“It’s almost like there’s an invisible kind of exoskeleton above the layer in which we think our lives take place on planet Earth, that’s made up of interconnectedness and data. We’re swimming around in it, and everything is totally porous, vulnerable and accessible. And if it hasn’t been targeted, that’s only because somebody hasn’t bothered to yet,” director Michael Mann recently told New York Times when it comes to his new film, Blackhat.
One of the films we’re greatly looking forward to this month, we now have a new look at how it was constructed, thanks to over 16 minutes of behind-the-scenes footage. Featuring on-location shooting at Chai Wan, Hong Kong, Perak, and Jakarta, it reveals some of the elaborate action sequences from the filmmaker. In the aforementioned interview it’s also revealed that “the movie starts with a nearly five-minute dramatization of code speeding through a network, shooting lights and grids, and a reverse internal shot of a keystroke,” all with the help of Qualcomm to have realistic geography. Mann adds, “if a conductive metal has a surfeit of electrons or no electrons, it does not change color — that’s fiction. I had to present it some way; I didn’t want to do motorcycles on a 3-D grid like Tron.”
Check out the footage below, along with a seven-minute featurette on the making of the film:
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, and Wang Leehom, Blackhat opens on January 16th.