Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

It’s been nearly a decade since Gore Verbinski’s last feature film A Cure for Wellness hit theaters, but the director best known for creating the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise hasn’t been slacking. “I’ve worked every day of those years,” the Oscar-winner behind Rango tells Filmmaker over Zoom. “We developed an animated musical. We recorded the entire soundtrack for an animated musical. We’ve developed multiple screenplays. I just find that sometimes the stories I’m most passionate about perhaps don’t satisfy the green-light committees’ process, and that’s fair. But I got to do what I do, and they do what they do.”
But now Verbinski is back on the big screen with the delirious Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. With a screenplay by Matthew Robinson, the undefinable flick stars Sam Rockwell as a time traveler who lands one night in a Los Angeles diner and explains that he needs to recruit a bunch of the patrons to help save the world from an all-powerful artificial intelligence. He’s been to the same place over 100 times before, but thinks tonight might be the night when he discovers the right combination of people to do the job. From there we flashback to learn the histories of his new team: There’s a pair of schoolteachers (Zazie Beetz and Michael Peña), a mother grieving the loss of her son (Juno Temple), and a girl in a princess dress who’s allergic to technology (Haley Lu Richardson).
During our interview, Verbinski walked us through his thoughts on AI and how he balanced the tonal shifts of the movie, which releases February 13. 
Filmmaker: How did this script land in your lap? 
Verbinski: This script was sent to me in 2020. It was dated 2017, so it had been kicking around for a while. I went and met with Matthew, the writer. We did a bunch of work, particularly on the second half, working on Sam’s character’s backstory and making it just a little more relative to how AI I think is affecting our lives currently. And, I don’t know, trying to make a psychotic opera.
Filmmaker: What were the elements of the story that lent itself to that “psychotic opera” description? 
Verbinski: I think it’s just the type of movie you don’t really get to make. It’s a strange time because you have the streamers enslaved by the algorithm and you have studios wanting sequels and everybody’s somewhat risk-averse, particularly in the theatrical context. You always leave it all on the field no matter what you’re doing. This one just felt like we knew immediately it was going to be scrappy start to finish. No studio was interested in making this movie, period.

Filmmaker: Why was that? 
Verbinski: Well, because it’s not a sequel. If you’re a studio, it’s an original IP so that’s off. I think you’d have to unwrap the algorithm to answer why a streamer wouldn’t be interested. I just think it’s not really defined by genre specifically. When I first got into this industry, the old-time producers would be like, “You can’t mix genres. That’s something you can’t do. If you’re a comedy, you’re a comedy. If you’re a horror movie, you’re a horror movie.” And I’m like, “Well, wait a minute. That’s how we got rock and roll. We mixed genres.” And now you’ve got vampire gangster movies or you can have people getting their heads chopped off in a rom-com. I think that’s all we do now is mixed genres. “But you can’t mix tone. Don’t mix the tone.” Well, maybe you can mix the tone. I think the movie is five movies with a different narrative. And why is tonight the night? He’s been there 117 times, but we’re telling you this story. It’s this particular group of misfits. I’m just a fan of the picaresque. We cast off the misfits in society, and then when all hell’s broken loose and everybody’s burning and on fire, the little boat of misfits comes back to land and save us. I think those are the narratives I’m interested in fundamentally. And I’m not interested in protagonists who are capable.
Filmmaker: How did you think about how you were going to play with the tones as you visually move into each different storyline?
Verbinski: We shot the movie in South Africa, and other than my editor, there was not one person on this film I’ve worked with before. I made a movie in Chicago once—[The Weather Man]—and as soon as I got off the plane, the driver said, “Where do you want to go?” And I said, “I want to take the transpo department out to dinner. Where’s a good Italian restaurant?” And he’s like, “Really? I’ve never been asked that question.” So he called his boss and I bought them dinner at their favorite Italian place. And I basically said, “I’m fucked without you guys. We’re doing three location moves a day on this movie. If you’re not with me, I’ll just get back on a plane.” In a similar way, this movie in South Africa, we got off the plane and James [Whitaker], the DP and I, met our two [camera] operators and just took them out to dinner and said, “We need to talk about composition in this movie.” 
I think in terms of the language of shot construction. If I read a script, I’m drawing in the margins immediately, “That’s a 27-millimeter closeup,” “This is a low angle.” That’s how I’m going to break the narrative down. Even though that opening monologue is very well planned, when you’re dealing with someone like Sam Rockwell, you don’t want the Kubrickian frame. You want the Hal Ashby frame. You want the Sydney Lumet frame. You want to give him some space because you don’t know what he’s going to do, and it’s all about tempo. By the end of the movie it starts to become more about the construction of very specific frames. There’s this analog versus digital mindset that was there from the beginning, breaking down things.
Filmmaker: This is one of the most fiercely anti-AI movies we’ve seen in a while. How did the conversations with Matthew evolve? 
Verbinski: Matthew, when he first conceived the piece, he had a specific notion of AI, and I thought the first half of his screenplay was brilliant, and so we didn’t do a lot in the first half. I have a particular view that I think Matthew came around to a little bit, which is I find that AI has been forced to study us through what keeps us engaged: what do we buy, how do we think, and what do we hate, more importantly. What keeps us on our devices? And I think the byproduct of that is it’s going to have our worst attributes ingrained in its source code. If we were created in God’s image and God’s need to be worshipped, then does that answer why we’re narcissists? I think there’s something about the fact that we’re birthing this thing and we’re also binding its feet and we’re doing things to it. We’re fucking up a child. We haven’t grown a child yet. I think it’s not going to be a HAL [9000] killing machine. I think it’s much, much worse. It’s going to want us to like it. It’s going to demand that we like it. I think just making our particular AI needing you to like it, demanding that you like it is what’s underpinning the villainy, which I think is more disturbing than “the humans must die.”

