QPORIT

THE FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER
51st NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2013

Closing Night Gala Selection
World Premiere of Spike Jonze’s

HER
Spike Jonze’s HER, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde and Scarlett Johansson will make its World Premiere as the Closing Night Gala presentation for the upcoming 51st New York Film Festival (September 27 – October 13).




Written and directed by Jonze, HER is set in Los Angeles, in the near future and follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a complex, soulful man who makes his living writing touching, personal letters for other people. Heartbroken after the end of a long relationship, he becomes intrigued with a new, advanced operating system, which promises to be an intuitive and unique entity in its own right. Upon initiating it, he is delighted to meet “Samantha,” a bright, female voice (Scarlett Johansson), who is insightful, sensitive and surprisingly funny. As her needs and desires grow in tandem with his own, their friendship deepens into an eventual love for each other. HER is an original love story that explores the evolving nature—and the risks—of intimacy in the modern world.






A brief note on human-computer conversations
Almost since computers were invented, there have been computer programs that respond in one way or another to user input with output that (dynamically) simulates response from an intelligent creature. 

Similarly, in films, these interactions themselves have been simulated with scripts that portray interaction between humans and computer programs.

Naturally, scripts can portray a more sophisticated interaction than actual programs can (at least for now). (It's easier to write a single scripted dialog for a movie than multiple scripts from which the dialog must be extracted dynamically by a program.)

In movies, the interaction is usually between one person talking and the computer responding vocally. Sometimes the conversation is not just with a voice from a program in a desktop or mainframe computer, but a program embodied in a robot – which is essentially a computer with a physical body. Of course, the interaction is fixed by the script. (Everytime you watch the film, the dialog is the same; as compared with a program for which every time you talk to it the dialog can be different.)

One early and very famous example of human computer dialog in movies is HAL_9000 from Kubrick’s SPACE ODYSSEY 2001 (1968), where HAL was a major villain.

A nice robot who interacted with humans was Number 5 from SHORT CIRCUIT (1986).

STAR WARS of course introduced R2D2 AND C-3PO.


Computer programs can interact with humans dynamically, to create a real-life human-computer dialog that can evolve in real time. It can use either voice input, with voice recognition to convert the speech into words, or just words themselves entered as text. Similarly the computer can respond with text or vocally, by converting its text response to speech.

The most significant current examples of real-life dynamic person-computer voice interaction are SIRI from APPLE and voice recognition programs on ANDROID devices. There is also a voice recognition program available for anyone to use or develop with called DRAGON from a company called NUANCE.

In the real world, a very famous early automated chat program was ELIZA, (specifically an algorithm called “DOCTOR”). The program simply picked a key word in an input sentence and constructed a new sentence from it in a very general way, based on a simple set of rules. But it could still produce an impressive conversation (kind of a parody of a psychiatrist talking with a patient). 

For example, it could respond to “My name is Mary” with “Hello, Mary. My name is ELIZA.” (note that here, the RULE is: REPLACE “My name is NAME” with “Hello, NAME. My name is ELIZA.”) Or it could respond to “My head hurts” with “Do you know why your head hurts?” (RULE: REPLACE “My ‘WORDS’” with "Do you know why your ‘WORDS’?”) Early versions of ELIZA were chat based: that is, text input, text output.

More sophisticated, current AI (Artificial Intelligence) chats can use voice recognition for input, text to speech for voice output, and can use rule-based logic, statistical big-data correlations, and other techniques to create sophisticated computer-human interactions.

TRANSMEDIA projects are more and more using robots, as well as just disembodied voices, to interact with humans in the real world. Giving computer programs a “personality” which becomes part of the way the response is formulated is a developing field.

Artificial Life, or AL is the branch of AI that instantiates some form of “life” along with intelligence as part of the program – for example an intelligent voice or robot is endowed with a unique personality. One of the earliest problems that was acknowledged in early studies of Artificial Life is the question: when does an Artificial Life creation become sufficiently alive that turning off the computer, or stopping a computer program, becomes the “killing” of the AL creation. A similar question, which is at the heart of HER is “what happens when a human and an AL creation develop a relationship?”


NYFF’s Director of Programming and Selection Committee Chair, Kent Jones said of HER, “The tone is magical, the freedom of the narrative is breathtaking, Joaquin Phoenix continues to be one of the most adventurous actors in movies, Rooney Mara and Amy Adams are unforgettable, Scarlett Johansson’s voice will break your heart, and so will this impossibly delicate, funny, daring movie.”



Spike Jonze said, “I’m very excited that it’s a premiere in the city. The New York Film Festival is where we premiered our first movie and that’s really special. It was our first U.S. premiere of BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and we had all our friends there and it feels so nice to come back to NYFF.”

Rose Kuo, the Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said, "In dealing with tragi-comic puppeteers, renegade orchid growers, an island of wild things, or a man's unique love affair, visionary film-maker Spike Jonze has shown himself to be the poet-laureate of our increasingly post-human world. Jonze’s extraordinary new film, HER, features Joaquin Phoenix who delivers an unforgettable, emotionally nuanced performance."

FilmLinc Daily Managing Editor Brian Brooks spoke with Jonze about HER, looking ahead to the debut of the film. That interview can be found at

http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2013/blog/interview-spike-jonze-her-joaquin-phoenix-scarlett-johansson-nyff


General Public tickets will be available September 8th. Subscription Packages and VIP Passes for the New York Film Festival are on sale now. There also will be an opportunity for Members to purchase single screening tickets in advance of the General Public. For more information about becoming a Film Society Member visit 

Filmlinc.com/support/home

More ticket information for the New York Film Festival will be available on 

Filmlinc.com/NYFF



Written and directed by Spike Jonze,

HER stars
> Joaquin Phoenix (“The Master,” “Walk the Line”),
> Amy Adams (“The Master,” “Doubt”),
> Rooney Mara (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”),
> Olivia Wilde ("Tron", "House", the upcoming “Rush”) and
> Scarlett Johansson (“Lost in Translation”).

It is produced by Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze and Vincent Landay. Daniel Lupi, Natalie Farrey and Chelsea Barnard serve as executive producers.

The film reunites many of Jonze’s longtime creative collaborators, including production designer KK Barrett, editor Eric Zumbrunnen and costume designer Casey Storm, who worked together on “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Adaptation.” and “Being John Malkovich.” Joining them is director of photography Hoyte Van Hoytema (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”) and editor Jeff Buchanan (HBO’s “Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak,” which Jonze co-directed). The music is composed by Arcade Fire.

HER is a Warner Bros. Pictures presentation of an Annapurna Pictures Production. It will be distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.


HER - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

SPIKE JONZE - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005069/

SPIKE JONZE - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Jonze

JOAQUIN PHOENIX - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001618/

SCARLETT JOHANNSON - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0424060/

OLIVIA WILDE - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1312575/

AMY ADAMS - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/

ROONEY MARA - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1913734/


ARTIFICIAL LIFE - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_life

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

CHATTERBOTS AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chatterbots#Chatterbots

ATTITUDES TOWARD INTELLIGENT SERVICE ROBOTS
ftp://ftp.nada.kth.se/pub/documents/IPLab/TechReports/IPLab-154.pdf

SIRI - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri

ELIZA - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA 

DRAGON VOICE RECOGNITION - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

HAL - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000

2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) - WIKIPEDIA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_%28film%29

SHORT CIRCUIT (IMDB)(1986) - IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091949/

Labels: Amy Adams, HER, Joaquin Phoenix, NYFF, Olivia Wilde, Rooney Mara, Scarlett Johansson, SIRI, Spike Jonze, The New York Film Festival