Hugh was spending time when he showed up at the MEDIA ZOOM CALL for REMINISCENCE, with a chicken in tow?


Jo

What post are you referring to?