REMINISCENCE
From Westworld to new future-noir Reminiscence, she’s blazing a trail in the world of sci-fi, getting complex, original tales up on the screen. The writer-director tells us why she keeps swinging big, no matter what’s in her way
Lisa Joy, co-creator of Westworld, recalls the events surrounding her directorial debut, a sci-fi noir thriller with Hugh Jackman.
Like many of us during lockdown, the Westworld
co-creator, screenwriter, and now movie director used the time away from society at large to better herself. She taught herself the guitar, took up painting, and even learned to whittle. But surpassing all these endeavours is a new-found passion for embroidery, a sample of which she holds proudly aloft. It’s a vibrant tapestry of intertwining leaves, dotted with hand-stitched blossoms of viridian, scarlet and canary-yellow. Inside the floral wreath, the centrepiece comprises three short words sewn in flowing, cursive script: “TAKE NO SHIT.”
For the woman in charge of HBO’S labyrinthine sci-fi Western, who this summer makes her film debut with Reminiscence, an equally ambitious sci-fi noir, these are words to live by. After all, Joy has spent her entire life doing what people told her not to. A Harvard Law graduate who once counted Elizabeth Warren among her professors, Joy walked away from a lucrative law career with zero notice to join the writing staff on Bryan Fuller’s short-lived (though excellent) Pushing Daisies. Later, as the only female in the writers’ room for Burn Notice,
she remembers being routinely told that women can’t write action. Even as showrunner of Westworld (alongside husband and creative partner Jonathan Nolan), her elaborately staged action is often misattributed, viewers assuming that Nolan, rather than she, is primary architect of that show’s violent delights. Carrying the weight of other people’s preconceptions is, she freely admits, exhausting.
“I spoke Chinese at home, as opposed to English,” says Joy, the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and British father. “And it came with all these assumptions of the kind of food I would eat and the things I would be good at. I was constantly fighting this idea of what I could and could not do based on some trope that I had no kinship to. It’s maddening, because to get through a day, you can’t just be you, you also have to deflect fallacies about who you should be.”
Her parents’ idea of who she should be, it’s fair to say, did not include ‘Hollywood screenwriter’. While hugely supportive of her academic pursuits, they didn’t allow her to watch films or TV as a child and, aside from stolen glimpses on the occasional sick day from school (“I would surreptitiously put on Magnum P.I.”), it wasn’t until adulthood that Joy fully experienced the wonders of screen time. She vividly recalls working as an au pair for a family in New York and, once her young charge was tucked away in bed, settling in to watch old movies till the small hours, gazing wide-eyed as the magic of Hollywood’s Golden Age washed over her.
“To Have And Have Not, The Thin Man, Out Of The Past, I watched all these black-and-white movies, some of them noirs, some of them romances. I was struck by how stylish and cool the world was, but how underneath that there was so much rot. The women were strong, they could hold their own with sharp tongues against the men. You couldn’t talk down to these women, and that undercurrent of strength appealed to me. And then films like Vertigo, which grounds you in Jimmy Stewart’s perspective, but you’re following a narrator who is unreliable and blinded by his preconceptions of who people should be. That’s certainly something that you see in Bannister.”
Bannister — or, to give him his full name, Nick Bannister — is the protagonist of Joy’s first film, her attempt to take those noirs she loved in her younger years and give them a complex, modern spin. A former army interrogator, he operates out of a dingy back-alley office, slashes of streetlight filtering in through half-drawn blinds. His desk is a mosaic of papers, the office strewn with empty whisky tumblers and full ash trays. With his trench coat, snub-nosed .38, and gravelly voiceover setting the scene, Bannister is every inch the gumshoe Bogart, Mitchum or Lancaster might have portrayed 70 years prior.
Reminiscence, while set in the near future, is very much rooted in the past. It’s a timeless noir in which Hugh Jackman’s irascible P.I. has his world knocked askew when a mysterious woman in a red dress (Rebecca Ferguson’s Mae) steps into his office, bringing with her a simple case that, naturally, proves to be anything but. It is, as so many noirs before it, a love story wrapped in a gritty mystery, one in which dirty streets wash clean but filthy consciences don’t.
“There was something about the ability to build a world in noir, but to take the character archetypes they have, keep the strength but add even more layers,” Joy says. “Because when you understand the trope as shorthand, then it’s like, ‘Okay, how are you gonna subvert it?’”
