It's been 14 years since writer/director Andrew Niccol brought us Gattaca, the prescient sci-fi film about genetic engineering. Now, he's releasing In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, out Oct. 28, about a society where everyone is immortal—provided you have enough time on your clock. Niccol sat down with Popular Mechanics to talk about how Gattaca influenced the film, and why people in the future drive classic cars.
By Erin McCarthy Published: Oct 28, 2011 6:00 AM EDT Save Article
Its a child of Gattaca. I always knew that the holy grail of genetic engineering was discovering and switching off the aging gene. I knew the implications were so enormous that it would be another movie.
Its just an extrapolation of todaypeople are already going to such extremes to look young, so this is taking it to its logical conclusion. They have found the aging gene in certain species, and were such a youth-obsessed society that if we could switch it off, we would. So maybe one day we will.
You get a year, starting when youre 25 years old. Thats when your clock starts. And theres a logical and scientific reason for that: The frontal lobe of your brain doesnt fully develop until youre 25 years old. And thats the part that controls reckless behavior and impulse. So it would be medically, scientifically, incorrect to stop the aging gene any earlier than 25.
You earn it, and you transfer it from person to person. I knew there would be massive overpopulation if everyone could live forever, so people can trade time. In fact, we could exchange time now, you could give me 5 minutes, or an hour. Its a mind trip.
I love the idea that Justin Timberlakes character wakes up with basically 23 hours on his clock every dayand there are 24 hours in the day, obviously, so he has to work or die. He has to [get] more time. And then you have the flip side of that: Sylvia, who is Amanda Seyfrieds character, who has thousands of years at her disposal. And so she does nothing. She has bodyguards, drives around in an armored car, desperately trying not to risk or do anything [because people could try to steal her time].
People have more taste in the future. It comes organically out of the idea that there is nothing new, and they have gone back to an older shape that they prefer and theyve updated the mechanics of it. But they just havent gone any further.
Every device has capsulesyou can store time in a capsule as well, so there are time capsules (Ive obviously co-opted the term), and there are scanners. When you go buy a cup of coffee you [get scanned and] give five minutes. And it works off the electricity in your pulse.
I dont, Im just curious. Im one of those people that only got interested in learning once I left schoolI think a lot of people are like that. It really irritates my father actually, because he is somewhat a scientist, and so when Im written up in a [science] magazine and hes never been, he goes, You? He knows that Im an idiot. Well, self-taught might be the more polite term.
Sometimes he is. But after a half an hour on the phone Im like, Okay, thats enough. I just scour the Net. The crazy thing is that almost any sort of fantasy solution that Ive come up with, I think, that probably hasnt been thought of, and no ones working on it. But [scientists] are. They really are.
I think it will work on different levels. Some people will just go for the action ride, because there is literally a ticking clock in every scene. But other people will talk about: Is it good to be immortal? Is that something we should strive for? What would that do to us?
