Living with the surrogates

MANILA, Philippines - In Surrogates, FBI agents (Bruce Willis, photo, and Radha Mitchell) investigate the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a high-tech surrogate phenomenon that allows people to purchase unflawed robotic versions of themselves enabling people to experience life vicariously from the comfort of their own homes.

Director Jonathan Mostow talks about the movie.

Was there ever a thought to having another actor play Bruce Willis’ Surrogate?

“The question was, how do you represent both him and his Surrogate doppelganger? I decided on having the same actor because it’s a very different thing to think about something or to imagine it in your mind and see it on the screen. There’s an emotional transference that you have in literature that you can’t have in movies. People invest in the person they see on the screen and they can’t shift gears. Intellectually, you’re like, “Yeah, that’s supposed to be Bruce,” but emotionally you don’t get it. In the sequence (in the film) you see the younger Bruce running around and you see the bald Bruce in the chair. That connection works.”

Can Surrogates feel pain?

“No. I mean you can. You can program it so that it will filter out whatever you want. But most people don’t want to feel pain. You don’t have to smell bad smells. Again, we don’t go as deeply into all that stuff in the movie as I wish we had been able to.”

So people can have more than one Surrogate?

“That’s an interesting question. No, not really. Every Surrogate is assigned its own unique code. Everybody in the movie basically has one Surrogate, but there’s one exception that I won’t get into because I don’t want to spoil the plot.”

Surrogates opens Sept. 25 in theaters.