Filmmaker: How did you conceive of the visual language of the AI? 
Verbinski: In Matthew’s original draft there was this child in his bedroom [that represents the AI]. We just expanded the bedroom. Do you know this movie, Akira? The last 20 minutes of that movie, I don’t know what’s happening, and it keeps me coming back. The power of enigmatic imagery makes you want to come back. Particularly if you believe in game theory—or if you’re in numerology, or if you’re into triangles—come see the movie more than once because there’s a bunch of little coded messages in there for you. [I’m] not defining the visual style as something that can be summed up in your brain. You don’t see a lot of [surrealism] in American filmmaking. There’s not a lot of Fellini these days. And there is something nice when you sit on that edge. I don’t know how to put these images together in a cohesive way, put a bow on it and go, “That’s what that is.”
Filmmaker: What was your approach to Juno Temple’s storyline in which her son is killed in a school shooting? 
Verbinski: I think it was important to lay it out in a way that if you wanted to criticize the film, you’re actually stepping into the spotlight we provided for you, which is you don’t want to talk about the thing itself. You want to talk about how people talk about the thing. You want to just proudly say it, then you’re missing the irony, which is you’re criticizing people who are actually saying, “Look how we’ve normalized this.” Do you really want to be that person as opposed to the person who’s actually going to try to do something about it? Look at our society. We put a Band-Aid on a missing limb and keep going. Or change a tire, but the road ahead’s full of nails. I think it’s making that point rather succinctly.
Filmmaker: How are you feeling about AI now? 
Verbinski: I’m cautiously optimistic. I think I’m nervous, but I’m curious. I’m curious, and I’m aware of the cost of curiosity. Got a lot of burned fingers leaning in and touching things to see what happens. I don’t really love the idea that it’s writing poetry or songs or doing things that I think are primal to us as humans. I don’t want a story told to me by Meta, and I don’t want a story told to me by a committee. I don’t like a homogenized story.
I think there will be things that artificial intelligence is going to be helpful with. Because so much of the language model has been designed in and around what keeps us engaged, I think there are going to be a lot of flaws with that. Maybe because it has been trying to write songs for us and poems and things like that that it should have no business doing. Maybe by the time it does grow and become this evil, horrible thing, we can stop it from killing all of us because we can tell it a little poem. It’ll have mommy issues. These are its formative years and that’ll be the thing we’ll hang onto. I’m curious also a little bit about, well, what is it doing to us, but also what are we doing to it?