CraveOnline: When you’re creating a story and you’re centering it in a world that’s based on ones and zeros, how do you go about structuring it in a way that’s exciting and dramatic?
Michael Mann: What it gets down to is a story about people, and people are trying to find something out. In the case of Hathaway, he’s a guy who is running from his past, trying to control his future, and he may or may not have one. This woman enters his life who is very alluring, could not be from a more different place. Two people from totally different backgrounds, and they’re thrown together and they bond and work side-by-side as underdogs, fugitives, almost stateless in a way, hunting for an adversary who knows they’re there and is hunting them. So that’s what it’s about.
“The world’s global. You wouldn’t tell this story and locate it in the confines of Des Moines, IA.”
Now that’s preceded by detection. It’s primarily a detective story. Who is this guy they’re tracking? On top of everything else, what does he want? Because when he blew up the nuclear reactor in China it wasn’t for money, it wasn’t for a political statement, and when he jacked soy, the way he did it doesn’t make sense. From his code, he’s smart [but] the way it went down makes no sense. If you want to do it to make money, only for the sake of making money, you do it low and slow. He didn’t. He did it in 24 hours. Which means what? They can project that the guy must feel that he is safe wherever he is, that no one’s going to find him. That means he’s not in the United States. He’s somewhere else. And to do it this fast means he must have a need for the cash.
That, plus the overwrite, plus the writing in the decompiled code that Hathaway is looking at on the green screen, tells him something else is coming. So what is that hit that’s coming?
Do you start with that inciting incident or do you work backwards, because you want this hacking story to be able to travel around the world and be about a bad guy who thinks he’s safe, and then how work out how to get to that point?
Well, these people are around the world. In any mail where it’s bounced across 17, 18 proxy servers, usually one of them is going to be Mumbai because they don’t keep good records of IP codes. So, it’s like they don’t keep good records of the address. They don’t keep a good record of a phone number. So it is going to bounce around the world. It is global. The world’s global. You wouldn’t tell this story and locate it in the confines of Des Moines, IA. [Laughs.] You’re out there, man. So that takes us to all these places.
