Five days of ‘Her:’ How Spike Jonze created the future

For those whove seen the buzziest of buzzy holiday movies, Spike Jonzes Her, youprobably left the theater with much to think about. One of the biggest questions, at least from a filmmaking standpoint: How did Jonze and his team arrive at the future we see on the screen?

Infinitely relatable though gently different, the Los Angeles of Jonzes unspecified future occupies a new and exciting place in cinematic history--and the history, as it where, of futurism itself. Hers L.A. is a million miles from Blade Runner, but it also not entirely a utopia. What looks bright and cheery can also conceal a dark undertow.

Perhaps the best evidence of this worlds complexityare the words being used to describe it, which according to a quick survey ofarticles on the film include the not-exactly-compatible phrases of utopian, dystopian, near-dystopian, gentrified dystopia, both utopian and dystopian and--why not--neither dystopian nor utopian.

PHOTOS: Holiday movie sneaks 2013

With this in mind, The Times set out to discover how, and why, the world was created. We conducted interviews with the five key people who helped Jonze shape the movies look and feel. It is a team that in most instances have worked with Jonze for years, going back to his 1990s wunderkind days, even as what its members do here is astonishingly forward looking. Over the next five days we will run a separate conversation with each of these players, exploring the rich psychological and philosophical reasons for their choices and the challenges they had to overcome after making them.

Today, costume designer Casey Storm.

Movies Now: One of the things that stands out right away in the filmbesides those much-discussed high-waisted pantsis how basic clothes looks in the future, how simple, how unfuturistic. Was that very much a part of your discussion?

Casey Storm: When we first started talking about how to depict the future we immediately disliked anything you usually see in movies about the future. We wanted to use updated elements of things we know rather than project things we didnt. We didnt want to guess.

MN: Because so many of those movies do just thatthe clothes and the whole movie has this sheen to it, black-and-silver uniforms, latex, lots of bootsalmost as though theres some unofficial rule in a costume-designer handbook that mandates that.

CS: I think with a lot of other movies the logic is that with technology taking over our lives that it creates distance. And when theres distance you lose warmth and end up with coldness. And the way you depict coldness is you use clothes and colors that suggest coldnessblacks and silvers and whites and blues. Or I guess thats the thought progression. We thought what really made more sense, what could very likely be happening, is access. You can choose from everything in the world, so clothes become more individual. The word "bespoke" kept coming up. If you had all the things in the world, what would you gravitate to? For a lot of people it would be something warm and comfortable. So thats what we tried to create.

Excerpt from:
Five days of 'Her:' How Spike Jonze created the future