How DreamQuil Creates A Beautiful Version Of An Ugly Future

A retrofuturist dystopia might be worlds removed from our own in terms of aesthetic, but Alex Prager’s DreamQuil finds plenty of other ways to hold a mirror up to our society. The art photographer’s feature debut splices the apocalyptic settings one would encounter in Total Recall or 1984 with the absurdist tone of Brazil, sprinkling in a bit of second-wave feminism to unpack the plight of her protagonist.

Elizabeth Banks is Carol, a working housewife who resents being called “mom” — even by her own child — and frequently escapes from her suffocating reality with trips into holographic simulations. She gets a chance to finally get out of her slump with the help of a program called DreamQuil; the only catch is that an automated copy of Carol will replace her while she’s off on her wellness retreat.

DreamQuil is filled with so many anxieties that now feel commonplace, or that growing leaders in the development of AI will call “inevitable.” Ads present tidy solutions to Carol before she even realizes she has a problem, as if the tech around her home is listening to every conversation. Some ads even feature her likeness, reaffirming the fears that AI will replace actors like Banks in real life. It’s all too timely for words, but Prager isn’t predicting our future so much as she’s articulating the conversations she’s had with her sister (with whom she co-wrote DreamQuil), Vanessa Prager, over the years.

“My sister and I are both working mothers and we have families,” Prager tells Inverse. “We were just noticing how disconnected people were getting and how distracted everyone was by automation and machines. And we were like, ‘What if...?’”

That question set the tone for what might be one of the most visually enticing and thematically unsettling films of the year. Prager has long crafted short films and pictures that do the talking for her, but with DreamQuil, the artist now gets to say the quiet part out loud. Ahead of the film’s SXSW premiere, Prager tells Inverse about the films that inspired her debut, crafting the perfect shade of red, and whether AI will eventually end up replacing us.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Have you always known that you wanted to eventually make a feature, or was that a desire that manifested over time?

Being born and raised in Los Angeles, I naturally was a child actress. I was on an episode of Tales from the Crypt that this amazing director and special effects guy named Kevin Yagher directed… when I was 10, or 8 years old. And then, when I was old enough to really think about it, I was like, “This isn’t what I want to do. I don’t want to be in front of the camera.” The idea of being anything other than [an actor] hadn’t even crossed my mind, because movies were just actors to me when I was a kid. And so I eventually discovered the art world and art and photography. That felt very good to me. I was very excited by what I could do in photography. And when I reached my first plateau, like seven years into being a photographer, I discovered short films. I discovered the medium of film for myself in London, just by talking to a producer I met at one of my exhibitions who offered to produce a short film for me.

After making one short film with Bryce Dallas Howard, I just became possessed by the medium of film, like many people. And since then I’ve been wanting to make a feature. But when you’re a first-time director, you don’t get all the good scripts sent to you. I quickly realized that I was going to have to learn how to write a screenplay in order to be a feature film director. It was kind of out of necessity that I learned how to write, and my sister and I became a team and a writing duo. Now we write everything together.

I’m also curious when you fell in love with this very crisp, picturesque, retro aesthetic, pulling from “the problem that has no name” and second-wave feminist ideas.

I mean, I love Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk and all the classic cinema and TCM. And my grandmother had a lot to do with raising me. So I was very much in her circle of friends; [she] had a friend that was a Hollywood starlet in her earlier days… I was constantly being influenced by that older glamor and the layer of artifice that you could use to tell really dark stories, like the film noir, the genre of using lighting and beauty and built sets and matte paintings and things that show you like an idealized version of the world to tell a really ugly story. I loved that dichotomy and... I still love the sinister mixed with the frivolous, and flamboyant expressionism mixed with realism. My cinematographer, Lol Crawley — who I was super lucky to be working with on DreamQuil — he was always joking that he was our [Robert] Altman and I was the Hitchcock influence. So together we would always figure out how to make that harmony work.

Is there anything else that you read or watched to assist in the building of this world? Anything that inspired you?

Yeah. I mean, a lot of things. Dekalog, Rosemary’s Baby… there’s super weird references like Total Recall, Joe Versus the Volcano. I could go on and on. There’s so many movies that influenced DreamQuil. But also like, most of all, my own life. My sister and I are both working mothers and we have families… and we were just noticing how disconnected people were getting and how distracted everyone was by automation and machines. And we were like, “What if?” So a lot of the dialogue comes from our own kids and our own friends, [other] moms, and there’s very much a connection to what people around us were actually saying that we brought into the script.

I love asking filmmakers about the color red in film because, from what I’ve heard, it’s famously hard to get the right shade, the right saturation. So for Elizabeth’s lipstick, how tricky was that? How long did that take?

You’re so right about the color red — and that applies to photography as well. It’s impossible. That’s why I love William Eggleston’s dye-transfer prints so much. Lol and I worked with our colorist, Tim Stipan, at Picture Shop and we created a LUT together that was very filmic. We spent weeks trying to pitch shooting on film and it just didn’t work out in the end, but we wanted to get that really cine-scope, sort of like vivid Technicolor. And the color red was really important in DreamQuil for many reasons, but most of all because it kind of represented the humanity and the blood of Carol while the blue represented the indifference of tech companies and machines and automation and that coldness.

We also worked with an amazing hair and makeup team that designed the wig, the red wig. That shade of red that she has and the lip color and everything. I wanted the reds to work together. So we spent weeks figuring out those colors on Elizabeth... I honestly feel like my whole career as an artist has kind of led to this moment because I have a collection of costumes and props and just all these things that I’ve been using in my photography over the years, and they were all coming out for DreamQuil. Every single thing was used, I feel like.

It really is full circle too, because Elizabeth was one of your subjects in Face in the Crowd.

And after that, she said, “You’re going to end up making a movie one day and I want to produce it when that happens. And I want to be in it.” And I was like, “That’s a f*cking great idea.” Because at the time, I wasn’t totally understanding what my future was because I was so locked into the art world and photography. My sister and I wrote this short story for Elizabeth to be in, and the second we sent it to her, she said, “Yes, yes, yes.” I never imagined anyone else for the role.

There’s so much in DreamQuil that reflects what we’re going through so overtly: our phones listening and the fear of AI replacing us. Do you believe that AI moms are going to become a real thing?

The way I like to look at it is, the more stories like this go out into the world, the more people are aware of their own humanity and what’s at stake, and the more we can write the future the way that we want to write it. Tech companies have invested billions of dollars into their automated future run by machines. And so they have a lot to lose in terms of financially, they have a lot to lose. So they’re going to, of course, tell everyone that this is inevitable, like you can’t do anything about it: “This is the future.” But they don’t know what the future is because no one does. We actually create the future together every single day, every single minute that goes by. We get to choose what that future is, and it is a choice.

As much as I want people to enjoy this movie and be entertained by everything that’s happening in it, I also want there to be really invigorating conversations that are impassioned and alive and that remind us who we are and why we are important... And maybe somebody will... who knows? I don’t expect to change the world with a single film, but I do think that film is the best medium to get an idea out to the masses that could invigorate people and inspire people. And when people are inspired, revolutions happen and new ideas come into play. Even if it’s just like I make someone laugh with this, even in that moment, an idea might just drop into their head that has nothing to do with DreamQuil, but just because they’re in that spirit of play, I think they’re more open to creation.

DreamQuil premiered at SXSW on March 16. It does not yet have a distributor.