Roger Spottiswood, 6th Day film director, interviewed about Bond, Arnie and his crazy life in fantasy film making

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Roger Spottiswood, 6th Day film director, interviewed about Bond, Arnie and his crazy life in fantasy film making.

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Do you condone cloning?

RS: "Well, cloning organs is a good thing. Genetic engineering does have a lot of offer, although there are a lot of ethical issues, a lot of problems to be addressed."

But isn't it playing god?

RS: "Well surgeons play god now, they pick and choose who is going to save lives. With genetic engineering they are now creating new tuna, new salmon, new wheat. Scientists just have created a salmon that grows to three times the size and reaches maturity in half the time. Who is the first world to say that the third world can't grow genetically engineered flatfish to eliminate Africa's starving?"

"The issue we are addressing in the Sixth Day is what if you could clone people. It's been around for a while, the script is over four years old. Genetic engineering is becoming a big issue, and I suspect it will be covered with increasing frequency. The issue in the '80s was nuclear stand-offs and terrorism this will be the next big concern. The film is just meant to raise issues you can agree or disagree with. Would you have a soul if you were made in a laboratory?"

How did Arnie do bearing in mind his heart operation?

RS: "He was disgustingly fit. Extremely fit."

How much input did you have into the story line?

RS: "We both wanted to make sure the villain of the piece was not written in a cardboard, black and white way. To make him more intelligent and rational. At no point was AS worried about his character - he recognised the script had to be believable and the villain more credible."

Were you after action Arnie or actor Arnie?

RS: "This was always going to be a suspense thriller rather than an action movie. There is action in there, but 6th Day is not ten big action scenes one after another. One of the great things about Schwarzenegger when you see the work he's done, Total Recall, Twins, etc. is that he likes to reinvent himself. You'll see a lot more of his acting in this film."

What templates did you use, and what films did you draw upon for 6^th Day?

RS: "I didn't want this film to be Bladerunner because of the issue we were trying to address. I thought it would be much more interesting and relevant if it was set in our world. I wanted the setting to be accessible, something you could connect to - not some strange, alien place. I think that makes it much more scary. Most the things that we have in the film are familiar. Repet is a kind of Disney Store with bright lights and branding - the world has got a lot more commercial with hologram adverts in the streets. It's easier, more comfortable, even wonderful … but there's undercurrents of unease."

Why the title, the Sixth Day?

RS: "We've posited a world where the US government have passed a law called the Sixth Day Law, after the phrase from Genesis about Man being created on the sixth day. The law was passed after the first experiment in human cloning has gone wrong, and the film is set 10 days later."

What's your perception of the differences in making big films like the Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, and your less commercial work like Noriega?

RS: "It's much quicker. It took me six years to raise £5m for Noriega - for the Sixth Day it seemed like we got £90m virtually overnight. Of course, with Noriega, you don't get big audiences, you make no money … all you get are good reviews."

How do you pitch that to a studio?

RS: "Well, personally, I favour complete honesty. Which much be very refreshing for them. I go into the room and I say 'I promise you that this film will make no money at all. Not a bean. You shouldn't make it. In fact, I recommend you don't touch it."

That must be tough.

RS: "Well, the cable people like HBO and Showtime, they like to do thing sometimes just because they're interested in it. They can cover their losses by packaging such films with their commercial stuff. They can say, buy these seven films, six of which will be great crowd pullers, and one of which will be something Like Noriega. Because I have been completely up front with them about its commercial chances, they don't feel cheated and say things like 'well, we're never doing anything with him again." For these kinds of movies you have to be patient."

For the Sixth Day it was easy, it pitched itself. It was already in existence as a script with Phoenix Pictures for years, but the script had never been right. It needed to be fixed."

Was there any deleted footage from the movie?

RS: "No, there's hardly any deleted scenes. Almost every scene made it through."

Were there any worries about the film being overtaken by real scientific breakthroughs in genetic engineering?

RS: "Not really, because there's plenty of things in the film that are way ahead still. Okay, the possible cloning of pets has been announced in Wired, but cloning of humans is still far off, and the scanning of minds into clone bodies is at least 50 years away. Also we've got ideas in the film like altering the clones to be say, fitter or bigger.

<Ed's note: There was a funny scene in the movie where AS snaps at a hovering repet salesman that he's worried about leaving his daughter with a large cloned animal with sharp teeth that he doesn’t know. And the salesman retorts that he can have the dead pet cloned with soft teeth, or even choose the fur colour to colour co-ordinate with his furniture.>

Did you have science advisors on set?

RS: "No. Advisors read the script, and they had real doctors advising on the cloning facilities, but they weren't on set. The whisper craft were based on experimental Pentagon designs that have been knocking about for a while."

As the man who redefined screen violence in Straw Dogs, how do you feel about violence and media now?

