‘Sunny’ Creator Talks “Bonkers” Upcoming Episodes and How the Sci-Fi Drama Changed Her Views on AI
The timing of Apple TV+’s recently launched sci-fi drama series Sunny was doubly fortuitous.
The show stars Rashida Jones as Suzie, an American woman living in Kyoto, Japan, whose life is upended when her husband and son disappear in a mysterious plane crash. As a “consolation” she’s given Sunny, one of a new class of seemingly sentient domestic robots made by her late husband’s electronics company.
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Produced by A24 and shot on location, the show had the good luck of going into production in 2022 when Japan’s borders were still mostly closed to tourists due to the pandemic, allowing for unprecedented shooting access to Kyoto’s evocative but usually thronged historic streets. And just as production was winding down, the world’s imagination became transfixed by a powerful new tool — Chat GPT4 — lending the show’s themes of AI’s promise and peril an all-new urgency.
As Sunny begins, Suzie resents the robot’s attempts to fill the void in her life, but gradually they build an unexpected bond, working together to uncover the dark truth of what really happened to Suzie’s family. Japanese actor Hidetoshi Nishijima, the appealing lead of the 2021 Oscar-winning film Drive My Car, co-stars as Suzie’s missing husband, introduced via flashback.
Based on the 2018 novel The Dark Manual by Irish author Colin O’Sullivan, Sunny was created and showrun by Katie Robbins, a former journalist-turned-screenwriter known for her work on Amazon’s The Last Tycoon (2017) and Showtime’s The Affair (2014-2019).
The Hollywood Reporter connected with Robbins via Zoom to discuss the creation of Sunny‘s appealingly retro-futuristic world, the challenges of shooting on the streets of Kyoto, and how researching and writing the show shaped her views on the excitement surrounding generative AI.
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What initially grabbed you about Colin O’Sullivan’s novel The Dark Manual and what can you share about the initial stages of the adaptation process?
It was sent to me by my agents in late 2018, which feels like forever ago. The book had just come out and it was kind of an unusual thing for me to get, because I had never written anything in the science fiction space. But Collin is a beautiful writer and it was set in Japan, which is a country I’d been lucky enough to spend some time in. So I was naturally attracted to it. But there was this kernel of a story within it that really resonated with me — about Suzie Sakamoto, an expat in Japan who has just experienced the most catastrophic trauma you can imagine, the loss of her husband and son. And she’s a person who in the wake of tragedy copes by pushing people away because she’s learned over time that if you allow yourself to be vulnerable you can get hurt. So she responds to tragedy with sharp elbows and a prickly sense of humor. I’ve realized over the years this is a tendency that I also have. It’s not my healthiest tendency, but I was really attracted to it in this story.
I understand you made some significant changes to the novel’s story as you were adapting it?
Yeah, the show deviates pretty quickly from the story of the book. They start in not even entirely the same place and then they go in very different directions. In the novel, the robot is a male robot, who is Susie’s adversary. But I saw Susie as a character who needs to be pulled out of her shell. So it felt natural to have the robot be introduced as the thing that potentially helps pull her out. And so I started doing some research into a field of robotics called HRI, or human robot interaction, which looks at the ways that robots can be surrogates for people who are in really intense times of need and crisis, where it’s easier to open up to some creature or entity that isn’t going to leave you vulnerable in the same way that a person will. I found that really fascinating — and often true. Like the way it’s sometimes easier to talk on the phone, when the other person can’t see your face — how it becomes easier to open up. So that became a core theme and a jumping-off point.
And the decision to transform Suzie from a male to a female robot was a way to explore the theme of female friendship. As a person with a consuming job and two little kids, I never see my female friends and I was missing them deeply and feeling this yearning. It was a way of exploring that kind of emptiness as well. So I took this kernel and pushed it in directions that were kind of ripe with the things I wanted to talk about.
I’m curious to hear more about the research you did into Robot Human Interaction. There’s been a lot of interest in that topic in Japan, in particular. Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, even used to talk about it as a potential solution to the population decline problem and the nation’s shortage of people to care for the elderly. What did you learn and how did it filter into the show?
