Robot & Frank: Interview with Director Jake Schreier

Frank Langella’s Frank has a strained relationship with his daughter played by Liv Tyler

You and Ford also attended the same film school?

Yeah, we both went to NYU.

What is it like being able to collaborate with such a long time friend?

It’s great. It’s nice because you really know where each other are coming from. You’ve known each other for long enough and you know each other’s taste and so when you have discussions about the work, you know where they are coming from.

It’s really helpful. It’s pretty amazing to remember Ford back in high school and remember me back in high school and then be on a film set and actually make it happen. It’s a funny thing to think back on. 

At the Q&A after the screening at SFIFF Ford said the story all came into place when he added the heist element.

Yeah.

Did you watch any heist films in preparation for shooting the film?

A little bit. Obviously our heists don’t live up to, like, The Thomas Crown Affair, per se. We sort of have old man heists in our movie. There’s a movie with Christopher Walken that is really awesome. It’s called The Anderson Tapes.

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Sleeper

The film is also set in the near future. Did you watch any sci-fi to sort of decide the kind of world you wanted to create?

We watched some, but we weren’t trying to directly reference anything. The movie has so many genres within it. The stuff we watched more before we went into film, with my DP Matt Lloyd, were, like, Gordon Willis-era Woody Allen films. Like Manhattan and Annie Hall and even Sleeper, obviously, is kind of an interesting take off for it.

So much of the visual humor comes from just seeing this old man and this robot together in the woods and places, I really had to think about how to direct comedy within wide shots, with longer takes and wider compositions so that you can keep both of them in the frame as much as possible.

You filmed all the scenes with Langella and the robot without Peter Sarsgaard present, what was it like to direct his voice performance after the filming was over?

It all got done in a very short amount of time. It was like two four-hour sessions. We basically found that the best way to do it was to just print out all of the robot lines in sequence without having him even interact with the images on screen and just kind of read them in a row. That gave us the best chance to keep the cadence really similar and robotic.

The main thing with Peter is that he has so much caring and empathy in his voice naturally, that you can clip it down to that level and it still kind of comes through.

Peter Sarsgaard voices the titular robot

Was he your first choice?

Liev Schreiber was attached for a while and we tried it out with him, but we felt in the end, he felt generous enough to give us an audition and his voice was so deep, it lined up too much with Frank’s. It’s a hard kind of thing to find the right balance.

I couldn’t tell it was Peter Sarsgaard while I was watching. I kept thinking, “Who is this robot voice?! I know it but I can’t tell.”

That’s good to hear. We had to program him. [laughs].

Do you have any plans for future collaborations with Ford?

I definitely want to keep working with him. We have a new idea that is sort of just in its infancy that he is starting to write. It’s not our next movie, necessarily; it’s just something in its early stages. But, absolutely, I’d like to keep working with him.