Drake Doremus sends Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult to an emotion-free future in "Equals"
Drake Doremus has made a name for himself as a filmmaker with quiet, contemporary relationship-heavy indies "Like Crazy" and "Breathe In," so his latest -- the sci-fi drama "Equals," starring Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult -- may seem like a bit of a departure. But Doremus insists to CBS News that the three are connected.
This seems like a departure from your other film work.
Exactly. I wanted to push myself to try to do something new, something foreign and something scary, and I think the genre presented itself in that way. I don't feel like I'm a sci-fi geek by any means, but I'm a super admirer of the genre, so I really wanted to explore a relationship against the backdrop of the genre and try to make something that was really warm.
How do you go about directing actors to play in a world where they're not supposed to have much of an emotional response to anything?
Gosh, it's so tough, man. That was probably the toughest part because, you know, we're used to doing the opposite, trying to create these really complex emotional things. I think that was the really tricky part because it was kind of the opposite of how we normally attack a film. We kind of had to start from scratch.
Given that this is such a departure, how do you approach explaining both the people you're working with and your audience the overall scope of your body of work?
The last three are very much cousins in a sense. I feel like "Like Crazy" is about confronting your past and dealing with your past and not being able to let go of it, and "Breathe In" is about not being able to escape the present and having to deal with the present, and I think this is sort of the future -- in a sense it is sort of a past, present and future trilogy, but I think that they very much are cousins in that sense.
This type of science fiction is generally pretty allegorical. Is there any message about contemporary relationships you would want audiences to take away from this one?
I think it's very much so a present-day, connective tissue story. It's really fascinating to think about how do you find your mate, how do you find your equal, how do you find a person you're supposed to be with? And it's really fascinating to think about the role that technology plays and how distant we are from each other, and just questioning that and thinking about that, I think, is a theme that very much feels contemporary.
It may be a small detail, but this is the rare futuristic sci-fi movie where the food actually looks good.
Well yeah, man, we wanted it to be artfully poetic. It's not a prison, it's a beautiful, wonderful place that maybe you want to be -- we wanted it to feel that way. Savoring the food and caring about the food and taking care of yourself as a human being and taking care of everybody else was a thing that was sort of the progression of the human race. If we have to start over would be very important to us.
"Equals" is in theaters starting July 15.