The Birth of the Project

The epic, history-changing events depicted in I, ROBOT were born over a decade ago, when screenwriter Jeff Vintar wrote a spec script, "Hardwired," a mystery about a murder that may have been committed by a robot. Producer Laurence Mark shepherded the project, and Twentieth Century Fox acquired "Hardwired" for development with Alex Proyas attached to direct. In early 2000, Vintar flew to Australia to begin working with Proyas on the project, a collaboration that continued over two years.

"We began developing the script with Alex Proyas, and our goal was to open it up a bit," remembers Laurence Mark. "It started out as a rather straightforward futuristic murder mystery, and there was an ongoing effort to broaden its canvas. Also, it seemed wise to go for a movie that took as much advantage as possible of Alex's keen sense of visuals."

During that time, the I, Robot film rights were acquired by Davis Entertainment, and Proyas re-envisioned the film to include additional elements of author Isaac Asimov's work. Asimov's ideas and characters fit naturally within the structure of Vintar's mystery tale.

"We married 'Hardwired' and I, Robot together because Fox had always wanted to do a big movie about robotics and it had always been Alex's dream to do a movie of Asimov's short stories," says producer John Davis. "It was a marriage that could happen organically because the themes of 'Hardwired' and I, Robot often coincided," adds Laurence Mark.

The world of 2035 believes robots to be "3 Laws Safe." A robot cannot hurt a human being or allow a human being to come to harm; a robot must obey a human being's orders unless the orders conflict with the first law; a robot must protect its own existence as long as it doesn't conflict with the first or second law. Asimov first created of Robotics in his science fiction writing, but his ideas extend into the real world, and even govern the way real roboticists and researchers tackle artificial intelligence.

"Asimov really became the best popularizer of science," says co-screenwriter Jeff Vintar. "He was one of the pioneers of science fiction and one of the first to write about robots. Before Asimov, robots were written as monsters. He was the first one to treat them not as metal Frankensteins, but as mechanisms that worked by certain rules, and he's credited with writing the first realistic robot stories."

Alex Proyas' affinity for Asimov's stories dates back to the filmmaker's childhood. "When I was about ten years old, I used to read a lot of science-fiction and Asimov was one of the authors that I enjoyed very much. I was a real fan of the science fiction genre and I, Robot was one of the few books that I always thought would be really cool to make into a movie. When you're young, you dream about this stuff and I wanted to make films from a pretty early age. So, I dreamed about turning this into a movie one day.

"I thought Asimov's ideas were still incredibly pertinent and contemporary," Proyas continues. "It's amazing that someone working in the 1940s and early '50s could project so specifically into the future, and conjecture about ideas that are now starting to affect us in our everyday lives. We are getting closer and closer to the future world he wrote about, so the time is now right to tell those stories."