Ascher builds documentary around big questions
His latest project explores if real life is just a simulation
Building his latest documentary around impossibly big questions — a cheeky ’90s cyber aesthetic and the words of visionary author Philip K. Dick — director Rodney Ascher explores the labyrinthine terrain between science fiction and reality in “A Glitch in the Matrix,” tackling an age-old conundrum: Are we living in a simulation?
A filmmaker whose natural inquisitiveness lent itself to feature documentaries, Ascher explores another niche corner of humankind’s search for meaning and truth.
“I didn’t know that it was going towards horror; I thought it was going towards science fiction,” said Ascher, whose film premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is available on VOD and in virtual cinemas.
Blending sci-fi cinema and video game iconography, the academic theories of experts and firsthand musings from “eyewitnesses” who are transformed on screen into otherworldly CG avatars, “Matrix” explores wide-ranging implications of simulation theory with imaginative, pop culture-infused flair.
In its most controversial sequence, “Matrix” employs photogrammetry and computer animation to re-create the 2003 night when Joshua Cooke, obsessed with the 1999 film “The Matrix,” murdered his parents. The case spawned the “Matrix defense,” in which a defendant claims they believed they were in a simulation of the real world.
This interview with Ascher has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: You made this film before (the pandemic), but subjects are interviewed over Skype, through screens, and are even presented in avatar form. How prescient does that choice feel now?
A: It’s a very strange coincidence that a movie that is built on these Skype calls, these webcam video calls, is getting released into a world in which we’re all interacting with each other through these images. In some ways having an avatar speaking to people in these interviews, people speaking in their real world environments, might seem a little bit like a satire of the first few COVID-19 projects that have hit. Or just the way that we live. A very strange coincidence, but not the only one.
Q: Had you been thinking about simulation theory for a long time when you began developing (the film)?
A: One of the people I spoke to for “The Nightmare” believed in simulation theory. He was the first person who turned me onto the idea that it wasn’t just an idea from science fiction movies — it wasn’t just “The Matrix,” “eXistenZ,” “The 13th Floor,” but that people were taking it seriously and that physicists were trying to see if they could look at the end of the universe and whether it broke down into a particular scale of pixel, and what that meant. That blew my mind.
Q: After making this film do you, in fact, believe that we are in a simulation?
A: I have no idea. I think I understand Nick Bostrom’s three-part simulation hypothesis better than I did going in, although I don’t necessarily understand whether all three branches are equally weighted. And I don’t necessarily understand
the bleeding edge of quantum physics and where science comes down on simulation theory, although I do know that people smarter than me, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Elon Musk, think of it as plausible.
What I take away from it is more simulation theory as a creation story, as an article of faith: that countless traditions and cultures have stories that explain how we got here, where the universe comes from, and in many ways this could be just another one of them. I was surprised going into this and talking to people, how quickly it became a religious question — not just, “Is the creator some fifth-grader cramming for their exam over the weekend on another planet or in the future?” but, “If this is a simulation, what does that mean about our relationship to other people?”
Because the first fork in the road is, are we playing
“Pac-Man” — where you’re the only player and everybody else is a phantom ghost — or is this “Fortnite,” where every character is tethered to a real human being? Where you come in on that fork, whether other people are real too, has extraordinary ramifications for how you live. I see it in the people who mistreat service workers because they’re an obstacle along the way of getting what they want. How that phrase “NPC” (non-player character) has terrifying connotations of thinking of people that way, and that rippling out, was one of the surprises of this project.
Q: The Joshua Cooke sequence marks a turning point in the film … How did you measure how much of his story to include, and how to go about it?
A: In the early days, I had a big whiteboard with every idea I could think of related to simulation theory. One of the early ones was the “Matrix defense,” the fact that people had used simulation theory as part of a criminal defense to explain an insanity defense that they weren’t liable for their actions because they didn’t realize the real world implications; they thought they were living in a simulated reality. I wanted to get something about the “Matrix defense” into the film. …
(Producers) Rebecca Evans and Colin Frederick found Joshua, and Joshua’s at a place in his life where he’s just written a self-published book on Amazon, and he’s trying to reach kids to try to help prevent them from repeating his mistakes, trying to learn from what he went through and be a better person, work on himself and reach out to kids who are in a similar space. So he was anxious to retell the story.
Q: When you set out to find interview subjects for this film, you put out a call online. What kind of responses did you get?
A: There were maybe 75 or 100 people who wrote us, and I probably talked to 15 or 20 of them at a similar length to the ones … in the film. It’s been noted that all four of them are white men, and that’s certainly something I noticed in the course of making it. That was also who dominated the replies. I think it’s fair to ask: Is there something about simulation theory that appeals more to white men?
It’s certainly a conversation that’s worth continuing to have. Again, it’s a pretty small sample group so I’m not sure if it’s statistically significant or just the way that it broke in our experience. If the tech world is dominated by white guys, maybe there’s something reassuring to them that the creator of the world is more like them.