“The robot behaves like a husband in a car”

Berlin – Alma and Tom are a lovely couple. If they turn up somewhere together, nobody notices that the scientist is out and about with a robot. “Ich bin dein Mensch” by Maria Schrader, celebrated at the Summer Berlinale, tells of our relationship to artificial intelligence in such a way that we no longer ask ourselves technical questions – philosophical, ethical, moral but all the more. Now the film is coming to the cinemas. We spoke to Jan Schomburg, who wrote the script together with Maria Schrader.

Berlin newspaper: How do you come up with the idea of ​​making a film about artificial intelligence with an artificial intelligence that is no longer robotic?

Jan Schomburg: In my work, I am interested in questions of identity: What is the difference between being someone and representing someone? That’s why the subject was very close to me when the proposal came up. Because we didn’t come up with the core of the film. It came to us as a short story that Emma Braslavsky had written on behalf of SWR.

So were you more interested in reality than science fiction?

Algorithms are already making decisions for us on the Internet and in apps or offering us things. You just have to think a little further, then you can become more fundamental and philosophical: What consequences does this have for love and desire?

Tom has been programmed to please Alma. For her it is a reason to think about who she is. I had to think of your film “Forget Me”. Are there any relatives?

It’s about a woman who loses her memory and is then shaped again according to her own specifications. She wants to become the person she used to be. This is irritating for her husband because he always has the feeling that she is just playing. There is actually a similarity: The woman in “I am your person” meets a counterpart who is actually an outgrowth of one’s own self.

At that time you cast Maria Schrader in the lead role. Now she is the co-writer of the script that she directed. How did you cope with this reversal of roles?

You don’t have to worry about my ego. We have already worked together in a wide variety of constellations: We wrote the script for “Before the Dawn” together. She read my novel “The Light and the Noise” as an audio book and she acted in the film that I wrote and directed. I think it’s fantastic when someone like Maria, whom I totally trust, stages my things.

What does trust mean in this context?

I’ve never written a script for anyone other than her. Maria can get something out of scenes that is even bigger than the formulated scene.

How do you write dialogues for an AI? Because Tom looks like a person, the special thing had to be attached to the language.

When you write, you operate on a meta level: you know it should be an AI and yet you use your own experience. As a result, everything has a double bottom, which can be fun. Think of the drive where Tom explains to her without being asked how she could control the vehicle better. He behaves like most husbands in the passenger role.

Clever Tom quotes statistics there, as well as in the attempt to seduce you with champagne and rose petals: Did you research them or are they made up?

I love doing research and inventing something from there. As we were thinking about what Alma could do for a living that might have to do with human history, I came across cuneiform writing and developed these scenes without knowing much about it. It was only when Maria asked the Pergamon Museum whether we could film there that we learned that it is the world leader in research into cuneiform script. That made us really happy. And of course I know how important research is sometimes: I’m currently writing a historical novel that is set between 1890 and 1940, so the facts have to be verifiable.

Emma Braslavsky published a novel two years ago in which artificial intelligence is very present in Berlin: “The night was pale, the lights were blinking”, but it is very different from your film. How does your story relate to your script?

The basic constellation was the same: a woman has a robot at home that is programmed for her. Emma may have focused more on the machine’s inadequacies; we were more interested in what happens when the AI ​​turns out to be the better person, so to speak – in matters that we consider typically human. So empathy, generosity, friendliness.

And humor! We don’t just laugh at Tom, we laugh with him later too. Why should the robot man look like an Englishman?

We didn’t want to animate a puppet – we wouldn’t have had that budget at all – but let a person perform. Everything artificial should arise in the mind of the viewer. The British accent creates the nuance of a strangeness. We also thought that if you don’t know the actor from German television, it would be easier to perceive him as a robot.

Tom’s language tends to be shorter within the statements, but also more precise. Did you consciously arrange them in a rhythm?

I like to switch from slapstick humor to serious philosophical reflections and touching moments. When I write prose, I notice that there is also a rhythm within the sentences. In the film we could also play with the language, with idioms like: Clarify everything! Tom uses them, Alma doesn’t like them. Right at the beginning he says something relatively normal, “You’re a darling!”, But that sounds so stupid from his mouth that it’s funny. Later it seems weird when he says everyday things like: “I think that’s super interesting.” Dan Stevens plays it very well, of course because Maria stages it that way.

How did you and Maria Schrader work on the script together in times of Corona?

Pandemic law even before the pandemic! We sat in different places and sent the texts back and forth.

At the beginning of the year Daniel Kehlmann gave a lecture about his experiment to write a literary text with AI, “The Algorithm and Me”. Are you worried about the future role of artificial intelligence?

There have long been compositions in the style of Bach or programmed images. As a screenwriter, I notice how slow I am at thinking and writing compared to such data processing. But AI is neither good nor bad. Most of the stories are about the AI ​​taking over the world in the end and turning against us. There are seldom positive visions.

In your film, we see in the older man played by Jürgen Tarrach how happy AI can make lonely people.

I really like this scene. If an AI could give it to people who have had no tenderness in their entire life, why not? There can be a utopia and at the same time a dystopia: that people become addicted to it, depending on this confirmation. But if you avoid other types of encounters that may be more frustrating, more frustrating, you stay in your own filter bubble. Sometimes I think the only thing that makes people really original is the irrational, the idiocy, the irrational. Since I got involved with it, I even feel a little sympathy for those who oppose the vaccination.

I beg your pardon?

I think that’s ultimately unreasonable, but human. An AI would never draw such conclusions from half-truths or false statements.