Short Movie Story: Siri Grows a Conscience
The one theme I never stop being fascinated with is the relationship between technology and how it affects how we live and relate to the world.
How in the past century it has seen such an insanely fast development to be both terrifying and fascinating. I have spent a good decade, mostly in my 20s, writing about video games, and that has trained me to take the way we interact with our machines very seriously, as there is nothing more serious than games.
After shooting ATM, I was jonesing for another narrative project, but I also wanted to make it as easy to shoot as possible. ATM was far from being a large production, but it still tried to be much like a mainstream comedy. I discovered that trying to produce independent work while mimicking mainstream products was a fundamentally bad idea, but I still did not have the tools—technically and artistically—to look for different models. But I could make something smaller: one location, one actor.
Not long after Apple released its “digital assistant”, Siri, I realised that the same voice is also one of the voice-over options in macOS, so it's easy to have it say anything. To use it as an actor.
This was 2013, and the hype around Artificial Intelligence was not as high as it is now, yet we used machine learning remarkably similarly. Most people were mediating their lives through smartphones, in constant dialogue with them. Siri was one of the first mainstream attempts to give people a way to interact with their devices through “natural language”, meaning in the same way that we speak to each other, human to human. But we have communicated with our computers since the beginning, via terminal commands first, then through visual interfaces. But that is so different from how we communicate with other humans that it feels like a completely different action. Yet, it’s not.
Thinking about this made me wonder if I could write a short movie based on that idea. So I wrote Siri Grows a Conscience, one of the very few times I had a story idea that could actually be set in a single place and a single actor, by having our protagonist going through a crisis, and her phone, with a pinch of magic, becoming self-aware.
Madelyn Marcella in a short from the short
I wrote the film with Madelyn in mind; she was acting with my friend's theatre group, and I really admired the mix of warmth and determination in her performances. She agreed to play the part, and I asked Cédric and Eva, at that point close friends and collaborators, to help with the short. Once again, we got to use gear that was way beyond the scope of the project for the time, going again with the RED Scarlett Cédric got just before we shot ATM.
Writing this was quite fun: looking back, I realise this is almost a variation on the “genie in a bottle” story, but one where there are no wishes to grant other than the wish to understand the world a bit better. Or maybe that makes this more of an “alien who fell to earth” story. Siri can’t quite understand human thinking. And crucially, in what now seems like a pretty strange line, she is compelled to grow a conscience, something that discussions around AI seem to be constantly skirting around. The knowledge that the processes behind the manufacturing of our tech were, at least in part, very cruel, was very clear and well-known ten years ago. It is still, even now, even if it has been in part normalized.
Madelyn, in her effort to explain our world to her, clears up her head, and her feelings. It’s a story about communicating, and how it’s always an erotic act when done properly, in the sense that it’s a constant exchange of energy between people (or… entities, in this case) who pay attention to each other and doing so pay attention to the moment.
Siri’s Conscience Transformation Sequence
We didn’t shoot that much. This must be among the projects where I used almost all of the footage we shot, or at the very least over 50% of it. Looking back at this, I wonder why I didn’t design it as something to send to festivals. This is more suited to festivals than ATM is. I think that I guessed that using Siri’s voice could be a copyright issue. Once realizing that I figured that there was no point in holding back on copyrighted material. I still think that using Michael Bolton is one of the funniest parts of the short and a sideways homage to the best Lonely Island skits of all time.
I'm still very impressed by the way Madelyn manages to convey emotion by playing basically against nothingness. Thanks to her, Siri's blank voice is infused with humanity and expression, and the dialogue works quite well - even if now some of the rhythms of the exchanges feel a bit stilted. It’s a tricky thing for a non-native English speaker to get a good feel of the rhythm of an adopted language, and watching this now I think I was still working on that.
Looking at this now, it probably looks like a sort of Black Mirror Lite experiment. But I actually never saw that show at that point, it had just started and it was not that big a deal yet.
This is another case of ideas just being in the ether: given how much technology is impacting our everyday lives, stories about this phenomenon are bound to be a big part of our storytelling landscape. I didn't even see Her when I shot this. It came out a month or so after we shot this short, and that's even closer to what this story is aiming at, even if with a radically different style to it..
This was shot in literally just a single evening; there was not much in terms of lugging equipment around, since we shot at Cédric's and Eva's house. It came together quite fast, and I quite like the way it came out. It felt a lot like the process I was used to when I was doing student films: I even composed a very simple soundtrack for it.
Once again, it ends up being more melancholy and meditative than funny, even if it's, in many ways, built like a comedy. It's just something that happens when I put a project together, I guess: magical realism is something that I end up embracing even when I am not trying to, like gravity.
