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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar filling in for Alison Stewart. Aliens, a topic of interest as of late, even in a White House press briefing back in February and a congressional hearing last month. Yes, I do wonder if they exist. I also wonder what life would be like living with them. A new film explores the potential effects of an alien invasion on Earth through the lens of two teenagers falling for one another. It's titled Landscape with Invisible Hand.

This film, it's set in the near future after an alien species known as the Vuvv, signs a deal with the world's business leaders to benefit from the alien's technology. There's a catch. The impact is a near takeover of human culture. The Vuvv enforce new curricula in schools, so students learn the Vuvv's history and language. Their occupation of Earth renders most human jobs obsolete, families are struggling. There's these two teenagers, Adam and Chloe, and they devise a plan to make some extra cash by doing what Chloe calls courtship broadcasting.

Let's listen to a clip. In this scene, Chloe proposes the idea to Adam after a failed attempt at selling some stuff to their classmates.

Chloe: Hey, you know we could always consider doing a courtship broadcast.

Adam: What?

Chloe: Where you set your notes to broadcast instead of receive, and they watch you while you go on dates. They actually pay to watch and then they send it straight to your account. You've never heard about this?

Kousha Navidar: That was from Landscape with Invisible Hand, which is now playing in theaters, and joining us to discuss the film is writer and director, Cory Finley. Some of you might recognize him as the director of Thoroughbred, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival back in 2017. Also, you might recognize him from Bad Education, which premiered on HBO. It won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie in 2020. Cory, welcome back to all of it.

Cory: Thank you so much for having me.

Kousha Navidar: Watched this film last night, got a lot of questions. The film is in part based on MT Anderson's novel of the same name. What did you love most about that book?

Cory: I loved a bunch of things. You alluded to some of the previous two movies that I've done, I tend to be a very restless filmmaker. When I've spent the two or three years that it takes to really live in a world and write, direct, edit, and release a movie, I'm very eager to move on to something very different. The last thing I did was Bad Education. It was based on a true story, true-crime story, this very subtle human-scale story. I really wanted to do something just totally wild and something with a strong genre element.

I read this book by MT Anderson, and it struck me as really unique and really strange in its premise. I was very drawn to this idea of essentially a purely economic alien invasion. A riff on the alien invasion trope where instead of being big, scary, dominating invaders. These aliens are small, comical, annoying bureaucrats, and they take over Earth through the free market. I thought there's something very subversive and funny about that, and all the implications of that premise. It also struck me as very, very hard to film and very hard to visualize in a way that felt like an exciting gauntlet thrown to me as a filmmaker.

Kousha Navidar: MT Anderson is known for employing both this cultural sarcasm and wit in his writing. How did you translate some of those elements into the film?

Cory: That was one of the things that most drew me to it, that I had this mix of extremely dark, serious-minded social criticism. It's really about corporate consolidation and colonialism, and cultural appropriation, and all these thorny topics, but it handles them in this unabashedly ridiculous, silly way. That really unapologetic collision of the very serious and the very unserious was what drew me to it. I don't know if it took a lot of thought or care to preserve that tone because it was so baked into the material, and then it just became about working with the actors to find the realism of this crazy story as much as possible.

Kousha Navidar: Can you think of an example that you especially love of where that seriousness and the silliness clash?

Cory: I guess I should be loath to give any spoilers, but the first time we meet one of these aliens at about the midpoint of the movie. We want the audience to really feel the reality of this everyday new order of the world that human scale before we show you the aliens behind the curtain. When they finally meet the alien, there's this scene that it's very, very close to the scene in the book. This scene I really loved, where this really bizarre creature is explaining to these humans how they're doing human love incorrectly.

These are human kids, they experience love. These aliens have no idea what love is, but this particular alien is an expert in human culture and assures them that they are faking it. He knows more about human love than they do, and he's going to sue them into oblivion. I loved the humor and the darkness of that premise.

Kousha Navidar: I'm thinking of that scene right now, and no spoilers, honestly. The design of the alien, I think, is something really to write home about. You stated that one of your first collaborators to join the project was Erik De Boer, who supervised the creation of the super pig in Bong Joon-ho's Okja. What sources of inspiration did you have for how the Vuvv would look? Because this was really a part of the movie that stood out to me.

Cory: To go back to the book, again, the creature design was one of the most compelling parts of the book in that it was handled in a very literary way. It was a very vivid but very mysterious and short description of these creatures. We don't get a head, shoulders, knees, and toes anatomical description of these creatures. We're told that they look and feel a little bit like squat, stony coffee tables. We're told that when they communicate, it sounds like someone walking forcefully in cardioids. We kept those.

We want to be very true to those evocative lines of prose, but obviously, that left an enormous amount of room for me and Erik De Boer, our VFX supervisor, to fill in their anatomy. We worked for ages because we had COVID delays on this movie. We had a long opportunity to just iterate and try to develop a design that felt like it didn't draw directly on any of the many alien, physical tropes we're used to seeing. We didn't want a little green man, or a squid alien, or a spider alien, or anything like that. We wanted the design to be simple and to have almost a deadpan quality to it as well.

