Splice
It’s not such an unlikely scenario. In a private, state-of-the-art lab funded by a pharmaceutical giant, two brilliantly talented young bio-engineers, Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, combine genetic components from different species into hybrids that could produce new disease-fighting compounds. It’s vital. It’s exciting. It’s the future.
As Elsa tells Clive, it’s their job as scientists to push the boundaries. But how far?
Director Vincenzo Natali, who devoted years to developing Splice, often found it challenging to outpace the science that fuels his story. "The technology is advancing so rapidly, I think it took scientists less time to map the human genome than it took to write the script," he jokes.
"How does ‘Splice’ fit into the world we live in now? I don’t even know what world that is. I don’t think anyone does. Things are changing in dramatic ways in all aspects of our civilization, culture and science, and that’s something ‘Splice’ explores: our relationship to technology and the doors it unlocks. It pushes us to places we’re unable, or afraid, to go."
"What takes place in this movie is not far from the truth," notes Adrien Brody, who stars as Clive. "We’re living in a world in which science fiction is becoming reality, and that gives the film its weight. It’s frightening to a certain extent, to see how precarious things can be, but also exciting because there is potential for wonderful things."
For Clive and Elsa, a power couple at home as well as in the lab, their triumphs have been widely celebrated in the media and their errors, so far, easily erased.
Having successfully spliced animal genes into superior hybrids, their logical next step would be adding human DNA to the mix, in the hope of creating a new life form higher on the evolutionary scale. But that’s not where their sponsors want to go, demanding instead that they curb their scientific ambitions in favor of something more practical and marketable.
So they make a daring decision. They’ll give the company what it wants while pursuing their own agenda, conducting the most monumental experiment of their lives in secret.
That experiment becomes Dren: a startling amalgamation of arms and legs, tail and wings, with remarkably expressive eyes; a being both miraculous and horrifying, with an increasingly unpredictable range of needs and a growth rate that’s off the charts.
If their first mistake was creating Dren, their second is letting her live.
Says Natali, "Clive and Elsa are smarter than they are wise, and while they play with the building blocks of life, they don’t really have any deep understanding of what life is.
"You could say this is a coming-of-age film in that they are forced to grow up and become responsible parents, in a sense. As Dren becomes a catalyst for their own darker needs, she sets off a downward spiral of their scientific ideologies obscured by the moral imperatives of parenthood. We watch the humans turn into monsters, as the monster reveals its humanity."
"Vincenzo has a savage imagination," declares master storyteller and Splice executive producer Guillermo del Toro. "Splice is incredibly powerful and morally ambiguous. Both the creators and the creature are flawed. At stages the creature is innocent, then malevolent; the scientists are empathetic, then ruthless. In so many ways this story crosses the line."
Losing their objectivity, then control of their creation, Clive and Elsa press forward with a series of decisions that will prove disastrous in ways they can’t imagine.
Just as the most dangerous part of Dren could be her human DNA, and not the animal, I think the danger in this film is not about science and where it’s leading us but about the unpredictable human element, in a way that audiences may find shocking,” proposes Sarah Polley, who stars as the driven Elsa.
Premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Splice impressed critics and enthralled audiences among them, Joel Silver, Chairman of Dark Castle Entertainment, who felt that the timely and thought-provoking thriller was exactly the kind of film for which Dark Castle was created.
Silver, an executive producer on Splice says, "This is the kind of story that goes for a visceral reaction and engages the imagination at the same time. It pulls you in and doesn’t let go.
"It raises questions straight out of headline news about how bio-engineering could shape the future, but also stirs up fears about the dark places in human nature that we’ve been running from forever."
"In science fiction, those issues become epic," observes producer Steve Hoban, whose association with the director dates back to his first film, the 1992 short Half Nelson, on which a young Natali debuted as a storyboard artist. "We’re speculating about the future: is it good, is it bad, is it scary?"
While focusing on the cutting edge of bio-engineering, Natali believes Splice also exposes a primal fantasy lying deep in the human psyche. "The notion of bonding with something not entirely human goes back to ancient myth. It has always existed and I was fascinated by the idea that those mythic concepts mermaids, centaurs, chimeras, human hybrids that have tantalized people’s imaginations for thousands of years could exist in the real world through new science.
"While ‘Splice’ is very much about the vanguard of genetic research, it’s also about things that have been with us since the beginning of time."
