After a triumphant, Emmy-nominated, blow-your-mind monologue in the last “White Lotus” Sam Rockwell shifts to big screen mind-blowing possibilities with “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.”
In this baroque sci-fi story set in the future, a homeless man (Rockwell) enters an LA diner armed with what looks like a terrorist bomb strapped to his chest. He announces he’s from the future, sent to save the world from an imminent AI uprising.
He’s done this 117 times, he says. Continually resetting, he must organize a group among the diners to, yes, save the world as we know it.
“This was a no brainer,” Rockwell, 57, said in a virtual interview. “I mean, I met with Gore (Verbinski, the director behind the first three “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies) and realized that we’ve been talking about doing a couple of things — and this was the one.”
He’s playing a character without a name, known simply as “The Man from the Future.”
“When I initially got together with Gore, I was doing a little more Kurt Russell vibe, like ‘Escape from New York.’ And Gore said, ‘You know, it’s too cool.’
“This guy’s not really the best guy for the job,” Rockwell acknowledged. “He’s the bottom of the list. So I decided to pitch my voice a little higher and work on a couple of things.
“I started playing around with the Don Rickles thing, and a New York regionalism came out of that. Really, there’s no justification for that if I’m being honest.
“But as far as being from the future, I don’t know why he would have a regionalism at all. But it just kind of happened that way.”
As Future Man is lamenting and warning about an AI takeover of humanity, would he call this a comedy? A weird time travel movie? Or maybe an offbeat thriller?
“It’s kind of all that,” Rockwell offered. “It’s in the vein of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once.’ Or ‘Time Bandits’ or Back to the Future.’ But a little darker. It’s definitely a dark comedy.”
As the star of a large, complicated scenario, how was it leading the troops for several months?
“Well, I could go into detail but it wasn’t the easiest shoot. Because we went back and forth from day to nights, our sleeping habits were not great. And somehow we (the company)] got a stomach bug in Cape Town.
“I don’t know how, all of us got sick. And then, I don’t want to bore you with all the bloody details, but the suit was a bit much too. And then I had, obviously, a lot of words to memorize.
“So it wasn’t always a picnic, but we really were there to make a great movie.”
“Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” opens Friday
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