Kousha Navidar: Deadpan is a perfect word for that. Did that bring up any-- not just deadpan, but did it bring up any challenges trying to take those pros and applying them visually? What was something that you really had to find a creative solution for during that design process?

Cory: I would say the whole project of designing them required a creative solution because we wanted to thread a needle where they felt real and strange and unnerving enough to feel like a threat but we also didn't want to betray what's so unique about this premise, which is, again, this idea that these are not scary, Ridley Scott's Alien style aliens that are coming and could bite our heads off. They need to feel very, very real, and they exert a real power over our society, but they also need to feel annoying in the way that the voice on a customer service call telling you that you're 39th in line to talk to a human is annoying.

Kousha Navidar: I'm talking with Cory Finley about his new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, and I'd love to talk about Adam and Chloe for a little bit. These are the two teenagers in the film, story centers around them. They broadcast their dates to the Vuvv. At some point, like you mentioned, they're told, "Hey, you're not doing this right now. I don't want to give away too much." But we could talk about why they're so interested in streaming the courtship and why the Vuvv are so interested between the humans and what happens when love is faked. Is there a sense of why the Vuvv were so interested in that in the first place?

Cory: What Chloe briefly tells Adam, and this is expounded on at greater length in the book, is that the Vuvv reproduce by budding. They don't have any romantic love in their culture. They don't have partnerships or human breeding. They find human love and really all human emotions very exotic and exciting and different. I love the idea that in a world where these aliens and their technology do and make everything that humans need so much better than we can on Earth, the only thing left to the only value that humans can create is by selling their humaneness to these aliens. That felt very subversive, but also very real to me.

Kousha Navidar: I might be way off on this, but something that I was wondering the whole time watching the movie is, is there a corollary with AI here? Because they were so deadpan like you said, and it felt like they just wanted as much as they could about humans, and they were making jobs, obsolete, et cetera. Is that a conscious decision? Is that something you've heard elsewhere? Am I just making something up?

Cory: You're definitely not making something up. One of the things I love about the way these creatures are conceived is they can stand in for a lot of things. They can stand in for a cluster of things. Again, there's this colonialist metaphor. The big one for me when we were making the movie is that they're all about corporate consolidation, as I was saying earlier. AI has become just a bigger part of our culture in the time since we've made the movie. I think it's an obvious corollary, strange creatures. One of the things I really like about the second half of the movie is we get to see the way that maybe like an AI, these creatures don't have existing human prejudices and venalities, but they absorb it through our culture.

They're fascinated by human culture, so they end up picking up a lot of the darker aspects of human culture secondhand and projecting that back toward the human race.

Kousha Navidar: You know it's so wild. I think this is what makes the movie captivating. You juxtaposed that with Adam's character specifically, who cares so much about painting. Painting is a big part of his personality, the way that he expresses himself, and the way the movie expresses itself, too. Can you talk to me about how painting came up for you, how you wanted to incorporate that into the movie?

Cory: Yes, absolutely. It's threaded all through the book, and it's a key part of our main character's life, and what he cares about, and something that I very much related to as a nerdy art kid in high school who cared a lot about authenticity, and what makes us human, and all that thing. It was a really important part of the visual language of the movie, too. If the biggest rock to turn over in the movie was the creature design. The other really big one was the paintings themselves. We found or worked with an amazing Atlanta-based artist named William Downs, whose artwork I was introduced to shortly before the movie and really fell in love with.

He's got a very, very distinctive style and just a wonderful artist. He created all of Adam's art for the movie. Every time we see Adam's art within the movie, which is a running visual motif, it's William Downs actually painted or drew it. The artwork was so good that in post, I wanted to incorporate it even more thoroughly in the movie. We came up with this idea of these chapter headings to highlight some of the unusual structure of the movie. We superimposed the chapter headings over different pieces that William created after the movie as well.

Kousha Navidar: I wanted to ask you about that. Why did you want to use that visual device to break up the movie with painting specifically?

Cory: I always have a weird love since childhood of chapter headings. I had them in my first movie, too. I don't know, there's a certain excitement when you close out a section and you're heading into a new section and you're greeted with some piece of text that will mean something different by the time you've seen the next chapter. Then with this movie, too, I really wanted the structure to feel novelistic in a way, meaning not as much of a standard three act, rising action, falling action structure as you will typically get, particularly in science fiction movies that are often a hero's journey type story.

This is trying to be an unusual story, and we wanted to have a little bit of an unusual structure, too, and to follow the slightly meandering, but ultimately coming together structure of the novella on which it's based.

Kousha Navidar: Got it. That idea of expressing the movie with those chapter markers, I think, has a nice tie in with how Adam chooses to himself versus how the aliens choose to express themselves. Is it giving too much away to say how the aliens express themselves? Is that okay?

Cory: I think that's perfectly fine.

Kousha Navidar: Because they use their hands, right?

