When Love Me directors Sam and Andrew Zuchero set out to make their first film, they set the difficulty level at god-tier: They didn’t just want to make a movie about post-apocalyptic robots in love (played by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun), they wanted to use extensive stop-motion. And full motion-capture character animation. And live-action sequences. And they wanted the story to stretch from small details on a devastated Earth out to a galactic-level scale.
“We didn’t know if we’d ever be able to make another movie, so we wanted to do all the fun stuff,” Andrew told Polygon ahead of Love Me’s theatrical release on Jan. 31. “We wanted to make robots and go shoot ’em in amazing locations around planet Earth and live the dream of being George Lucas in the early ’70s. We wanted to animate like Walt Disney and Pixar. And finally, we wanted to be on set with a film camera, shooting 35mm with two of the most amazing actors working today.”
“We like stuff that’s hard,” Sam says. “We like climbing mountains. We like working together. [Laughs] We like studying.”
That desire to be Pixar and George Lucas at the same time helps explain the design of their protagonist Me, a solar-powered weather buoy voiced by Kristen Stewart, and later played by her in humanoid form, in mo-cap and live action. In this exclusive clip, the buoy, who is just starting to achieve self-awareness and explore what it means to be alive, scans through the remnants of the internet on a deserted Earth, watching YouTube clips and zooming in on an influencer named Deja (also Stewart), who will eventually become an obsession.
To a sci-fi fan, the buoy strongly resembles other inhuman-looking but anthropomorphized robots from popular cinema, particularly Wall-E from the Pixar movie WALL-E and BB-8 from Star Wars: The Force Awakens and other movies. The irising eye, the little interrogative head-tilts, the way Me lowers her head to indicate sorrow or shame — these elements are only vaguely suggestive of human behavior, but they communicate human emotion clearly and effectively. The basic design, though, came from real-world machines.
“We were just playing around with it,” Sam says. “There actually are a bunch of buoys that monitor ocean temperatures, salinity, turbidity, that stuff, that look similar to our buoy. But we built her based on what we needed her to do to be a person, to be emotional.”
“It was really our production designer, Zazu Myers, who figured out a way to take a tool built to monitor the environment and to anthropomorphize it in a way that feels realistic but cute,” Andrew says.
Sam says Myers worked with Laird FX — which has built props and physical effects for series including Netflix’s Locke & Key, Star Trek: Discovery, The Umbrella Academy, and The Expanse, among others — to create the physical Me buoy, which the Zucheros then shot live on location for the movie’s first act. While Me remains a robot buoy throughout the movie, she and her satellite counterpart (Yeun) also create virtual spaces where they can enact in various forms.
“We just always said this was a love story about transformation,” Sam says. “The ability to transform is very important — the ability to fix or change whatever you want in order to fit in with what you need, and what society needs. And it’s important to not be stuck in stone. So Love Me is about constant change, and acceptance of constant change.”
Love Me is in theaters now.