I did a lot of reading about it. There’s a roboticist thinker in the States, Kate Darling, who talks a lot about this, and I also went to visit a lab in Japan, outside of Kyoto, to see some of their research. There’s the baby seal robot that was created for elderly people. It’s super cute, has just a little bit of movement, and you can interact with it and just sort of cuddle it in a way that’s very comforting. It’s actually really moving to see how people are affected by it. Of course, you can look at it with a different lens and it’s a bit creepy. But it’s not that different from having a pet, where it’s something to take care of and a reason to get up in the morning. I found it fascinating. Where do you draw the ethical lines when something just makes you feel okay and complete? Does it matter whether it’s another person or not?
And yeah, Shinzo Abe, after he was elected the first time, he often talked about using robots as a way to care for Japan’s elderly and as a way to allow more of Japan’s women to return to work after having children. So I read about all of this stuff and was just lapping it up. Robots and AI are like this shiny new toy and it’s very easy to see why people get so excited about it, because it does seem like a potential solution to so many problems we have. But it’s also totally terrifying and could conceivably go in horrible directions. It’s all about how we use it, right?
It occurs to me that you must have been deep into the development and production process long before Chat GPT4 came along and kick-started the AI boom — which has only made Sunny‘s themes more relevant and urgent. It must have been wild watching that unfold while working on this show.
Absolutely. When I started writing the pilot in early 2018, I would talk to my AI consultant Nell Watson and she would give me her predictions for the way AI was going to develop. And I was like,”okay, I’m going to use these ideas because they’re really cool and it makes for good near-future fiction — but it’s definitely fiction, right?” But then lo and behold, while we were in Japan filming — and I’m in the throes of production and not really keeping up with the news — all of my friends start sending me these texts, saying, “Have you seen this ChatGPT thing? It’s like your show!” And before you know it, since I’m a writer, I’m spending a summer on strike over some of these very same issues around generative AI in our industry. It all became very real, very fast. Sunny is about grappling with the role that AI is going to play in our lives. In one scene, Sunny the character is an adorable, wide-eyed creature whose aims towards Suzie seem totally benevolent. But in the next scene, we’re questioning her motives and we’re a little afraid of her. That feels emblematic of where we are with AI in general right now.
Having spent all this time pondering AI and telling an emotional story within these themes, do you think your thoughts and feelings about the promise and potential peril of AI evolved in any surprising way?
I think I was always fairly dubious and wary of AI going into this. But then over the course of making the show, I fell in love with Sunny — I fell in love with this character, with Joanna Sotomura’s performance of it, and with our robotics team that created it. Suddenly, I was like, “This is all great. I actually want Sunny to exist.” I loved this character so much. And now, I’m coming out the other end of it and all of the fears are still there — but only more so, because the technology has advanced so much, and I’ve experienced that feeling of kind of being tricked by it. And that’s the thing that really sticks with me: This technology is really enticing. There is potential for really cool, great, meaningful and productive things. But it is also profoundly dangerous — precisely because it is so seductive. I’ve seen for myself how you need to be careful in that relationship. And so it makes me that much more nervous and cautionary towards the rest of humanity.
Japan is a miraculous place in so many ways, but it’s known to the industry as a notoriously difficult place to shoot — particularly Kyoto, and especially for large-scale productions. Did you encounter challenges?
Whenever you bring one system of doing things into a completely different system of doing things, there’s always growing to be some growing pains. We were primarily in Tokyo, but we did a big block of shooting in Kyoto because the show was set there. So we did exteriors there and we shot on stages there a bit as well. It was really amazing because we were there when the borders were still closed to tourist because of Covid-19. So we had access to these places in Kyoto like Gion where very few foreign productions get to shoot. My sense is that not many Japanese productions even get to shoot there. But because of when we were there, we got to do it, which was an amazing privilege. But still, the culture is so built around mutual respect that nobody wants to disturb their neighbors or the flow of people’s daily lives. So, being a big film crew is not the greatest thing, and the hours we were allowed to shoot were often extremely limited.
