Production notes - very interesting read

www.thezerotheorem-movie.com/uploads/The-Zero-Theorem-Production-Notes .pdf

Here's a few quotes, if you don't have the time to read it all:

For Gilliam, the chapel was symbolic: a metaphor for old beliefs and systems. Yet the chapel also contains Qohen’s backstory, as the director explains, “You can see that at one point he was doing some building work: Qohen has put a kitchen in. In the corner there’s a cement mixer and building materials. On the table there are plans. And there is a sexy, pink chaise longue. So it is about his life: he bought this burnt out chapel. He bought it obviously cheaply, intending to do it up. He was in love with somebody, yet that relationship fell apart.

The decision was taken to make Mancom enormous, contrary to current technological trends. Warren explains, “At the moment everybody is trying to make tiny computers. But what if in the future it all goes the other way and size becomes really important, and computers are chunky? If Mancom is the biggest one of the lot, it should be colossal, since it is meant to hold all this entity information.

There were further decisions to make about the look of computers in THE ZERO THEOREM. Warren says, “Early on, we came up with the idea of liquid memory: data suspended in fluid. It was quite an arcane, messy kind of thing - downloading and uploading these tubes, one has to put them in a receptacle and out comes the information. And Terry made a conscious decision to use flat screens, but we have turned everything portrait, like pages of a book.”

Gilliam found significant irony during the filming of Joby’s Africa party. He says, “Everyone was dancing with these mobile devices and tablets. They are looking at each other, but not really quite connecting even when they are all dancing together. It was interesting watching the extras because they all have these things, and the minute we stopped shooting, they were all interacting with their own devices on the web. Very few of them were actually talking to each other.”

A black hole is the metaphor for what Qohen fears, and it exists within his imagination. This gave the filmmakers a certain amount of liberty to not necessarily visualise an academically-accurate black hole. It’s an analogy for nothingness itself; it is what Qohen is most frightened of, being sucked into nothingness.

In films such as THE BEAUTIFUL MIND, we see many numbers and equations on screen. We’ve gone in a different direction, with objects. We have invented some beautiful imagery based on cubes, and to prove that all is chaos, it seems one has to do that by building something which may or may not stick together.

Warren describes the early design, “We found a reference early on, something called a Menger cube. It’s like a fractal cubic environment. The logic of this world is this massive fractal landscape, made out of conventional six-sided cubes, which are a form of packaging information. Mancom is forming a lifestyle out of entities, which are us - people. These various entities are grabbed, put together in this six-sided box, and that is an expression of a successful lifestyle. It is a way of marketing and monitoring the consumer society. The ideawas that the visual cubic modelling is higher level programming, reserved for boffins like Qohen or Bob.

The picture provided personal resonance to the editor, he says, “At the start, we see a guy sitting naked in front of a computer. His life is harnessed in manipulating something on screen, and that is something I can relate to as a film editor! I think it’s very much a document of our time, about the notion that in this world of communication, there’s a strong aspect of isolation. All the communication in the world does not necessary connect you spiritually.