by SARAH ROWLAND

“It’s really eerie how relevant it is.”

That’s a very jittery, sleep-deprived Winona Ryder talking at an L.A. press conference about the parallels between today’s political climate and the bleak, not-so-distant future described in Philip K. Dick’s 1977 classic sci-fi novel A Scanner Darkly.

And now, thanks to director Richard Linklater and the use of a new rotoscoping technology that entails animators painting over live action footage, Dick’s caustic vision of paranoia and government suppression can be experienced at a theatre near you.

That’s where Ryder comes in. She plays Donna, the love interest of Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves), an undercover cop who is suffering a serious identity crisis. Posing as a strung-out slacker, Bob has been assigned to spy on Anaheim’s drug-ravished underworld, which is dominated by a highly addictive hallucinogenic called Substance D. But too much D has rendered Bob incapable of separating his undercover persona and his police work. In effect, he’s a narc narcing on himself.

So when he’s not self-snitching, Bob and his equally whacked-out roommates Luckman (Woody Harrelson) and Barris (Robert Downey Jr., who has never been more wickedly funny than he is here) hole up in their junkie pad, popping pills, concocting conspiracy theories and looking for hidden bugs planted by The Man.

Visions of terror

For Ryder, a world where surveillance cameras and phone wires record every move you make hits a little too close to home.

“I think Philip K. Dick was really, really on the money when he wrote it and what he predicted,” she says, referring to how Dick’s interpretation of Nixon’s War on Drugs could just as easily be Bush’s War on Terror today. “I just think it is a terrifying time right now in this country and in the world.”

Linklater agrees.

“I think Dick really set the stage for what we’re seeing now,” he says in a one-on-one with the Mirror. “Every week we hear about some new, hidden information from our government. When you think about their intrusion into our information, we’re just data in their data banks. It’s a creepy time in the same way it was creepy back then.

“I mean right now we’ve got a really unpopular war going on. We may not have any riots and marches because there’s no draft. But they’re silencing critics and the thinking that would question their overall approach. So even though it’s a different time, a different place, Philip K. Dick saw and saw it pretty clearly.”

Conspiracy leery

As far as being a paranoid individual, the laid-back Texan filmmaker admits that not too much keeps him up at night.

“I’ve never really believed in the personal conspiracy—I don’t think people are out to get me. And until the current administration, I didn’t even think in terms of a few guys in a room controlling the world.

“But for the first time in my life, I really do think a small group is putting its will on a lot of people. I think that’s just the reality of our world—so it’s not even paranoia per se because ‘paranoid’ has all these connotations like it’s unreal. And the reality of what’s being done in our name by our government in the U.S. makes you think, ‘Oh wow, so we’re those guys; we are the torturers.’”

Linklater recently shared these views at a Hollywood press forum. It didn’t go over that well.

“I said we act like we won the Cold War, but we lost it in that we’re emulating the Soviet Union of the ’60s and the ’70s—we have a secret government with one network sending out false press reports, creating news and the suppression of any pubic discourse. This kind of governing seems to be modelled from that country during that era so in a way, we didn’t win the Cold War,” he says, before adding, “You could have heard a pin drop when I let that one out!”

Ripped on D

Throughout the making of A Scanner Darkly, Dick’s daughters, Laura Leslie and Isa Hackett, regularly consulted with Linklater. According to him, one of their biggest concerns was that the film didn’t glorify drug abuse.

“They were like, ‘You know if it wasn’t for drugs, our father would still be alive and writing,’” recalls Linklater. “So they wanted to make sure I wasn’t cavalier with that part. I was like, ‘No, no, no, I want it to be a cautionary tale too, yet not in a vacuous just-say-no to drugs kind of a way.’

“I mean you can have fun. But you also pay a price for that fun—i.e. your whole life. I mean it’s a fascinating subculture and I’ve always been curious about it.”

His fascination with drug use really shows itself when Donna and Bob are ripped on D, talking in circular sentences, thinking they’re way deeper than they actually are. One has to wonder what Linklater draws on to nail these scenes as well as he does.

“Despite what people think from my movies, I’ve never been a drug guy,” he insists (and he has the healthy glow to prove it). “My experience is very limited to being high at concerts every now and then. I’ve been spared the chemical predisposition of addiction. I don’t need them. Maybe, if my brain was wired differently, I would need them to juice my whole creative process. But I don’t.