I remember we were shooting a scene that appears in the pilot where Suzie is walking through Gion. We literally had half an hour to get all of these shots. So we did all of this pre-lighting and all of this work to get everything ready. Like, we had this perfectly lit vending machine, because it’s Japan, so you have to have a vending machine. All of these other little scene details like that. So, finally, we’re ready to go and here comes Rashida and we have just minutes to get our shots. And then, because it’s Kyoto and you can’t fully control the streets like you can in LA, even if you have shooting permission, a delivery truck comes up to deliver stuff to this mom and pop convenience store that was in the middle of the street we were shooting. And he just backs right into the shoot — not in a dangerous way, very carefully. And then he just starts unloading his truck in the middle of our shot. So we’re like, “Shit! We gotta get this shot.” So we all just put our stuff down and jumped in and started helping him unload his truck — picking out toilet paper and boxes of water bottles and all this stuff. He was bewildered, like, “I have no idea what’s happening, but thank you very much.” Then he drove away and we went back to shooting and we got our shot. None of us had ever experienced anything like that before, but it was great. We all chipped in and got it done.
The only way to flow in Japan is to just join the social fabric as best you can.
(Laughs) Exactly.
Tell me about the world-building aspect of creating the show. There were echoes of other sci-fi projects for me in the production design — the color palette and the costumes vaguely reminded me of Her, and that brutalist building that serves as Hidetoshi’s office has some Blade Runner vibes — but it still feels quite fresh, which is not easy to do.
Thank you. When I wrote the first format for the show and we’d set it up at A24, we were looking for directors and Lucy Tcherniak had directed this show End of the Fucking World, which was sort of a tonal comp for me in a lot of ways. A24 suggested I meet her because I loved that show so much. So they set up a meeting and while Lucy was reading my pages to prepare, she made this amazing playlist of 1960s and 70s Japanese pop and sent it to me — and it felt like she had looked into my soul and understood everything I dreamed of the show being but hadn’t quite realized yet. It was the answer to the question I didn’t know I’d been asking. We developed this incredibly generative, joyful collaboration. We didn’t want to timestamp this show; we wanted it to exist in a sort of alt-reality or near future. So you wouldn’t want to use songs that were super contemporary. Instead, we looked to songs from the past and that became a thread that got pulled through when we were thinking about the design of the show. Lucy referenced a lot of Seijun Suzuki’s mid-century, colorful noir films and that became a jumping-off point. She saw the Kyoto Conference Center you mentioned in a book of utopian architecture. I wrote about Masa’s yellow shoes in the pilot [and Lucy used that as a jumping-off point to find] our color palette of primary colors. It was just this amazing baton passing of references and ideas. That continued when we started working with our incredible designers: Analucia McGorty, our costume designer, and Shinsuke Kojima our production designer. Shinsuke’s production design was out of this world. I’ve never seen sets like the ones he built. He saw the things we got excited about and figured out ways of realizing them.
I want to live in Rashida’s house from the show.
I know. Me too.
How did you conceive of how the robot would look? Is it described in the book? The show is on Apple — were Apple products a touchpoint or something to avoid?
We tried not to make it something that felt overly Apple. Although, it’s certainly shiny and white in the way that a lot of Apple products are. But our overall conception came from that research I had done into robotics, in terms of what makes us connect with AI. A lot of what the research tells you is that human beings are prone to personify anything. It doesn’t take a lot for us to want to interact with something. Some people name their cars. So, we wanted it to have some sense of a body that felt familiar, but not overly humanoid. We didn’t want to get into any Uncanny Valley territory. We wanted it to be on the smaller side because there are echoes of the son that Suzie has lost. We wanted its features to be fairly simple — to again avoid an Uncanny Valley effect — but it also had to have the ability to be expressive because we knew we’d be spending so much time with it. So we looked to the clean lines of a lot of Japanese design and we worked with an animator out of Japan to design her features. We then worked with Weta Workshop in New Zealand to figure out exactly what she would look like and how to build her. We went through hundreds of iterations. A big part of the process was figuring out how to make her move and work, because we shot all of the scenes with her in-camera. She’s a physical, corporeal robot that Rashida, as Suzie, shares scenes with.
So, no spoilers, but what are you most excited for viewers to experience as they get deeper into the season?
Well, I will be eternally grateful to the people with whom we made this show, our partners at A24 and Apple, for letting me be as bonkers with this show as I wanted to be. It goes to some pretty crazy places in the back half of the season. There are also some unexpected departure episodes, which are really weird but deeply personal, and get to the biggest themes the show deals with in unexpected ways.
New episodes of Sunny release every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
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