Cory: Yes, their paddles, as we call them. I don't know if they're referred to as such by a character in the movie, but yes, there's-- and that was one of the big elements of the creature design. These are creatures that are not usually chasing people around. They're often sitting behind desks or sitting on couches or in these human environments. We wanted a creature that could look really interesting while communicating. The way that we tackled that challenge, again, with my visual effects supervisor, Erik De Boer,, and then with a long-time collaborator named Jean Park, who does the sound for all my movies.

We worked on building this physical language that, yes, is created by these creatures rubbing their scratchy textured paddles together in strange physical combinations.

Kousha Navidar: I loved this point that I'm sure you're going to say, "Yes, that's obvious. That's a part of being a good story." The Vuvv express themselves by rubbing their hands together. Adam expresses himself by putting a brush in his hand and putting it to a wall, right?

Cory: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: What meaning do you take from that?

Cory: I hadn't thought of that exact connection, but I like that there's a hand--

Kousha Navidar: Maybe not so obvious. [laughs] That just made me feel really good. Thanks.

Cory: It's good. I have found myself, as a director, drawn into hands. I love a good hand insert shot, essentially a close-up of hands. It's always interesting to watch the way great actors express themselves through every part of their body. Certainly, the movie is all about this contrast between, on one level, the invisible hand of the market from the title and the very human hand of the artist.

Kousha Navidar: I hadn't even thought about the invisible hand element to it, too. That seems like the most obvious. I was visiting that.

Cory: Hands all the way down.

Kousha Navidar: Hands all the way. Hands up and down. [chuckles] Talking about that juxtaposition, I want to listen to another clip in this scene. Adam is having a conversation with his sister Natalie, played by Brooklynn MacKinzie, while painting before a Vuvv City, like a physical city in the sky blocks his entire view. Let's listen to it.

Natalie: Mom looked upset. Did something happen while you guys were out job-hunting?

Adam: She's just tired.

Natalie: Did she find anything?

Adam: She will. Now, plant your vegetables. I'm trying to focus. [background noise] You're kidding me? I thought this almost heading east.

Natalie: Yes, I think it's a different one.

Adam: Hey, park somewhere else. [background noise] People live down here.

Kousha Navidar: One of the elements that really drove that scene home for me, besides the stunning visual effects, was just the relationship between these two actors and that entire family, the Campbells, was so gripping. For this film, Black actors were casted as the Campbells. However, these characters could have been played by anyone. I was wondering how race factors into the relationship between the Campbells and the world that they're living in.

Cory: To be honest, that decision started with just my love for particular actors. Tiffany Haddish, who plays Beth Campbell, the mother of this family, is an actress I've been wanting to work with since I saw her in Girls Trip many years ago. I'm really drawn to a certain comedian, and I think actors that start with a comic base can often give these really great and surprising, dramatic performances. I certainly am biased, but I think that's what she does in this movie. Then Asante Blackk, who who plays Adam, our lead, really, he was fantastic in Ava DuVernay's Netflix-limited series When They See Us.

As a director, whenever I see an actor, just jumps off the screen for me in the way that both of them did in those projects. I just file them away in my internal Rolodex of people that I really, really want to work with. I think having it be a Black family at the center of the story leads to some interesting additional layers with Chloe's family who move into their basement in the second half of the story. I don't want to go too deep into spoiler territory there, but I think it just adds to some of the dynamics in the book.

Kousha Navidar: It was so funny to see how the families adjusted themselves to try to appeal in certain ways to the different forces during the movie. One way is that the Vuvv seem to have romanticized this 1950s American esthetic from television. Why do you think the Vuvv were so obsessed with this era?

Cory: Again, the book goes even more deeply into this question and talks about how the Vuvv started watching humans in the '50s. There's a brief allusion to this as well. There's something in the movie as well, and there's something fun about the idea that when alien imagery started appearing all over our popular culture in forms of flying saucers and again, those first little green men images and that kind of thing, that, that was when the Vuvv secretly began observing us.

Then the interesting other side of that is the idea that because that's the first version of humanity that the Vuvv encountered in the '50s, they have this fixed idea of what humanity is just based on what they first saw. There's an interesting idea about tourism, colonialism there, but I thought that was very interesting and certainly speaks to a lot of '50s nostalgia that all different parts of our current culture are wrapped up in as well.

Kousha Navidar: When I was watching it, I was thinking, "Well, what are we imprinting on ourselves by watching them, and how that applies to what we imprint when we are absorbing all of the media that's out today? How are we adjusting ourselves?" Which leads to this meta question, love to hear from you, what parallels do you see between the film and Earth today?

Cory: I think there are too many parallels, and it's been interesting in the long process of making this movie, just all the different elements in our culture that this allegory has magnetically grabbed onto for me. When we were shooting, we were right in the throes of the Delta wave of COVID, and there's a scene, again, not getting deep into spoiler territory, but there's a scene where this kid's school is closed down, and they go all the way to nodes instead of in-person learning. I could go on and on, but that's what I love.

Kousha Navidar: We'll have to pause there. Cory Finley, Landscape with Invisible Hand. What a pleasure. Thank you.

Cory: Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: This has been All Of It. We'll have more tomorrow. Check this out. We're going to talk about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. The debate will be fierce and yummy. Thanks for hanging out with us. See you tomorrow.

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