Bruce Cogburn (Guy Pearce) is the author of the famous book ‘The Infernal Machine’. He is a controversial man who leads a secluded life. As he begins to receive letters from an obsessive fan, he embarks on a dangerous search for the person behind them, forcing him to face his past and the truth behind his writings.
Starring alongside Pearce in The infernal machine are Alice Eve, Alex Pettyfer, Jeremy Davies and more. It was written and directed by Andrew Huntand can be seen in select theaters and digitally from September 23, 2022.
“I think the most important thing for them is” [the audience] to be on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster,” Hunt said.
Character study of The Infernal Machine
“My feeling is that I’m one of those audience members,” Hunt told me, “and that I want to go down a really interesting rabbit hole, a really crazy emotional roller coaster where the audience could predict what they think is going to happen. happen, and then pull the rug all the way down and realize that yes, this movie is a psychological thriller, but it’s also a character study.”
Hunt went on to explain how the character study can relate to the audience on a more personal level. “It’s of a character who is just trying to find his own inner truth and trying to find the courage to face that truth. And so, I think it’s a mixture of you walking out, and you say, ‘Okay, that was a great ride,’ and at the same time it’s commenting on how we are, because we all have a really interesting story about who we are now. And many of the ways we live our lives today are based on decisions we made in the past, and sometimes those decisions haunt our present. The idea of knowing that you can change that present, that you can make different decisions, and that you can create a whole new future for yourself is something the public loves to walk away with.”
When I was 10 years old I had a shoebox full of action figures and if it was a rainy day and I knew none of my friends would come and I entered my room with this box of action figures I had no idea what I was going to do, but I was so excited with the potential of what I could do. And I feel the same feeling I had when I was 10 years old, now 47 years old, when I walked through a row of movie trucks getting ready to walk onto the set, and I get to play for a day.
As for the characters in The infernal machineHunt said he drew inspiration for Bruce Cogburn from people throughout history who have experienced similar dynamics, including JD Salinger and The Beatles.
“There’s a number of different references, whether it’s JD Salinger and ‘Catcher in the Rye’ or Charles Manson and The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter,’ it’s one of those things with the theme of creator versus creation. You create this thing that you release into the world now, and your intentions, maybe you have the best intentions…if it comes out and someone misinterprets the message…the real question to ask is how the creator is feeling right now, what they made has caused this kind of negative reaction, maybe not just for a group of people, but for a person who has now lost a loved one because a writer or musician is writing a song or writing a book there i thought that was something very interesting to discover, that guilt of what an artist carries when his work has been misinterpreted.”
Guy Pearce and Alex Pettyfer in The Infernal Machine
“Working with Guy is like an honor over honor,” said Hunt. “I grew up watching his movies. He’s a great actor, and to take something that I had written on the page, and now Guy embodies that character, and creates so many more layers and levels, and you see his three-dimensional tormented soul in front of the camera… I was on the front row to watch a great performance. But the beauty of working with Guy is a real collaboration that, it’s the first time I’ve really had that in film directing, where I’ve never seen Guy as an actor, more than that, he’s a partner. Every day we came in with different ideas and different thoughts about changing and adapting scenes, and it was always about finding the truth in each scene and what feels fair. And that was something that always fascinated me when I saw Guy at work.”
“Alex Pettyfer… he took on this character that was initially on the page – I think he was a bit two-dimensional – and what Alex could do was wash away a bit and make this tougher character really terrifying. I think the reason that he’s so terrifying in the movie is that he’s everyone he’s the guy who lives down the street two blocks away from you there’s something much more terrifying when it’s someone you can actually recognize where it isn’t a spinning mustache-like villain, it’s someone you might run into… Alex’s decision to go that way and when he presented it to me, I was like, ‘Wow, what a great approach to that character’, because I’d never seen a character like that before,” he added.
The infernal machine comes to us from Paramount Pictures.