Hot Spot Director Agnieszka Smoczyńska on AI and 1984

Agnieszka Smoczyńska didn’t want to remake 1984. She wanted the version where you say yes.

Agnieszka Smoczyńska knew where the 1984 comparisons were going to land, and she built Hot Spot to sit somewhere else.

Her new film — in theaters Friday, Aug. 21 from Focus Features — takes place in a society run by an AI its citizens call the head. It keeps them safe. It keeps the water and the power on. It also hears everything. In the near-future sci-fi thriller, private detective Djonny investigates a murder in a society governed by a sentient AI system.

The Orwell read is right there. Smoczyńska turned it down on purpose.

“I didn’t want to be too close to George Orwell, 1984,” she told The Nerd Wire. “Because I think today there’s a different system of control. You think this is your choice as a human being, and you are a part of it. And you agree — because of your safety, because of the safety of your beloved ones. But this is a huge compromise, and it’s a kind that you are not free.”

That’s the whole design. The head doesn’t grind people down; it takes care of them. Smoczyńska said she and screenwriter Robert Bolesto weren’t building a future at all.

“Our main goal with the scriptwriting with Robert Bolesto was to recreate a world which we have currently, nowadays, like today,” she said. “We are all the time connected to the internet, and this is our choice. And everything, what you are doing, everybody — it can be heard, it can be noticed.”

Why Hot Spot’s AI Is Built on Consent, Not Force

In Hot Spot‘s history, the head wasn’t installed by a coup. It was accepted.

“The society chose the AI to protect them and to give resources, to give water, to give energy,” Smoczyńska said. “It is a kind of the society agreement. Common agreement.”

Which is what makes the older characters interesting: they remember the before. Djonny, played by Andrzej Konopka, was a child when there was no head. So was Ayka, played by Reika Kirishima. They opted in. They know what they gave up.

And Djonny — a detective, and by Smoczyńska’s own description the system’s cop — doesn’t fight it.

“He is the guy of the system. He’s the policeman of the system,” she said. “And what also I like, that he doesn’t rebel. He doesn’t fight with the system.”

That’s a rare thing to build a genre protagonist around. The audience gets no rebel to root for, at least not in the lead.

The Hot Spot Line That Captures Smoczyńska’s Warning

Ask Smoczyńska what the film is actually about and she goes to a line spoken by a child character, Zen — one she says stopped her cold when she first read Bolesto’s script.

Zen says he remembers being alone when he was very small. Now someone is always with him. He misses loneliness the most.

“That line struck me when I was reading the script,” she said, “because for me it’s the DNA of today. That’s our feeling and how we live — that we have to be all the time connected. And you can’t hear your own thoughts.”

(The Nerd Wire is quoting Smoczyńska’s account of the line, not the film’s dialogue.)

Why Noomi Rapace’s character is called a witch

Rapace plays Rana, whom the film’s marketing has been calling a cyber witch. In Smoczyńska’s telling, Rana isn’t the story’s villain so much as its accelerant — the outsider who cracks Djonny open.

“He meets somebody from the outside of his world,” she said. “It’s a kind of accelerator, a kind of trigger to his own emotions, to his own fears, and that’s what he desires. And you don’t know if that’s what he feels — if this is witchcraft, if this is love, or this is his breakdown.”

Smoczyńska is explicit that the breakdown reading is on the table, and that it’s partly a midlife one: “I think it’s a kind of a breakdown. He comes the crisis. And this is also a metaphor of a crisis of the middle life crisis.”

The witch framing, though, is doing older work than the cyber part suggests.

“People from Middle Ages, they always blame women,” she said. “Because they were different. Because men thought that they have power — that they are maybe not dirty, but they are powerful, they are evil.”

Her point lands on the men, not the witch: “This is also the metaphor that you blame somebody, or you blame outsiders, because of your — when you have problems.”

How Art Creates Freedom From Hot Spot’s AI System

There is one crack in the head’s coverage, and it belongs to an artist. Ayka is a singer, and Smoczyńska says her voice can knock people loose from the system for a moment.

“She can disconnect people for a second from the head,” she said. “It’s also the symbol how art can sometimes — you can disconnect from the, maybe not from the system, but give you a little space of the freedom.”

Not a revolution. A second of quiet, which in a film whose central complaint is that nobody can hear their own thoughts is roughly the same thing.

On directing Konopka through it: the exterior is deliberately silly — “he’s a little grotesque as a character, because his costume, it’s a pastiche a little bit” — and the interior is not.

“The emotions have to be real,” she said. “He had to be connected with his own fears and with his own desires and with his own feelings, because then the viewer can be connected with the character.”

Hot Spot opens in US theaters Friday, Aug. 21.

Quotes are from The Nerd Wire’s interview with Agnieszka Smoczyńska, lightly condensed for clarity.