“And I’ve always had the Frank Zappa approach to drugs, which is if you’re some drug casualty, you’re certainly not going to be productive or a threat to the existing order.”

Cast from the past

As well as being a reunion for Ryder and Reeves, who haven’t worked together since 1992’s Dracula, A Scanner Darkly is also a reunion for Linklater and Rory Cochrane, who plays Bob’s doomed friend Freck. You may not know Cochrane by his real name, but fans of Linklater’s 1993’s bong hit Dazed and Confused will remember him as the scene-steeling Slater, something that Cochrane was somewhat concerned about.

“I was definitely worried about repeating it,” says Cochrane, who gives perhaps the edgiest performance in the movie as a man so beyond wired that he thinks his body has been invaded by man-eating bugs. “We had rehearsal for like two weeks but I couldn’t really find a way to come up with this character. It just sort of hit me the day we were supposed to shoot. I don’t think anybody expected that. But Rick’s such an easygoing relaxed individual… he never sweated me or said anything to me.”

What is it in this one-time CSI: Miami detective that instills so much trust in Linklater?

“I think Rory is a great actor so I had all the faith in the world he would be Freck and do something really interesting with it,” he says. “He has a real instinctual approach. He still maintains that he never really read the Dazed script.”

In fact he still hasn’t read the book A Scanner Darkly.

“Yeah, he’s kind of the opposite of like Winona and Keanu, who just dig into the material asking all these deep questions,” says Linklater. “He’s more like ‘Okay man, lets go.’ So he would pride himself on saying that he didn’t prepare.”

When it came to casting the lead, for Linklater, the Matrix star was the obvious choice to play Bob, the hapless mind-fucked cop/dealer.

“Keanu’s a really confused guy and has no idea who he is in this world,” joked Linklater in the press conference, but later he elaborated, “He’s just a really curious interior kind of guy. He’ll even joke about it: ‘I’m “The Guy.”’ And I guess he’s sort of The Guy here again. I don’t know what it is, he just brings something to it.”

Another thing he brings is big-name recognition, a quality that tends to attract financial backing from studios.

“When he came aboard, that’s when things really started getting going,” says Linklater, who applauds Reeves for slumming it on this $8.5-million project (his normal asking is in the neighbourhood of $15-million). “When I hear some big actor complaining about how there’s no good parts. I’m like, ‘No, they’re out there; you’re just not willing to take a pay cut to do one.’”

But considering what a big Dick fan Reeves is, it’s not all that surprising he was willing to forego a few zeros on his paycheck.

“I love his writing,” Reeves said at the press conference, proving that, if provoked, he can rise to the occasion of completing full sentences. “He’s got brutal irony... His stories tell of fights of the individual against forces beyond their control… and then of being manipulated by them.

“He also tells really good romantic stories and writes really cool women. There’s a kind of flesh and blood: people are greedy, people are angry, people are needy, people are scared. I just relate to the worlds that he writes.”

Dick, Spielberg, Woo and Winona

Unlike other interpretations of Dick’s work, (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Paycheck, Minority Report—none of which Dick lived to see), A Scanner Darkly strives to be as authentic to the source material as possible, as opposed to just riffing off futuristic gimmicks featured in one of his stories.

“I thought Philip K. Dick deserved that much,” says Linklater. “I didn’t want to just take the scramble suit [high-tech disguise] and the narc narcing on himself elements. I mean those are unique plot points but for me it’s the characters. It’s all part of the whole. That was just my instinct. He’s such a good writer, he doesn’t deserve to be just mined for his endlessly cool ideas.”

Still, Linklater is careful not to criticize those filmmakers who opt for the other approach.

“As a director, you can’t help but make it your own. I mean Spielberg’s Minority Report is gonna feel like a Spielberg film. And this is gonna feel like something I did just ’cause there’s a bunch of people sitting around bullshitting about the gears on a bike. That’s kind of my thing. Can’t help it. Then there’s Paycheck by John Woo. Didn’t see it, but I strongly suspect it’s a John Woo movie.”

So what would Dick think of Linklater’s interpretation of A Scanner Darkly?

“I think he would like it,” says Linklater. “I have to be self-delusional enough to believe that I’m the guy to do it and that he would like the spirit of it. So yeah, I think he would have been pretty cool about it all. He would have had a big crush on Winona, so he would have been very happy to visit the set often. And then she would have had a big crush on him. It would have been one big love fest.”

A Scanner Darkly opens Friday, July 14

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