When Johnny Depp channelled his inner Max Headroom: “The worst part is I liked it”
For the purposes of the Johnny Depp movie we’re going to talk about today, you’re going to need to know about two things, firstly AI, which we presume you know about because it’s going to take all our jobs and leave us foraging for food in a post-apocalyptic wilderness like in Terminator, and secondly Max Headroom, which will take a bit more explaining.
Max Headroom, for the uninitiated, was a kind of early virtual reality talking head in the 1980s, with a very pronounced American accent, lego hair and sunglasses who wasn’t particularly funny at all. Nobody really liked him in the UK, and yet he became inexplicably ubiquitous on TV at the time, before disappearing as quickly as he became popular.
Regardless of how irritating he was, however, there are a couple of interesting facts about Headroom. For one, he was actually British, created by a group of UK video directors, and for another, someone once hijacked a US TV station pretending to be him. And lastly, his origin story is actually based on AI, and specifically, how the mind of an unconscious journalist is taken and uploaded to create the Headroom character.
Which brings us to the 2014 movie Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp is a genius scientist who works with AI, ends up being shot, then having his own mind uploaded to protect the secrets he has on how technology might eventually ‘transcend’ human capabilities, while some shady people try to steal it.
Although it was directed by Christopher Nolan’s Director of Cinematography, Wally Pfister, and featured plenty of big names other than Depp, including Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, and Rebecca Hall, the movie absolutely tanked on release, making a sizeable loss on what was always going to be a hugely ambitious $150m expenditure.
Given Depp spends most of the movie as a kind of talking floating head thing, it’s probably understandable that some assembled journos at the time grilled him on whether or not he aligned himself with that particular bit of ‘80s culture.
He told them, “I did feel a little bit like Max Headroom. And I guess the worst part is I liked it. You know what I mean? I liked being in my little dark room and they were on the other side, and we couldn’t find each other sometimes. All this was done through videotape and sound. So, yeah.”
He probably didn’t like the raft of extremely poor reviews that greeted the film on release, however, and not only did Pfister not direct another movie afterwards, he even retired from cinematography, which seems extreme given he won an Oscar for it and did the likes of Inception, which was genuinely ground-breaking.
Depp, of course, headed straight into global notoriety with the Amber Heard court case a few years later, but has rebounded somewhat and managed to ‘un-cancel’ himself. Although he’s been quiet the last few years, he is about to start work on a big screen version of the Dickens classic Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, which actually sounds pretty interesting given it’s directed by Ti West, who did the X trilogy with Mia Goth. Depp will line up alongside Andrea Riseborough for the film, which is due out next year.