The answer, in part, was a sci-fi slant that substitutes 1940s LA for 2030s Miami, and makes
Bannister an investigator not of physical clues, but of breadcrumbs scattered across the human psyche.
IT STARTED WITH MEMENTO. MORE
specifically, the film’s US premiere, where Joy — still toiling away in the legal world, only there as a friend’s plus one — first met director and future brother-in-law Christopher Nolan. Along with his dashing younger sibling, who had penned the story upon which the film was based.
“I met Jonah and was like, ‘Man, I always wanted to write something on memory.’ Which must’ve sounded so bizarre coming from somebody who had nothing to do with the film industry. But I just remember thinking, ‘He beat me to it!’”
The idea never went away, though. Even after Joy — who gained Bryan Fuller’s attention after writing a spec script for Veronica Mars while studying for the bar — transitioned to become a full-time writer. It wasn’t until she and Nolan met with J.J. Abrams about the rights to ’70s sci-fi Westworld that ‘memory’ resurfaced.
Between them, Joy and Nolan turned
Michael Crichton’s somewhat daft film about robot cowboys running amok into an uncompromising, deeply intellectual slice of hard sci-fi that explored the nature of free will, sentience and what memory actually means when your remembrances are nothing more than programmed subroutines. But even that didn’t fully scratch the itch.
So, a decade after her initial discussion with Nolan, while heavily pregnant with their daughter and in the process of giving birth to the couple’s other child, the pilot for Westworld, Joy sat down and wrote Reminiscence. It was a crime thriller about a man whose profession was to sift through people’s memories, letting them return to their childhoods, revisit lost loves and wallow in the pleasures of their former selves — for a reasonable fee.
“It came around the time when I lost my grandfather,” Joy recalls. “It was painful for my grandmother to look back. She didn’t want to look at the photos because it was too difficult — too close and yet too far away. That’s why memory has this sweet sting to it. Why nostalgia is both so intoxicating and so painful: because you are coming tantalisingly close to a moment you miss, but you know you’ll never get back there. And I thought, ‘But what if you could?’”
Enter Nick Bannister, who, through a process that’s part therapy, part guided meditation, allows his clients to slip seamlessly into the past — an opportunity rendered all the more appealing when the present and future have less and less to offer.
Joy’s Miami, while set only ten years hence, is Greta Thunberg’s nightmare. Sea levels have risen and a drowning America fights a losing battle against the encroaching tide. Waves lap against high-rises as commuters bob past in sloops and rowboats. While the poor wade through brine-drenched streets, the rich hole up in the Dry Lands: sprawling, inundation-proof enclaves surrounded by towering, concrete flood barriers which divert the torrent towards less salubrious neighbourhoods.
Neither a gleaming, chrome-plated ifuture, nor some grimdark dystopia, Joy’s sci-fi vision is rooted firmly — and uncomfortably — in our tomorrow. It was, for her, a perfect backdrop for an ‘updated noir’, a story that took hints of Vonnegut and Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and Eternal Sunshine, and used them to tell a classic, hardboiled mystery. The gambit paid off. After a furious bidding war, Legendary Pictures snapped up the script for a tidy seven-figure sum in 2013, just two days after Joy took it to market. Reminiscence then appeared on the prestigious Black List later that year.
Westworld, meanwhile, became all-consuming. Joy and Nolan wove their complex tapestry, leading viewers through The Maze, while toying with notions of reality and fantasy. It wasn’t until 2019 that Joy turned her eye back to Reminiscence, using her Westworld clout to earn a director’s chair and finally turning her tale of memory into reality.
Joy had written the character of Bannister with Jackman in mind, so after dropping him a casual email (which you can when you’re showrunner of one of the hottest series on TV), she popped round for coffee and secured her lead character: “Wolverine meets Humphrey Bogart”.
Almost more important than her hero, however, was the subject of his obsession. Because, as is so often the case with noir, ultimately it all comes down to the woman in the dress. Ferguson’s Mae is an enigma, a promise in human form and, as with all femmes fatales, partly a false projection of male expectation.
Subverting gender assumptions has become a fixture in Joy’s work, from Westworld’s Maeve (Thandiwe Newton, who also appears in Reminiscence), the brothel madam who can manipulate the very fabric of her world, to Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) — designed as a victim, but who supersedes her programming to become a terrifying force of nature. In twisting these archetypes, Joy has consistently wrongfooted her audience. It’s a theme that continues in Reminiscence, which plays with the way we choose to see the people around us.