To help stir that emotional connection, Natali felt strongly that Dren should be portrayed by an actor rather than a computer-generated image, and cast Delphine Chanéac in the unusual role. "It pays homage to all the things one would expect in a Frankenstein kind of story but also delves into aspects of the relationship between the creators and their creation that really keeps it on a personal level, and it’s because of that I decided to have an actor play Dren. Only when it’s anatomically impossible do we use CG."
Ultimately, he offers, "I don’t feel ‘Splice’ makes a clear statement about whether the actions of Clive and Elsa are good or bad. Their mistakes in creating Dren are mostly well-intentioned.
"That the question of whether we are going in the right direction or the wrong direction is raised by the film, but not answered by it, is relevant, because, at this moment, I don’t think we know."
Splice is released 23rd July
It’s not such an unlikely scenario. In a private, state-of-the-art lab funded by a pharmaceutical giant, two brilliantly talented young bio-engineers, Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast, combine genetic components from different species into hybrids that could produce new disease-fighting compounds. It’s vital. It’s exciting. It’s the future.
As Elsa tells Clive, it’s their job as scientists to push the boundaries. But how far?
Director Vincenzo Natali, who devoted years to developing Splice, often found it challenging to outpace the science that fuels his story. "The technology is advancing so rapidly, I think it took scientists less time to map the human genome than it took to write the script," he jokes.
"How does ‘Splice’ fit into the world we live in now? I don’t even know what world that is. I don’t think anyone does. Things are changing in dramatic ways in all aspects of our civilization, culture and science, and that’s something ‘Splice’ explores: our relationship to technology and the doors it unlocks. It pushes us to places we’re unable, or afraid, to go."
"What takes place in this movie is not far from the truth," notes Adrien Brody, who stars as Clive. "We’re living in a world in which science fiction is becoming reality, and that gives the film its weight. It’s frightening to a certain extent, to see how precarious things can be, but also exciting because there is potential for wonderful things."
For Clive and Elsa, a power couple at home as well as in the lab, their triumphs have been widely celebrated in the media and their errors, so far, easily erased.
Having successfully spliced animal genes into superior hybrids, their logical next step would be adding human DNA to the mix, in the hope of creating a new life form higher on the evolutionary scale. But that’s not where their sponsors want to go, demanding instead that they curb their scientific ambitions in favor of something more practical and marketable.
So they make a daring decision. They’ll give the company what it wants while pursuing their own agenda, conducting the most monumental experiment of their lives in secret.
That experiment becomes Dren: a startling amalgamation of arms and legs, tail and wings, with remarkably expressive eyes; a being both miraculous and horrifying, with an increasingly unpredictable range of needs and a growth rate that’s off the charts.
If their first mistake was creating Dren, their second is letting her live.
Says Natali, "Clive and Elsa are smarter than they are wise, and while they play with the building blocks of life, they don’t really have any deep understanding of what life is.
"You could say this is a coming-of-age film in that they are forced to grow up and become responsible parents, in a sense. As Dren becomes a catalyst for their own darker needs, she sets off a downward spiral of their scientific ideologies obscured by the moral imperatives of parenthood. We watch the humans turn into monsters, as the monster reveals its humanity."
"Vincenzo has a savage imagination," declares master storyteller and Splice executive producer Guillermo del Toro. "Splice is incredibly powerful and morally ambiguous. Both the creators and the creature are flawed. At stages the creature is innocent, then malevolent; the scientists are empathetic, then ruthless. In so many ways this story crosses the line."
Losing their objectivity, then control of their creation, Clive and Elsa press forward with a series of decisions that will prove disastrous in ways they can’t imagine.
Just as the most dangerous part of Dren could be her human DNA, and not the animal, I think the danger in this film is not about science and where it’s leading us but about the unpredictable human element, in a way that audiences may find shocking,” proposes Sarah Polley, who stars as the driven Elsa.
Premiering at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Splice impressed critics and enthralled audiences among them, Joel Silver, Chairman of Dark Castle Entertainment, who felt that the timely and thought-provoking thriller was exactly the kind of film for which Dark Castle was created.
Silver, an executive producer on Splice says, "This is the kind of story that goes for a visceral reaction and engages the imagination at the same time. It pulls you in and doesn’t let go.
Tagged in Adrien Brody