New thriller 'Anon' takes aim at privacy

Andrew Niccol has already given us a satirical snoop-fest in The Truman Show, and his latest thriller addresses very relevant issues in the high-tech world we inhabit, writes Esther McCarthy.

The way we watch film is rapidly changing and with it the politics of the movie business.

Just this week, the world’s biggest film festival, Cannes, opened without Netflix on board, amid a stalemate over traditional film distribution models.

As far as top filmmaker Andrew Niccol is concerned, changing realities offer movie-making opportunities.

His latest film, Anon, a thriller about technology and privacy, opens in cinemas this weekend but will also be available to watch at home on subscription service Sky Cinema (it’s on Netflix in the US).

“There’s a lot of what they call ‘day and date’ movies now, which I kind of understand, and it even relates to the film,” he tells me.

“I think it’s weirdly appropriate that people watch it on different formats. You can’t be a purist any more, I think, because people sometimes have better home theatres than you’d get at your local multiplex.

“For me it’s always about story, so to reach as many people as possible is the idea for me. For me, a story has to be able to work on any number of formats.”

While many filmmakers are wary of the TV/streaming models, Niccol feels they have much to offer. Is this because it’s getting harder to make movies?

“Yes and no. If you don’t have a character with a cape on, then yes, it’s hard to get a big studio to give you $100m unless it’s a franchise. On the other hard there’s a whole lot of new places that need, in the horrible term, content. Let’s say stories, it’s a nicer word. There’s all of these different places now that need stories.

“I think back to my first film, Gattaca. You probably can’t make that today at a studio, and it was made at a studio. The world’s changed and I guess I have to change with it!” chuckles the affable New Zealander.

With classics like Gattaca and The Truman Show, both of which he wrote, Niccol has become known for high-concept ideas. Anon, starring Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried, is a jittery account of a world without privacy, policed by the sharing of information.

It’s a world of such transparency that crime no longer exists. But while investigating a series of unexplained deaths, Sal (Owen) comes across a woman (Seyfried) with no identity who is invisible to police, threatening to bring the system to its knees.

Amanda Seyfried in Anon

“For a long time I’ve been wanting to do a film about privacy. About the war for privacy and how there was no war, actually, we gave it up without a fight, for convenience.” says Niccol.

“That’s always intrigued me. If you look at the current times, there are real echoes of that, how we’ve given away so much.”

The film’s extensive visual graphics show how characters are ‘life logging’ in their every day-to-day interactions, meaning privacy is impossible.

“Everybody’s walking around with a phone in their hands. They’re all on social media. So I just took a leap forward because if I could just put that in what we call your mind’s eye… I’ve just taken a leap in the technology.

“I had some narration in the beginning of the film originally, and then I realised that we’re actually so attuned to this idea of data technology that we live with, that I didn’t need the narration at all, I just jumped right over it.

"Because everyone understands that that’s what we’re already doing. You can’t go to a concert these days without it being filmed, without everyone having a phone in their hands. There are some artists that won’t even perform because they’re just looking down at a sea of cameras.

“Right now you and I are geotagging on our phones, so Google knows where we are. That may not matter to you but at the same time it feels like an intrusion. And with Cambridge Analytica we realised how much we’d given up. It came as a shock to a lot of people.”

Did the film come about from his interest in the subject matter or vice versa?

“Yes!” he laughs. I think it’s a bit of both. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time — there’s kind of a false choice, where people say: ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’.

"But I prefer what the girl says in the film, where she says: ‘It’s not that I’ve got something to hide. I’ve got nothing that I want you to see’. Of course, some people are more private than others, but I think it is a human instinct to preserve something of yourself.”

Andrew Niccol. Pic: Angela Weiss/Getty Images

Growing up in New Zealand, Niccol says, gave him a “beautiful perspective” when it comes to making his films. He feels that sense of distance from Hollywood was of benefit to his career.

“If I was born in the belly of the beast, if I came from LA, I don’t think I would write the kinds of movies that I write.”

Like some filmmakers, he moved into cinema through advertising. “I went to London pretty early on, to advertising which was my film school. At the time there was more storytelling, more of a narrative, in commercials.

Now it’s more style over story and it’s about imagery, but at the time it was genuinely more mini-films. It was a good film school.”

Still, a desire to tell bigger stories was driving him to write and develop ideas in his free time. “I just had a story that had been in the back of my mind for a long time which was The Truman Show, the first thing I really wrote. Colleagues around me were making that jump from directing commercials to movies. That was the impetus I guess.”

Written and produced by Niccol and directed by Peter Weir, The Truman Show was not only a bona fide hit but had a huge cultural impact, spawning thousands of features and TV debates on the nature of reality and privacy.

“There was no reality television when I wrote it. So if I had anything to do with that I apologise,” he says.

As a writer, he is constantly developing idea based in what he likes to describe as “parallel presents” which he says is his Trojan horse when it comes to bringing challenging ideas to the screen.

“I’m writing a couple of things, but I find when I’m working on more than one I get quite schizophrenic and characters start walking from one script into another. Ultimately it’s the stories themselves that decide: ‘I’m next’.”

Anon opens in Irish cinemas and on Sky Cinema tomorrow