Exclusive: The Russo brothers on The Electric State, Spielberg’s ‘ubiquitous’ influence, and the ‘addiction problem’ of modern technology

Leave it to Netflix to drop a $320 million sci-fi movie into your lap like it’s no big deal.

The streaming giant’s latest money-no-object production, The Electric State, comes from Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo, stars Chris Pratt and Millie Bobbie-Brown, and features more humanoid robots than a Silicon Valley cocktail bar. But you’d be forgiven for not knowing it was coming until right this second, such has been the relatively low-key publicity campaign surrounding its release (perhaps Emilia Pérez hoovered up all the marketing budget).

In any case, The Electric State is here to commandeer your weekend watchlist – and it bears all the hallmarks of another straight-to-streaming hit for Netflix (a company which, let’s be honest, doesn’t need advertising to secure eyeballs).

Loosely adapted from the much-loved graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag (whose dystopian artwork inspired Amazon’s criminally underrated Tales from the Loop series), The Electric State takes place in a retro-futuristic version of the 1990s, where a failed robot uprising has left millions of once-friendly animatronics exiled from the human population. The film follows an orphaned teenager (Bobbie-Brown) as she ventures across the American West in search of her missing brother, with an illegal robot, a smuggler (Pratt), and his wisecracking sidekick (Anthony Mackie) in tow.

Sure, that synopsis makes The Electric State sound like a mash-up of The Creator, Fallout, and Toy Story – it certainly has similarities to all three movies, and many more besides – but with a killer soundtrack and some of the best VFX this side of Avatar: The Way of Water, Netflix’s latest blockbuster isn’t short on eye-popping spectacle. It also stars Woody Harrelson as an animatronic peanut, which is reason enough to give it a spin.

Ahead of the film’s release on March 14th, Shortlist spoke to its box office-breaking directing duo, the Russo brothers, to get the inside track on its (very long) journey from page to screen, its “freeing” detachment from the Marvel movie machine, and Spielberg’s “ubiquitous” influence on the sci-fi genre.

You won the rights to adapt Stålenhag’s graphic novel way back in 2017. How did the novel come to you, and why did it make sense as a movie?

Anthony Russo: The film’s writing team, Chris Markus and Steve McFeely – along with our production company AGBO – is the same team we worked with on all our Marvel movies. Chris discovered [Stålenhag’s novel] on a Kickstarter campaign, and was really struck by it. He brought it to Joe and I, and also to his writing partner, Steve, and we all immediately fell in love with what was there. Right away, in every image that Simon had created, you could see that he was exploring a very complex relationship between humanity and technology. It felt very current to us, very of the moment – but it also felt very sideways and original, like an approach to [this idea] we had never seen before. So the combination of those two things just lit us up and kept driving us all toward finding a [screen-ready] story there.

There are a lot of very on-the-nose warnings about the dangers of AI, smartphone use, VR headsets, and so on in the film – but you’re not outright saying technology is bad. What message do you want the audience to take away?

Joe Russo: It's a complicated issue, so it’s impossible to be prescriptive about it. Technology benefits all of us, but it also has incredible downsides as well – there’s a massive addiction problem. The movie isn't demonizing technology, it's just asking questions about what our relation to it is. How is that relationship best positioned moving forward? And how do we protect ourselves from the downsides of it moving forward?

The movie’s so-called Neurocaster headsets had me thinking, ‘One of these guys definitely owns an Apple Vision Pro’. Do either of you?

JR: I do [laughs].

And how do you feel about this spatial computing idea? Do you use the headset for work?

JR: Not at all. I use it for streaming. Frankly, I’ve found that the best use for it is on a plane, where I can watch a movie, shut everything out, and just have a nice viewing experience – a widescreen experience, which feels like you're in a theater. You know, I think it’s got to get a lot lighter. It’s got to get a lot smaller. If you're going to be spatial computing, it can't give you a headache after half an hour of tilting your head, trying to hold the thing up.

How difficult is it to go from projects like Avengers, where you don’t have to worry about characters resonating with viewers, to something like The Electric State, where you have to do all the heavy lifting yourselves? There’s no character credit in the bank, if you like.

AR: It’s more freeing, without question, because you can invent the entire world. We started this movie about two-and-a-half years before we rolled cameras on it, and much of that [work] was about world-building and figuring out [a story] – because graphic novels are a collection of images with a very loose narrative around them. So [Stålenhag’s novel] was really begging for world exploration. And that’s something we love to do – to dig in, ask questions, and answer those questions for ourselves about the characters, the details, the rules. How did the technology [of this world] develop? Why did it develop this way? If robots exist, what other kinds of technology exist? How did Ethan Skate [the film’s Elon Musk-style villain, played by Stanley Tucci] come to power? How did he maintain power? What was his backstory? Why does he care so much about technology? What drives him?

JR: There seems to be a cathartic level of drive behind our current technology stars [laughs], who seem to have a certain... I mean, to get to where you need to be to succeed in that field certainly requires a particular personality type. So we wanted to try to examine that personality type. Are they all Charles Foster Kane? Is there a Rosebud hiding in their past somewhere? [These people] only sleep two hours a night and own 47 companies!

There’s a very obvious Amblin influence on the film, but I do wonder, as directors, do you find that Spielberg has been so influential that even things you don’t intend to be seen as references come off like references? As if he stole all the ideas.

AR: He’s so responsible for so much of the modern cinematic language, you know? It’s really difficult for anything that isn’t done in quote-unquote ‘studio mode’ using dollies and cranes to not feel Spielbergian. He advanced that language more than anyone – he made it ubiquitous. Certainly, he had his predecessors, but he popularised it. Listen, he coined a term – [his style] is so specific and well-known that ‘Spielbergian’ is now a term in the dictionary.

JR: But, you know, Anthony and I, our relationship to storytelling is very self-referential. We grew up watching movies and TV shows, playing video games and Dungeons and Dragons with each other and with our friends, and talking about the things that we watched and did – quoting it, laughing about it, watching it again and again and again. So our work is very intertextual. We were film students for years – we spent a long time studying directing, filmmaking, and acting. So, everything we do has a self-awareness to it and we like wearing our homages on our sleeve. To us, it’s more fun a process when we’re celebrating the things that we love than when we’re trying to disguise the fact that we’ve been influenced.

And a last word on the soundtrack. The Flaming Lips, Oasis, Journey – there are some big songs in this movie. How did you decide the soundtrack?

JR: It's all very personal to us. These are songs that we grew up with. Songs that we have an emotional connection to. We have to watch the movie hundreds of times while we’re making it, so we want songs in there that we love, that we know will resonate, that have a kinetic energy to match the scenes, that have lyrics to match the scenes. And working with someone as amazing as Alan Silvestri [the film’s composer, who also scored The Avengers], allowing him to start blending the needle drops into the score and watching him turn them into major compositions, that was probably a highlight in terms of a collaboration with a composer.

Favourite track from the movie?

JR: Favourite track… hm…that’s a hard one. It’s probably The Flaming Lips' “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 1”.

AR: Dammit. Since Joe went with that I’ll go with “Mother” by Danzig. Chris Pratt's intro to the film.

Chris Pratt loves a musical intro.

AR: He really does.

The Electric State is streaming exclusively on Netflix from March 14th.

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