In Sweetwater, Robert (Michael Keaton) returns to his childhood home as he prepares it for sale and is greeted by an AI recreation of his mother Bettie (Kyra Sedgwick) assembled from publicly available information on the celebrity, which brings up many memories as he both cherishes and fears the opportunity to engage with a version of someone he’s missed for so long.
Awards Buzz spoke with Keaton, who directed in addition to starring in the short film, and his son Sean Douglas, who served as writer and composer. The conversation begins with a question about whether this film’s subject matter feels related to Keaton’s previous directorial effort, the feature film Knox Goes Away. Keaton was surprised by the comparison:
“Not until you brought it up, no! What’s odd about it is that I’m also in development on this feature with Morgan Freeman and we were just meeting about it the other day. We’re in the pre-pre-production stage. That also is going to deal with memory and loss of memory and all that. It also has a little bit of – I don’t want to give away too much – how people remember certain things. Not just losing memory, but everyone’s memory of things. That also brings up, there’s memory and there’s, did that even happen? There’s a tiny bit of that in this that I like. The ending of a movie I directed called The Merry Gentleman, I always wanted it to have an underlying tone of, not even surreal – that’s actually not what it is – but are we watching not a fantasy but is this occurring really? Without making a big deal out of it, if it’s sitting in there somewhere in people’s consciousness when they watch, good. I like things like that.”
Douglas added:
“There is a big theme in that that certainly is about what is memory? How reliable is this? Especially in the Sweetwater story where someone has trained this AI projection of his mother from mostly public performance, which is all fictional, how faithful a representation of a person can that be?”
Watch the video above to hear about the project’s origins as part of Google’s AI on Screen short film program, telling stories about AI without actually using AI, and casting Sedgwick for a key role that was all about warmth.
