You Only Live Twice

More secrets from the minds behind Self/ less

Sir Ben Kingsley doesn’t share Damian’s fear of death. “Life is finite, not infinite,” says Kingsley. “I think it’s an odd and rather dumb aspiration to want to live forever, because you will remove all the wonderful ingredients that drive you to fall in love, have children, to build monuments. I think we healthily translate our mortality into things that may have a life after we’ve gone. But as soon as you know you’re going to live forever, I bet you that all of your ambition goes.” Although writers Àlex and David Pastor are SF veterans, many of their influences weren’t genre- related. “The more interesting references are the ones that don’t even belong to the world of sci- fi, or even film,” says Àlex. “We’ve talked about Steve Jobs. The Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, definitely inspired the character of Damian. The title means the opposite of selfish, but if you break it down it seems to suggest a disembodiment, a lack of a true identity, or a sense of self.” Self/ less takes place entirely in the present, in a world where the secret of mind transfer technology is hidden under the surface. “We feel a special attraction to the ‘ 30 seconds into the future’ branch of sci- fi,” says David Pastor. “It allows you to connect directly with the audience… We took a page from the Inception playbook, where Nolan presents a world where the technology that allows you to infiltrate dreams exists, but he never tells you how it actually works.”

sci- fact! Kingsley has high praise for Self/ less director Tarsem Singh. “Tarsem is a man from the Indian subcontinent where they completely accept the idea of reincarnation, destiny, face, cause and effect, karma, and finishing unfinished business,” says Kingsley. “Because he has this great bigger picture of the universe, I feel extremely secure in Tarsem’s mythology. He embraces love, life, loss, separation and redemption. All this comes from his massively rich heritage.”