“Part of the idea of rebelling against tropes is that, as a woman, you’re surrounded by them all the time,” says Joy. “So it makes it so deliciously fun to say, ‘Alright, this is probably how they see it: beautiful girl in a red dress walks into a bar — this is what you think. She’s nice to you — this is what you think. Ooh, she did drugs — this is what you think. Right? And to take those different lenses and use it to propel a mystery where the truth can only be revealed when you learn to see beyond tropes.”
Bannister’s journey, then, is as much about opening his eyes as solving the central mystery. To look past the mirage he’s constructed and see Mae for who she is, instead of who he wants her to be.
JOY, LIKE THE WOMEN SHE WRITES, HAS
never conformed to expectation. Never been willing to fit inside the box society provided for her. Yes, she can now embroider, but she’s also giddily enthusiastic about martial arts (“I tried to become a ninja, but nobody was hiring ninjas so I had to be a lawyer”). She delights in old-fashioned love stories, but her true passion lies in directing bone-crunching fight scenes.
“The stuff that really gets me excited is personal, with one character battling another where the choreography in and of itself tells a story.”
Joy’s only previous directing experience has been Westworld Season 2 episode ‘The Riddle Of The Sphinx’ (in which she has Ed Harris force-feed a glass of nitroglycerine to a Confederate soldier), but with Reminiscence she arrives as a fully-fledged action director. Joy uses her singular environment to stage a succession of inventive set-pieces that include a desperate, balletic struggle in a sunken music hall and a frenetic shoot-out during which Hugh Jackman gets a face full of eels.
“It’s those little flourishes that make it different,” she laughs. “The unlikely ways in which people will fight and surprise you. In that one I have Hugh Jackman, Wolverine, one of the best action heroes in the world. But I wanted to show him helpless and in a psychological space where he’s dealing with an eel problem!”
Her feature debut in the bag, Joy is currently in the process of prepping Westworld’s fourth season, and will soon head to these shores for pre-production on another sci-fi series, Amazon’s The Peripheral. She also has an adaptation of
retro-future video game Fallout in development and spent a good portion of lockdown — when neither sewing nor whittling — writing a companion piece to Reminiscence, one that may cement her status as the current queen of sci-fi.
“It’s a distant cousin, not a sequel. It’s an evolution in theme and a conception of the world and man’s place within it. Plus, there’s a lot of action.” She grins. “I wanted to create a new type of action. It’s taking different bits from different cultures and kind of fusing a new way of approaching action that I think will be exciting.”
Reinventing the action genre is quite a claim, but one Joy makes matter-of-factly, with hint of neither ego nor hubris. She isn’t trying to make a statement; she’s simply doing what she loves. Some will scoff, of course. After all, what does she know? She’s just a girl. It’s the same tedious stereotype she’s been pushing back against her entire life.
“Have you ever played Werewolf?” she asks. This, she goes on to explain, is a party game in which a group of players sit in a circle, each assigned the role of either villager or werewolf. During the game’s ‘night’ turn, the wolves secretly mark villagers for death, while during the ‘day’ survivors try to build a consensus to uncover the monsters among them.
Ten years ago, while working on Burn Notice, Joy, then a junior writer, was invited to participate in a game of Werewolf with a group of industry heavy-hitters. Eager to make a good impression, she accepted.
“It’s a game that operates on social paranoia,” she explains. “It was all yelling at each other and I just kept getting killed. They’d be like, ‘She’s a useless player, kill her!’ And I’d just die and die and die. The crippling self-doubt and insecurity that came from a supposed leisure activity with a bunch of dudes who were far more powerful than me thinking I’m an idiot was so miserable.”
Despondent, Joy went home, keen to put the experience behind her. “But Jonah was like, ‘You have to go again. They completely underestimate you. That’s the only tool you have, so use it.’”
Despite the prospect of further humiliation, Joy returned the following week. She was, she recalls, chosen as the werewolf, the game eventually coming down to three final players.
“I pretended to be the person they thought I was: incredibly stupid. Each of these two guys jockeyed for me to side with them and vote the other one out. Out of three people it was inconceivable to them that I was the werewolf. And it was because I was stuck in a trope. They were blind, but that’s how powerful tropes are.”
The outcome? “I absolutely annihilated them all and then never played again.”
Underestimate Lisa Joy at your peril. Because she isn’t ‘just’ a girl. She’s also the werewolf. And she takes no shit from anybody.