The new AI thriller T.I.M. hits theaters this week, and it’s a darkly comic look at what happens when AI (inevitably) goes off the rails and turns on its masters. One of the best parts of the movie is the rivalry between T.I.M. (Eamon Farren) and disgruntled house husband Paul (Mark Rowley)—and it turns out that rivalry was as fun behind the scenes as it was onscreen.
T.I.M. tells the story of Abi (Georgina Campbell), a prosthetics engineer who lands a new job at an AI company. The job comes with a robotic servant named T.I.M., who gradually becomes obsessed with Abi and jealous of Paul. We sat down with Farren and Rowley to talk about T.I.M., Paul, and what makes the film so much fun.
“The script reminded me very quickly of 90s thrillers I watched growing up, especially The Good Son,” Farren says. “I was nervous, of course, but the challenge of playing a humanoid in something that was this fast and furious was kind of great to me.”
“When you read the script, it’s got this fun energy to it,” Rowley adds. “Think of the coffee test: If I can have just one coffee while reading a script, then it’s good. This script only needed one, so there we go.”
One important aspect of T.I.M.’s character is his physicality. “I first decided that I wanted to know how he moved,” Farren says. “Physicality was important to me. Because this is such a cat and mouse story, the way T.I.M. moves around the space was important. Early on in the film, when there’s this other being placed in Abi and Paul’s home, the way this being moves around the house could add to the tension and the feeling of destabilization.”
Rowley grins and jerks his arms around like a robot. “Beep boop!”
Farren laughs. “That was my first draft,” he jokes. “That was my first coffee.”
But Farren says that he didn’t just take inspiration from other robots. “There have been so many great portrayals of humanoids in film, so that’s on your mind,” he says. “But I wanted to try and find something that sparked my interest a little more out of left field. This may sound strange, but I was thinking about movement, and I love the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. I thought, ‘How interesting, if I could play with the idea of strength in soft movement. When T.I.M. moves, there’s a feeling of gliding, but a sharp edge, as well.”
Paul, of course, is the perfect foil to T.I.M.: brooding and volatile, with a marriage that’s already on thin ice. “People are complex,” Rowley says. “We have flaws. But we make up for our mistakes through our actions. We try to better ourselves. But if you have something that’s constantly perfect [like T.I.M.], you constantly compare yourself to them. With robots and AI, there’s no redemption, there’s just perfection.”
But the rivalry that comes to a shocking head in T.I.M. was the result of a close partnership on set. “We did have fun with it, didn’t we?” Rowley says. “I would try something in a take, then you would try something different just to mess with my head.”
“They gave us permission to needle each other,” Farren says. “But I felt very lucky to work with someone like Mark, who’s very funny and works very hard, and who can give you so many great offers in one take. It didn’t feel like we had to draw anything out of each other. There was a nice camaraderie between the three of us.”
T.I.M. comes out in theaters and on demand on January 12.
(featured image: Brainstorm Media)
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Julia Glassman
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