RS: "There's some tiny truth in it. I mean, you go down to East LA and watch the kids in the arcades and then see how well they shoot each other on the streets, you know they've been getting some serious practice in somewhere. But it's all so stupid to accuse the media. None of the politicians have the courage to touch the guns and really do something about it. Those gutless fools should ban the guns. Look at Canada. They have the same films as America, the same arcades. They have no guns and the murder rate is well below 1%."

And your next film?

RS: The Spire. By William Golding.

<Ed's note. Golding, whose most famous book is Lord of the Flies, tells in The Spire the story of a Dean, Jocelin, whose obsession is to add a 400-foot tall spire to Salisbury Cathedral. All, including the builder, tell Jocelin that this is impossible, as the building lacks adequate foundation. Nonetheless, Jocelin persists, going mad in the process.>

Did Schwarzenegger feel he needed a hit after the negative reviews over his film, End of Days?

RS: "I haven't talked to him specifically about End of Days. I suspect he knew the film didn't work. That's why we were both obsessed with getting this script right and smart. We wanted a good, interesting film, which is always about the script. The movie is now in FX production. You can take 5-6 months to generate a 2 second shot - it's enormously complicated."

How do you see humans evolving?

RS: "I would recommend you read 'why the future doesn't need us', an article by Bill Joy, the creator of UNIX, which appeared in Wired magazine. Its about how technology, specifically nano-technology will replace us - first as spare parts within us, eventually evolving into an entirely artificial, life. Bill is very much for science, but he sounds a very cautionary note."

The questions he raise, which were echoed in the film, is how can society adapt to this new technology, to have an input into things which are currently being driven by corporations and governments. Flat Earthism isn't an option. I was in Rome and met an Italian journalist and we talked about the Pope's position on genetic engineering, which is not now, not ever. We got into an argument about how condoms in Africa - which the Catholic church have prohibited - could have stopped or slowed Aids. Now we have 40 million dead and dying. How can you explain that morally?"

Would you do another Bond movie?

RS: "Well, I was glad I did The World is Not Enough, but I wouldn't want to do another. A Bond movie is a sort of technical puzzle. I though I could change the formula, the puzzle, and it would be fun. Fun to try once, that is. They let me move the Bond opus a tiny bit. I had an oriental girl in it as the main Bond girl. I thought the story made a bit more sense. I moved it maybe 5/10%. The original script was set in Hong Kong before the handover of the island back to the Chinese. There was a mad tycoon who wants to blow up the island before this happened with a nuclear reactor underground.

"Unfortunately, shortly before shooting began, the script was passed by a consultant on foreign affairs - Henry Kissinger - and he put the nix on it. He didn't want us to shoot a film that would be coming out when the island really was being handed over in case something happened in real life that would make the film look ridiculous. So I needed a new script, and the film had to be delivered on the same date. And oh, nobody was to find out about it, because we had to keep our theatre slots."

How did you cope?

RS: "Well, I was told to have a scene with Ericsson featuring prominently, because they had paid millions for a prominent placement. I also wanted to do a great car chase. So I thought, right, we'll have Bond sitting in the back seat driving his car with an Ericsson phone, and we'll film it in a parking lot, because we can shoot that anywhere in the UK and there's plenty of carparks that can be found."

"BMW wanted to have their hatchback in the film, but it looked ugly, so I wanted a seven series - which they didn't want because it was being phased out. They had paid a lot of money to be placed in the film, so we agreed it'd be a seven series, but I'd add a BMW bike chase too to give them something extra as a trade. In the first week I had planned four scenes totally independent of the non-existent script."

How did you choose locations for Bond?

RS: "Well, we picked a country to shoot Bond in, and it was Vietnam, which was a big mistake. It started fine, we had found locations, hired staff, even signed an agreement with Vietnam's Prime Minister. We were about to fly out - we were actually sitting in Heathrow at the time - when we got a call saying they had changed their mind and we were refused permission to film. I immediately switched the flight to Bangkok and on the flight out we hired 10 people while still on the plane. On the first day of arrival we found the streets with the rooftops where we'd do a lot of the filming."

Did the studios meddle much?

RS: "My big clash was the scene where Bond sleeps with Paris <played by Lois of Lois and Clark fame, of course>. The studio executives felt Bond would never sleep with a married women. I thought, well he shoots them whether they're married or not - so he can damn well sleep with her too ! But you can't blame the studio. Bond's like a little family cottage industry. They've got a little money pot, something that works, and they want to keep it the same, keep the franchise going. They're inherently conservative and they want to live up to all the Bond traditions."

Back to 6^th Day. Did you have to reshoot many scenes?

RS: "Not often more than once or twice. A lot of that depend on the chemistry of the actors."

Did you have any product placements in 6^th Day?

RS: "Well, 6^th Day was very different from Bond. I wanted to create a world where there was far too much advertising. In terms of money we got nothing out of the placement in 6^th Day. Pioneer gave us lots of screens for the sets, which would have been nearly impossible to obtain <Ed's note: there were some Pioneer holograms floating around the shopping mall>, General Motors gave us some cars, but there was no exchange of money."

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