Risky robots reap reward

Kim Nguyen discusses working with hexapods for his latest film, Eye on Juliet Chris Knight

W.C. Fields once said, “Never work with children or animals.” To that, Kim Nguyen can add: “... or robots.”

The Montreal director’s newest film, Eye on Juliet, tells of a strange encounter between the male American operator of a remote-controlled six-legged security robot and a young woman in the desert near her North African home.

The exact place and time are left unclear. “It’s a parallel reality thing,” says Nguyen at the North American premiere of his film at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. “We wanted to have an outdated technology in today’s world.” Someone in the film refers to the futuristic ’bots as “vintage.”

The robots are real, not digital effects, promises Nguyen. “I Googled ‘coolest hexapods in the world,’” he says. He found an engineer in Portland who was making robot critters in his spare time. Production designer Emmanuel Frechette crafted their final look, and then Nguyen and his team took the robots to Morocco.

“First day of filming they worked for five minutes and then ‘ZZZZT’ they died on us,” he remembers. “I freaked out. I was like, how could you be so careless as to assume that these would work? Luckily enough, after the first day, the programmer did 24/7 work on programming and fixed the robots.”

He adds: “It’s funny, because they got better as the film went along. We could do more stuff and more humanistic reactions. So at a certain point, we redid a shot that we had at the beginning of the film.”

And why work with real robots? “There’s something about the real deal. I really wanted to have real robots because, in order to be able to relate, it had to be real.”

In addition to the hexapods, Eye on Juliet stars Lina Elarabi as Ayusha, betrothed to an older man she doesn’t love, and Joe Cole as Gordon, the Detroit-based drone operator who becomes increasingly obsessed with helping her. “The theme of isolation in today’s world and human’s yearning to get closer together” is how Nguyen puts it.

Nguyen has previously made films about human connections in remote places and extreme climates. War Witch (a.k.a. Rebelle) told of a pregnant teen in war-torn sub-Saharan Africa. Two Lovers and a Bear was set in the Far North.

But he grins when the topic of technology comes up, calling his hexapods in the desert “a distant homage” to C-3PO and R2-D2 on Tatooine in the original Star Wars movie. “I’m a geek,” he admits. “I subscribe to Wired.”