Interview with Humans movement director Dan O'Neill

18 October 2016

You’re the Movement Director on both series of Humans. Can you explain your brief on the show?

Basically my brief was: go away and come up with a really great, efficient, synthetic machine, based on the human body, based on opposition, on natural symmetry and so on. I began working with the principal actors who were playing synths in series one. So that was initially Gemma Chan and Will Tudor, and the others came and joined us later as well. And we started developing the movements until we came up with what you see on screen.

 

Where do you start doing something like that?

The first thing we did was look at how the machine would stand – its posture. We decided that the machine would always be in parallel, that the arms would be carried in a certain way, that the weight would be carried in a certain place, that the eye line is looking a certain way...

 

And how did it evolve after that?

We discovered all sorts of things we hadn’t been able to do in the studio - like walking up and down stairs, getting in and out of cars, or opening and closing doors, all everyday things that we developed using the rules that we’d first applied to synths. That was all to do with the governing principle of being as economic and ergonomic as possible, being very judicious as to how they use their energy. All tasks are performed in the most efficient way possible. As humans, we’re always demonstrating emotional states and conditions and attitudes to things. Non-verbal communication is a huge part of how we interact as humans – pulling faces, blinking, shrugging our shoulders – and we decided that obviously synths don’t communicate like that. They don’t have an interior monologue, or a future or a past. They just exist in the present, like a refrigerator. So when they move, there’s no emotional state to factor in, they always move the same way. And they have a grace and economy of movement.

 

I understand there are elements of tai chi and a Japanese tea ritual in the movements. How did you decide where to draw your inspiration?

I trained as a dancer, and was a dancer for many years, so I drew on stuff that I’d come across during that time. Things like tai chi, which I’d done at college, and martial arts, which I’d done subsequently. The stuff about how to stand, where to put the weight and so on comes from that. I dipped into a little bit of Alexander Technique as well – in terms of keeping the body as efficient and symmetrical as possible. We knew that they should have a grace and simplicity about them, so I thought about all the Apple products, and the beautiful lines and shapes that they have, that high tech quality and desirability and gloss. We based how they run on Michael Johnson, that upright stance with a very fast chopping arm action, and a speedy leg lift with the body staying incredibly still and very upright. We did lots of improvisations, laying tables, being in cafes, we even improvised a nightclub scene. We figured they’d have pre-programmed dance sequences that would go with a song.

 

How many cast and extras did you have to train?

I’m on set every day, so I think for series one I met 150 people through castings and workshops, of which we probably worked with 60 or 70 during the series. This time I think I’ve met well over 300 people, and I think of those we might see double or even triple the number we saw on screen in the first series.

 

Were Gemma and Will good students?

They were fantastic. All the people I worked with in the ‘synth school’ really committed to the physical world of being a synth. Gemma and Will would go away and work on it at home, and come back and discuss things with me that they’d been thinking about. They had lots of ideas. It was really collaborative. And Will had to learn how to be a real synth, and then we had to put in all sorts of things that were going wrong with him –the flickering of the eyes, the juddering and slight malfunctioning. So he had the proper synth training and then we broke him down.

 

We’ve all seen how androids, robots and cyborgs have moved on screen in the past. Were you very keen to avoid clichés?

Yes, absolutely. That was a conversation we had really early on when I was invited to work on this. When I looked at the original Swedish shown that this was based on, I was told not to watch it too much, because we were going to do our own thing with the synths. And normally, for a project like this, I’d research other places of inspiration, and I thought that would be fatal for this project, because I’d just end up recreating other people’s really great ideas. There’s wonderful work out there, from Bladerunner to Westworld to AI. So I blocked all of those things out. A lot of the things the synths do are very subtle. They need to have the qualities of humans, have things we recognise. The smile – it’s a very put-on, plastic smile, to make them appear user-friendly. The fact that they blink now and again is a mechanical feature so they’re not just staring at us all the time with an unbroken gaze. I think that would be really disconcerting to have around the house. And they can breathe – they don’t have lungs, but we imagined they’d have a little pad in their chest that would move in and out, which also allows the actor to breathe. But when we have emotional scenes, actors are used to creating emotion through breath, but we had to suppress that, so you don’t see heaving shoulders or chests. When they have to run fast, they then have to stop and not show the effort they’ve gone through. It’s really challenging. Every day there’s a new challenge to overcome.

 

There’s something strangely unsettling about the synths movements. Why do you think that is?

I think because we can’t read them. When people communicate, we make hand gestures, we express emotion with our eyes or facial expressions. We communicate on various levels, we send sophisticated signals. And these machines don’t communicate any of those, they don’t give us any clues. They don’t project any personality, and we find that rally unsettling.

 

We have series two coming up. Is it easier, because you and the principal cast have done it all before, or did it just present you with a whole load of different challenges?

Both of those things are true. Synth schools are more precise, in a way, we know exactly the sort of skills we need from people who are going to be involved. We’ve looked much more closely at how to identify those people – actors with good training, dancers, people who have done sport to a high level, stunt guys, people who can apply the grammar of being a synth. But expectations are higher – and we’re introducing conscious synths, which presents a whole new challenge in terms of how we move the challenge forward. You have conscious synths, unconscious synths, malfunctioning synths, original synths, so it’s a bigger project.