SUBSERVIENCE: Director S.K. Dale Tells Us About His New Sci-Fi Thriller!

Synopsis

In Subservience, Megan Fox stars as Alice, a lifelike artificially intelligent android who can take care of any family and home. Looking for help with housework, a struggling father (Michele Morrone) purchases Alice after his wife becomes sick. Alice suddenly becomes self-aware and wants everything her new family has to offer, starting with the affection of her owner – and she’ll kill to get it.

Meet S.K. Dale

Hailing from Melbourne, Australia, S.K.Dale is a writer/director with a sharp sense of story and a keen ability to cut to the heart of the emotion in his filmmaking. His short film TOMMY, about a young child amid a custody battle, has toured the globe, and screened at national family law conferences. S.K. made his feature directorial debut with TILL DEATH, starring Megan Fox, which made the New York Times ‘Critic’s Pick’ with a Certified Fresh 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.

A Word from the Director

My child has recently come into this world, and it’s amazing to witness the strength of his bond with his mother. It is said that for the first few months after birth, a baby believes it is an extension of their mother. For me, this was the emotional core of the film, as we watch a mother return home, only to find herself replaced by an AI sim.

Subservience explores a world amid an AI revolution as the workforce and domestic households grow heavily dependent on AI. It was vital to navigate all this through a more personal lens of a young, loving family as technology slowly tears them apart. For many of us, fears of being replaced by AI are quickly becoming a reality. During post-production, we witnessed union strikes fighting to protect our workforce from AI. We soon realized that we were not creating a story set in the future, but rather the present.

While developing the script, the question we kept asking ourselves constantly was, what makes us human? Is it our ability to learn from our mistakes? To be selfish in our desires? To lust? Or to love? To sacrifice? It was these questions that propelled me and the writers to explore the flawed and dark areas of humanity. As the world around us continues to evolve, the line between humans and AI will only further blur. Subservience sets out to explore that ever-narrowing line as we try to find our place in a world encompassed by AI.

Interview

Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower sat down with director S.K. Dale to discuss his new science-fiction/thriller film Subservience. They discussed S.K. working previously with the film’s star, Megan Fox, wanting to develop another ‘badass M3GAN’ (literally), and how working on short films helped prepare S.K. for the big leagues, among other topics.

Glen Dower:

Mr. Dale, how are you, Sir?

S.K. Dale:

Good, how are you doing? 

Glen Dower:

I’m really good, thank you. So let’s talk about Subservience, from the script by Will Honley and April Maguire. First up, how did you become involved with the film?

S.K. Dale:

I had done a film for Millennium called Till Death with Megan a few years earlier and they had acquired the script and they were developing it. And at some point, they thought it might be interesting to talk and see what my thoughts were on it. I read the script and when I got to the halfway mark, I saw there was a scene where we have the wife coming home and discovering her being replaced. That was when I started to fall in love with the script and we started to develop it from there. I thought April and Will had done such a great job on the script. And it was just expanding on these ideas; ‘let’s play with this and try different things’. Rewriting, reworking it, and getting onto set, we jumped into it pretty quickly.

Glen Dower:

Was Ms. Fox involved before or did you approach her after you worked together on Till Death?

S.K. Dale:

It was afterward. We were prepping the film and we were discussing different names and it’s funny how much she didn’t come up at the start! And then at some point, we discussed it and I thought, well, having these intimate scenes and having worked with her before, there’s a lot of trust there that you need for that and to create that environment. So once I started to think about it, it reminded me of Jennifer’s Body, which is such a great film and people love that and love her in that film. So I wanted to see another ‘Badass Megan’, that destructive path coming through and doing some fun things.

Glen Dower:

And how much fun was it to direct her as Alice? Was there a scale you had in mind where one is very benign, and ten is a completely malicious, murderous robot?

S.K. Dale:

Yeah. It’s interesting because her performance was very vital in terms of creating something robotic that was exciting to watch and felt unique, but also having enough emotion in there for the more intimate scenes that it didn’t feel clunky. So finding that balance, it was really interesting. She said this one thing very early on, which I loved, which was that she wanted her physical performance to feel like a ballerina and her movements to be slow and precise. So we leaned into that. Then getting to that third act of glitching and craziness, which was exciting for me.

