What a Scanner Sees: Richard Linklater Animates a Philip K. Dick Sci-Fi Classic

Words: Jesse Ashlock

Every middle class suburban neighborhood has that one house that doesn't belong. In A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater's upcoming animated adaptation of the paranoid 1977 classic by Philip K. Dick, the house sits at the end of a sun-drenched Orange County cul de sac. An abandoned shopping cart rests on the edge of its weedy, unmowed lawn. During the day, its occupants come blinkingly into the driveway to tinker with broken-down cars; at night, you might hear gunshots fired in the backyard. Unsavory-looking people come and go at all hours.

The house is a haven for a group of friends hooked on Substance D, a fiendishly addictive new drug that now holds 20 percent of the population in its thrall. "You're either on it or you haven't tried it," a character explains early on. Substance D isn't the only thing that's different about the world of Scanner. The film portrays an America whose citizens understand and accept that they are under constant and complete surveillance -- an America where the War on Drugs and the War on Terror have converged and given way to a modern police state. Unlike past adaptations of work by the legendary science fiction author, which have sought to dazzle with high-concept techno-fantasy, this one chills with its dystopian vision of a plausible near-future not far removed from our present day.

The story's familiar-but-strange quality is heightened by the film's groundbreaking rotoscoping technique, the method of layering animation over live action that Linklater first employed in his 2001 philosophical ramble Waking Life. We recognize the actors -- Keanu Reeves as the rapidly deteriorating undercover cop Bob Arctor; Winona Ryder as his elusive, enigmatic love interest, Donna; and Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane as his drug- addled coterie -- and the settings they move through as realistic, yet the richly detailed, graphic novel-like animation style challenges that perception, suggesting that what we think of as "reality" is a construct, a fabrication. That's a notion that's central to the story, as it is to nearly all of Dick's writing.

From the outside, Detour Productions, where the alternate world of Scanner was brought to life, appears as disreputable as the house in the movie. It's in a squat, generic '70s building that looks like it might harbor a shady insurance company or telemarketing firm, on a low-rent commercial stretch of north Austin alongside Interstate 35. Virtually the only pedestrians are homeless people holding cardboard signs asking for handouts. "We've found needles out here," says Tommy Pallotta, one of the film's producers. "It's kind of ironic." When I visited last November, there was even an abandoned shopping cart on one side of the parking lot.

But inside it's another story. During my first trip to Detour, not long after the film was shot and edited, the building was nearly empty, and only a few very brief test animations had been completed. Now Scanner is almost done and the place hums with a combination of laid-backness and creative intensity you might have found in a late-90s dotcom startup. Shaggy dogs snooze in the hallways under framed movie posters, while animators sit at cluttered workstations using Wacom tablets to trace over the famous faces on their screens. Between phone calls to Linklater and the studio, Pallotta emerges from his shared office to harass them with a laser pointer. "It's a total garage operation," he says, a touch of pride in his voice.

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