film - A Scanner Darkly film
Photograph by swanksaloton Flickr.
The following extras are film National Film Board of Canada included: the theatrical trailer; Weight of the Line, an animation tales feature; One Summer in Austin, a short documentary on the filming of the movie; and audio commentary from actor Keanu Reeves, director Richard Linklater, producer Tommy Pallotta, author Jonathan Lethem, and Phillip K. Arctor has serious brain damage from his withdrawal from Substance D.
Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney are among the film s executive producers. Hank assumes Fred is one of the drug users in the Arctor household, but does not know which one, and actually orders Fred to focus the surveillance on Arctor.
Hank reprimands Arctor for becoming addicted to Substance D while undercover, and warns him that he will be disciplined. After Barris supplies information to the police on the terrorist organization that Hawthorne and Arctor supposedly belong to—including a recording that Hank immediately recognizes as fake, synthesized on a computer—Hank orders Barris held on charges of providing false information to the police, which he assures Barris is merely a cover to protect him while the information is evaluated. Entertainment Weekly felt that the commentary track was friendly and aimless , but that the featurette on the rotoscoping process, a lot more lively . .
Dick s novel, in which Dick lists people he knew who have suffered serious permanent physical or mental damage (brain damage, psychosis, pancreatic trauma, etc.) or death as a result of drug use. It is revealed that the police had intended for Arctor to become addicted to Substance D; his well-being was sacrificed so that he might enter a rehabilitation center unnoticed as a real addict in order to find conclusive proof of New Path s crimes.
A highly addictive and debilitating illegal drug called Substance D, made from a small blue flower, has swept across the country. Meanwhile, Barris secretly contacts the police and tells them he suspects Hawthorne and Arctor are part of a terrorist organization.
Arctor spots rows of blue flowers hidden between rows of corn. Rotoshop animation, however, makes use of vector keyframes, and interpolates the in-between frames automatically. The animation phase was a trying process for Linklater who said, I know how to make a movie, but I don t really know how to handle the animation. Originally, the film was supposed to be released in September 2005.
Pallotta wrote a personal appeal and pitched a faithful adaptation of the novel to Russ Galen, the Philip K. Some of the shorter cues were assembled into longer CD tracks. Having never been intended for mainstream audiences, A Scanner Darkly opened in seventeen theaters and grossed $391,672 for a per-theater average of $23,039.
Barris implies to longtime friend and near-insane Substance D addict Charles Freck (Cochrane) that he has made advances toward Donna only to be refused, and suggests that Freck supply her with cocaine in order to attract her attention away from Arctor and convince her to lower her drug prices. Hank orders Fred to step up surveillance on the members of the Arctor household. Mackey was an influential philosophy professor at the University of Texas at Austin; he had appeared in two of Linklater s previous films.
A Scanner Darkly was filmed digitally using the Panasonic AG-DVX100 and then animated with Rotoshop, a proprietary graphics editing program created by Bob Sabiston. It was important to him that Dick s estate approve his film.
A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 Animated film directed by Richard Linklater based on the novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick s daughter, Isa Dick Hackett.
Dick estate s literary agent who shared it with the late author s two daughters (Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett) who own and operate their father s trust. For the dual roles of Bob Arctor and Fred, Linklater thought of Keanu Reeves, but figured that the actor would be burnt out from making another science fiction film after making The Matrix trilogy. Linklater assembled the cast for two weeks of rehearsals in Austin, Texas before principal photography began in order to fine-tune the script. As a result, Arctor is no longer able to distinguish between his roles as a drug user and undercover policeman, which makes him incapable of performing his job.
After Barris arrest, Hank reveals to Fred that he has figured out, through the process of elimination, his true identity, and that his identity is indeed Arctor. Most of the animators were hired locally with only a few of the 30 people having movie-making experience. Animation and training for the 30 new artists had begun October 28, 2004.
In late November, Mark Gill, head of Warner Independent Pictures, asked for a status report. However, Hawthorne refuses Arctor s sexual advances and Arctor s housemates question the true nature of their relationship.
In response, or perhaps using the drug as an excuse, the government develops an invasive, high-tech surveillance system capable of monitoring any person at any time and puts in place a network of informants and undercover agents. Bob Arctor (Reeves) is an undercover agent assigned to immerse himself in the drug underworld and infiltrate the drug supply chain. Hank then informs Arctor that the whole point of the surveillance was to catch Barris, not Arctor himself; the police suspected Barris of being involved in the Substance D ring, and they were setting him up by driving up his paranoia level until Barris cracked and tried to cover his tracks with the false info.
Linklater discussed the ideas and inspiration behind his use of rotoscoping in a UK documentary about him in 2004, linking it to his personal experiences of lucid dreaming. There were no finished sequences as the majority of animators were still learning to implement the film s highly-detailed style. The studio increased the budget to $8.7 million (it was originally $6.7 million) and gave Linklater six more months to finish the film. A test screening was scheduled for December 2005 and went reasonably well.
Dick. It grossed $5.5 million in North America and $2.1 million elsewhere. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote, it s the real world or what we perceive the real world to be that makes for the more obviously bad trip, not scary little pills . Entertainment Weekly gave the film a C- rating and Owen Gleiberman was unimpressed, writing that the film is more fun to think about than The DVD was released in North America on December 19, 2006 and in the UK on January 22, 2007.
