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Self/Less Director on What He'd Change About Underrated, 2015 Ryan Reynolds Sci-Fi Thriller
What do you know about shedding?
A year before he brought Deadpool to the big screen and irreparably shattered the fourth wall of comic book cinema, Ryan Reynolds took center stage in the highly underrated sci-fi thriller, Self/less.
Now streaming on Peacock, the film — directed by The Fall's Tarsem Singh — brilliantly mashes together elements one might recognize from Altered Carbon, Get Out, and Total Recall in a unique genre tale centered around dying real estate tycoon Damian Hale (Academy Award-winner Sir Ben Kingsley), who yearns for immortality. For a small fortune, he has his consciousness transferred over to a younger, fitter body via a revolutionary process called "shedding."
The procedure, Hale is assured by oily academic Albright (Matthew Goode), is completely safe and harmless. Damian's led to believe his new persona, Edward Kidner (played by Reynolds, whom Singh describes as "the funniest guy you’ll ever meet in your life"), was grown in a lab, but when he starts having disorienting flashes of what appear to be memories from someone else's life, he sets out to discover the terrible truth behind his sip from the fountain of youth.
Self/less director Tarsem Singh reveals what he'd change about Ryan Reynolds sci-fi thriller
Speaking with SYFY WIRE over Zoom, Singh explains his intention was to make a "classical" type of thriller, "because every film I’d done up to that particular point had been fantastical."
Apart from the overt sci-fi premise that sets the story in motion, Self/less is a pretty grounded — and surprisingly emotional — yarn about a failed father who gets a second chance to be the loving parent he always should have been. "I wasn’t so interested in the science of it. I just looked at that as a MacGuffin," Singh admits. "If you can, in the future, afford to download your brain into somebody else’s, it’s never going to be a straight transfer. But if it’s going to happen, what are going to be the learning curves?"
As we soon learn, however, the bodies used in the process of shedding are not lab-grown blank slates, but actual people who have willingly terminated their own lives in order to become vessels for the rich, powerful, and brilliant. This doesn't sit well with Hale, especially once he realizes his donor (badass Marine Corps veteran Mark Bitwell) left behind a wife and young daughter.
While Singh doesn't have many regrets about the movie — "I wanted to tell a classic thriller tale and I think it stands up" — he does wish he'd done more to set up the big reveal, which doesn't arrive until 40 minutes into the runtime. "I just thought it was happening so late," he adds, voicing his wish that he could go back and open the film with "a real hardcore action piece that doesn’t make sense until [later]."
The sequence would have involved a daring rescue mission that audiences would eventually connect back to Mark's military service in the Middle East.
"I even remember the piece of music I had in mind was from Rage Against the Machine," Singh continues. "A lot of times when they’re [going for] shock and awe during torture or an attack, they’ll play music really loudly, so nobody knows what’s going on. A chopper would come in with some really loud, hardcore music and just shock the people who are holding somebody hostage in a building. [Another chopper lands] and this team would come in and extract somebody ... That doesn’t make any sense in the film until you come in and realize, ‘Oh, that must have been one of [Mark's] missions.’ I wish I’d fought for it because I think it would have given me a little more license to have the audience engaged as opposed to making them feel for a guy who’s dying and then he gets a body ... But somehow, I think for budgetary reasons, I never really fought hard for it and it went away. I saw the film recently and I just thought that original instinct would’ve worked. I would’ve bought myself some time to get into the story of Kingsley and [get the audience] wondering when the two paths were going to cross."
Another disappointment for Singh was the fact that he wasn't able to film Kingsley's handful of scenes at the start of production. "It was a scheduling problem," he says. "If we could get Kingsley to play his part first, then Ryan could ape those parts like it was the same guy in a different body. But unfortunately, the schedule did not allow that ... [It] was a pity because Ryan would have liked to do it the other way, too."
Self/less is now streaming on Peacock.
