Director Royce Gorsuch – 2017 USA 106 min West Coast Premiere – Cyberpunk
A young mad genius attempts to ‘hack the mind’ in order to fix humanity. During the course of his experiments Mason accidentally gives physical form to his inner voice, Finn, and the pair must work together to stop the opposing forces attempting to coopt the same technology for evil.
. –Bears Fonte
Director Royce Gorsuch on the color palette of his cyberpunk film: I worked in commercials earlier for several years before the film and I was actually doing a completely different style. In those commercial works they were documentary-style, very natural, natural light, real humans – non-actor style. So this film Mindhack is completely the opposite of that. It’s totally lit, it’s hyper-real, it’s not real, it’s scripted…it’s all those things that my old work was not, and I actually really love both styles. Mindhack was really a place for me to explore doing more hyper-real, sci-fi cinema, which is what I ultimately want to do. I did bring in some of the elements of my documentary work into Mindhack, in certain scenes to make it feel more real, to make it feel more intense and sometime we’d do very classic framing. But in terms of colour and lighting, I’m a huge fan of cyberpunk. I love cyberpunk, Neuromancer by William Gibson is my favourite book, it’s influenced me my entire life. This was a place that I finally got to explore that on my own terms. It was a very purposeful decision to go with the colouring that we did because I wanted to make the world feel sort of extra real and I didn’t have a very big budget and it’s a sci-fi film and so the way that we could do that was with our colour and our lighting. The way that I view the film also is that I always thought about it as a mini-graphic novel, that is the hidden graphic novel on the shelf. It’s not the blockbuster Marvel title but is like a cool little comic book, and that’s the way that we lit it and the way that we cast it in a way. That was kind of the ethos of the film, we’re making a mini-comic book movie and that’s the way we shot it. (Source: The Hollywood News)