As the film ends, Arctor hides one of the blue flowers in his boot, so that when he returns to the New Path clinic during Thanksgiving he can give it to his friends (in the narcotics department). The end credits feature an abridged version of the afterword of Philip K. After Arctor leaves the office, Hank heads to the lockers to remove his scramble suit, and his true identity is revealed to be Donna Hawthorne, something not explicitly included in the book. At New Path, Arctor experiences the severe symptoms of Substance D withdrawal.
Arctor is surprised to learn his own true identity and he begins to act extremely confused and disoriented. Linklater adds another name to the credits and dedicates the film to the memory of Louis Mackey.
The film saw some expansion in later weeks but did not earn back its $8.7 million production budget. He also sees a shaved-headed Charles Freck at the clinic, another addition to the original story. Sometime later Donna, using the name Audrey, has a conversation with another officer named Mike (seen undercover as an orderly at New Path), in which both reveal that New Path is responsible for the manufacture and distribution of Substance D.
Arctor hopes to buy so much Substance D from Hawthorne that she is forced to introduce him to her supplier, but Arctor develops romantic feelings for her. They are heavy drug users, and they pass their days by taking drugs and having long, drug-inspired conversations. When Arctor is at the police station, he is codenamed Fred, and hides his identity from his fellow police officers by wearing a high-tech scramble suit that changes every aspect of the wearer s appearance.
After finishing the film, Reynolds set to work on remixing the surround sound music into stereo. Additionally, the CD includes exclusive remixes of Graham s music by DJ Spooky and Jack Dangers (Meat Beat Manifesto).
Barris unknowingly tells this to Arctor himself at the police station while Arctor is wearing his scramble suit (i.e. He died in 2004. Originally, Richard Linklater toyed with adapting the Philip K.
The film was screened at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and the 2006 Seattle International Film Festival, and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2007. In the future seven years from now , America has lost the war on drugs. The film tells the story of identity and deception in a near-future dystopia constantly monitored by intensive high-technology police surveillance in the midst of a drug addiction epidemic.
A revised release date was set for March 31, 2006, but Gill felt that there would not be enough time to mount a proper promotional campaign and the date was pushed back to July 7, putting the film up against Pixar s Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man s Chest. The score (more than an hour s worth is in the film) was provided by Austin, Texas-based composer Graham Reynolds. While a disturbed Arctor begins to break down, Hank phones Donna and asks her to take Arctor to New Path, a corporation that runs a series of rehabilitation clinics.
Arctor s superior officer, Hank, like all other undercover officers at the station, also wears a scramble suit. While posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to Substance D, a powerful psychoactive drug which causes a dreamy state of intoxication and bizarre hallucinations; chronic users may develop a split personality, cognitive problems, and severe paranoia. Donna/Audrey was part of a greater police operation to infiltrate New Path, and Arctor had been selected, without his knowledge or consent, to carry out the sting.
This is similar in some respects to the rotoscope style of filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. He then selected 44 minutes out of the film score in order to craft a listening CD while attempting to retain some feel of the arc of the film.
Rotoscoping in traditional cel animation originally involved tracing over film frame-by-frame. Arctor befriends an attractive young woman named Donna Hawthorne (Ryder), a user of cocaine, Arctor s supplier of Substance D, and part of the drug scene.
These flowers, referenced throughout the film, are the source of Substance D. Extensive on-set footage of the filming of A Scanner Darkly was featured in a UK documentary about Richard Linklater directed by Irshad Ashraf and broadcast on Channel 4 in December 2004. After principal photography was finished, the film was transferred to QuickTime for a 15-month animation process: interpolated-rotoscoping.
A Scanner Darkly was released in July 2006 in limited release, and then widely released later that month. Dick novel Ubik but stopped early on because he was unable to obtain the rights and he couldn t quite crack it. After completing School of Rock, Linklater told Pallotta that he wanted to make A Scanner Darkly next.
To give the film its distinct look, the movie was filmed digitally and then animated using interpolated rotoscope over the original footage. The film was written and directed by Linklater, and stars Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Rory Cochrane. In the meantime, the household members are extremely paranoid that the police have bugged their home and are watching their every move.
Linklater approached Reynolds in 2003 after a club performance and suggested Reynolds create the score for A Scanner Darkly. The composition and recording process took over one and a half years (the unusual time allotment was due to the film s time-consuming animation process) and was done in Reynolds east Austin home, in his bedroom. The album is available from Lakeshore Records and includes the score by Graham Reynolds featuring the Golden Arm Trio. They are dubious if there is still enough of Arctor left to find the evidence. To continue his rehabilitation, New Path sends Arctor to work at an isolated New Path corn farming prison.
Arctor and his housemates, Ernie Luckman (Harrelson) and James Barris (Downey Jr.), live in a suburban tract house in a poor Anaheim, California neighborhood. in his job as Fred). Due to Arctor s heavy use of Substance D, he apparently develops cognitive problems which stop the two hemispheres of his brain from communicating with each other, and as a result he is receiving two different sets of information that are in conflict.
The paranoia reaches extreme levels, and Arctor seems to become wrapped up in the concern of his housemates, even forgetting that he is the undercover agent spying on his justifiably paranoid friends. Dick includes his own name on the list, as Phil, a victim of permanent pancreatic damage.
As part of the rehabilitation program, Arctor is renamed Bruce and put through psychological reconditioning treatments.
