And he said, ‘Then, when you say something, it has real weight.’” But he had much more dialogue originally, and gave most of it away. I think he actually says that line to me in WESTWORLD. He said that in a movie like that, it’s better not to talk too much. So he was surprising all the time.”īenjamin also recalled a noteworthy exchange with Brynner that imparted some solid acting advice: “We talked about movies, and he talked about Westerns, and he talked about how he gave away most of his lines on MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. He took me out to a Japanese restaurant on Pico Boulevard for lunch one day when we had a break, and they all knew him in there, and he was talking to all of them in fluent Japanese. “It turned out it was all real and all true. “I couldn’t always tell if he was making up something,” Benjamin laughed. The two men forged a nice friendship, and Benjamin remarked that the larger-than-life THE KING AND I Oscar winner was always armed with a good story. Who called you?’ He said, ‘Nobody called me.’ They said, ‘Well, why are you here?’ And he said, ‘I can’t think of a better place to be.’ He loved being around movies. “The went crazy because they thought somebody had made a mistake and called him, and when they said, ‘Mr. It was really just a total pleasure.”īenjamin recalled that Brynner loved being on the WESTWORLD set, and would even show up when he wasn’t scheduled to work. … When we did some of the stuff at Red Rock Canyon, which was where we shot the exteriors, Paula, my wife, came out there with us and we all went horseback riding together. He’s a really nice guy, real down to earth. We’d sit around in between camera set-ups and we got to be friends. “I just thought he was great for the part. “We got along right away,” said Benjamin of Brolin. Through all this fun, Benjamin bonded with his co-stars, becoming good friends with Brolin, Brynner, and Crichton. “And you can see it all in JURASSIC PARK and all the stuff he did.” Notably, WESTWORLD was the first film to employ computer-generated imagery in the narrative - a simplistic pixelation, fundamentally, albeit very complicated to create - in the form of the Gunslinger’s point of view: basic grid-like patterns showing body-heat signatures that allow him to track his prey. “ was creating this whole of the machines going crazy - something he really believed in - that people were giving too much over to them,” said Benjamin. Naturally, this “highly reliable” technology develops an unspecified virus, resulting in a slow chain of glitches, anomalies, and malfunctions that crescendo with out-and-out robot revolt mayhem. In WESTWORLD, even the horses and snakes are manufactured synthetic creatures. In a controlled environment populated by compliant, servile androids and monitored by white-coat lab technicians, park guests can indulge their most base urges, from picking fights and wanton sex to even killing for pleasure. Their way through the seven deadly sins - at adult-oriented theme parks like Western World, Roman World, and Medieval World. WESTWORLD is set in a near future in which tourists pay top dollar to live out their innermost fantasies - and perhaps work I mean, you think you get smarter around him, because his intellect and also his wit and everything is on such a high level that it brings you up.” He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and you get smarter around him. When you see pictures like EX MACHINA - she’s a robot, but she turns out to be lethal - and there’s a TV show called HUMANS, which is very interesting because someone does sleep with a robot in there - all these things are children of Michael’s writing.”Īfter cutting his teeth in the director’s chair on the 1972 TV-movie PURSUIT, Crichton made his feature-film debut with WESTWORLD, and Benjamin noted that the towering, 6’9 novelist-turned-director was impeccably prepared. The veteran star of such broad-ranging film and TV projects as CATCH-22, LOVE AT FIRST BITE, and QUARK - and director of such memorable films as MY FAVORITE YEAR, RACING WITH THE MOON, MERMAIDS, and THE MONEY PIT - is not particularly fond of watching himself on screen, but his revisit sparked a number of new insights: “Michael was really ahead of all this kind of stuff today. “It was scarier than I remembered,” the film’s star Richard Benjamin told me of his impression of WESTWORLD after his most recent viewing of the film.
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