I think that was more nerve-wracking for her. But we said let’s try to take it where you go completely crazy. And then one way we bring it back a bit. And so it was trying to find that balance in the editing of it later on and seeing what works, how far can we push it? But also keeping that groundedness, keeping the horror and the dread pushing to the end of that third act.

Glen Dower:

Did Megan have a method approach where she was always in ‘Alice-mode’ or would she step on set as Megan, you call Action, then the head tilts and she’s Alice?

S.K. Dale:

She’s got a great skill for just switching it on and switching it off. I think that was important with the children and making sure they felt comfortable, that they were in a playful sandbox. And I think everyone helped create a warm environment for those children. But there are moments where you call cut and Megan’s just laughing at the ridiculousness of something. One of my favorite bits of the film is there’s a dinner sequence where the wife is trying to serve dinner. She’s come back from an operation, and she struggles.

So Megan, as Alice, helps her and asks her a question and Maggie says, sorry, it’s a family secret. And they just smile at each other. I love the way they do it. You don’t need anything said, but there’s something so fake behind Megan’s smile as she turns her head and does it that I would laugh behind the monitor. Doing a sci-fi movie like this allows you to play around with things in an exciting way.

Glen Dower:

Let’s talk about the rest of the cast as they add so much to the story.  Megan is the box office name, of course, but we have Michele Morrone as Nick, Madeline Zima as Maggie and Madeline, and see little Matilda as their daughter. Not hugely well-known names, but that’s what works for the story, doesn’t it?

S.K. Dale:

Yeah. And I think, for me, the kind of contrasting Megan, knowing we had Megan as the robot, what can we do to make Maggie more interesting? And when we kind of found Madeline, she had this innocence about her. She has a girl-next-door vibe that I thought was kind of polarizing interestingly. And I thought she kind of softened Nick’s character a little bit more having a wife like that, which I think was very necessary with stuff that was happening in the plot and everything like that. But it’s so interesting because when we were casting this because we were racing up to the shoot date, we had to lock in Matilda, the young girl in the film.

We had to lock her in quicker than the others because, for the safety admin of working with children, you have to do so much paperwork. We don’t even know who’s playing the father or the mother right now! And you’re telling me I need to lock in the child?! As we locked that in, it’s going to only give us a certain amount of flexibility in certain ways, but it was freeing because it was just focusing on who was the best child performance that we could direct and get what we needed. So it allowed us to free ourselves up and analyze who we thought was great. And Matilda was amazing from the get-go. And in retrospect, Madeline, I feel like, looks more like her mother than Matilda’s actual mother! 

Glen Dower:

I just want to ask you about your career, as you started with a lot of shorts. We have a lot of readers who are aspiring filmmakers, can you give some advice to those people about what tips, tricks, and invaluable experience you got from shooting shorts, and building up to feature films?

S.K. Dale:

Yeah! I think shooting shorts was so beneficial to my career now, because, you know, we just had a group of friends that were getting together on a weekend and shooting something. So I was taking charge of directing the cinematography. I was doing catering! I was doing everything on set. And then you get into the editing. I was editing it myself. I was doing all the visual effects myself, watching YouTube tutorials, and seeing what I could do. And all that benefits you when you get on a film set and you need to understand what everyone’s job and position is.

You suddenly have incredibly experienced people on set, but if you don’t know how to utilize them, you know, you’re not going to get what you want out of it. So knowing what everyone’s job was, knowing not just what their job was, but their limitations and where they could push things and try things out. I think it’s vital. And so I would say, if you’re doing a short film, try to take on as many of those positions as possible, because you will learn from those mistakes.

You learn from everything that you do wrong when it’s you doing that. It’s easy to get an editor to come in and do something and you’re like, well, you know, you’ve screwed it up. But when you’re editing it yourself and you realize, oh, no, I screwed it up while I was on set and I didn’t get that shot that I needed or I didn’t hold on a take for as long as I wanted. I think all that stuff is so beneficial once you get on a feature film.

Glen Dower:

Perfect. And just one more thing Mr. Dale. Who wins in a fight, Alice from Subservience or M3gan from M3gan?

S.K. Dale:

Ha! Well, I think if Alice can control other SIMS and if she starts to evolve that control, she could probably win that fight by bringing some teammates into that ring to help her out!

Glen Dower:

That is a fair enough answer!  Also, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for your time and best luck with the movie’s release.

S.K. Dale:

Thank you so much, Glen. I appreciate it.

SUBSERVIENCE will be released on Demand and Digital on September 13.

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