Wally Pfister is best known to you as “Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer,” but he’s also got a movie coming out next week that looks pretty good. That said, he’s less than happy with how Transcendence is being sold.
Transcendence, of course, is about Johnny Depp turning into a computer and trying to eat everything. It actually deals with a complicated issue of biophysics and artificial intelligence, namely what happens when we give a computer the same urge to survive that we do.
Of course, we all know that Hollywood marketing departments are completely incapable of accepting that not everybody outside New York and L.A. is a total rube. So the marketing department has been… “streamlining” the trailers, something Pfister is extremely unhappy about according to IndieWire:
During a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, director Wally Pfister revealed that a dramatic line in the “Transcendence” trailer—Morgan Freeman uttering “It will be the end of mankind as we know it”—wasn’t his idea.
“…that line is not in the movie,” Pfister told attendees at the panel, saying that WB’s marketing team put it in there. “I’d never write something like that.”
Actually, that’s something of a relief. That was easily the cheesiest line in the trailers we’ve seen, and made it sound more like one of those movies where somebody hacks a car instead of an action drama about A.I.
On the other hand, it does raise the question, first of all, of how the marketing team has access to Morgan Freeman. Secondly, it makes us wonder how the trailers reflect the film that’s actually being put on the market. We’ll find out soon: Transcendence arrives April 18th.