The Human Drama Of Hacking Fuels TV Thriller 'Mr. Robot'

Transcript

RAMI MALEK: (As Elliot) Hello, friend. It's Lane. Maybe I should give you a name. But that's a slippery slope. You're only in my head. We have to remember that.

ARUN RATH, HOST:

Meet Elliot - cyber security engineer by day, vigilante hacker by night. He's the unlikely hero at the center of the new TV show "Mr. Robot." Sam Esmail is the show's creator and executive producer.

SAM ESMAIL: Elliot is sort of an internal, isolated guy who can't really interact with people socially, in real life, but online he can hack them and knows all the intimate, private details of them.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MR. ROBOT")

MALEK: (As Elliot) Hacking her was simple. Her password - dylan2791 - favorite artist and the year in which she was born backwards. Although she's a psychologist, she's really bad at reading people. But I'm good at reading people. My secret - I look for the worst in them.

RATH: Elliot, played by actor Rami Malek, stumbles across a secret society run by a man called Mr. Robot. Think of a cross between Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Weather Underground. Elliot is pulled into a web of anarchy and danger where all the moral lines are blurred.

ESMAIL: Who's good and who's bad in the show? I don't know. I mean, you really can't pinpoint the clear-cut morality here - who is the person I should be rooting for and not. I think it's more interesting when it's messier 'cause I just think that's more true to life.

RATH: You take us inside Elliot's head with this really intense inner narration. It reminds me a little bit of Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" because it's also (unintelligible) of loneliness - just this one voice.

ESMAIL: Well, that would not be an accident (laughter) as "Taxi Driver" was a huge inspiration.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TAXI DRIVER")

ROBERT DE NIRO: (As Travis Bickle) Loneliness has followed me my whole life everywhere.

ESMAIL: One of the things about "Taxi Driver" that's so great is it's just a pure character piece. Obviously there's a plot and there's a story, but just you are purely inside this guy's brain. And when I went to write "Mr. Robot," I just knew in order to really pull off this really tricky thing to see the world through this guy's point of view, I needed just to immerse the audience.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MR. ROBOT")

MALEK: (As Elliot) I never want to be right about my hacks, but people always find a way to disappoint.

ESMAIL: Voice-over gets a bad rep a lot of times in screenwriting because people think it's lazy, whatever it is, but when it is done really well, it just adds this other dimension. It creates this sort of intimate relationship with the audience that you really can't do just with dialogue and scene.

RATH: You know, the alienated young techie is almost - it's kind of a type now when you think of people like Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning. Was that in your mind at all as you were coming up with this character?

ESMAIL: No, I would say - I would say - look, teen angst, I think, has been around since, you know, Holden Caulfield. I mean, it's something that I think was there the whole time. I think it's kind of interesting that now it's associated with techies. I think it's a lot older than that, but it's cool the association has become more popularized with technology.

RATH: So do you think if "Rebel Without A Cause" came out today the James Dean character would be a hacker?

ESMAIL: Yeah, absolutely.

(LAUGHTER)

ESMAIL: You know, it's weird, it's like the nerds are having their moment, I would have to say, right about now.

RATH: I love that my kids are growing up in that world.

ESMAIL: Yeah, look, I endorse it.

RATH: You know, I feel like since the cyber world or whatever you call it has been with us, filmmakers have struggled with how you portray it. You know, whether it's documentary or fiction, it's kind of hard to sustain interest around people typing on keyboards. But you do that while maintaining the drama. Can you tell us how you approach that as a film maker?

ESMAIL: Yeah, you know, look, I will say I - so I was a nerd growing up, and I was a big techie. And I watched all those terrible movies and all those terrible television shows. And it was actually, I think, more work to portray it as poorly as they did because they forced all these CGI graphics and all this ridiculous stuff to force the drama there. One of the rules I have on my show is that we don't green screen anything. So everything that you see that we filmed is real. And so the actors, I really wanted them to react to what is actually going on on-screen.

But I gotta be honest, I'm not some genius over here. I'm just actually going through what a programmer or coder or cybersecurity engineer would do in a certain hack. And the funny thing is, even though people don't completely understand it, they get it. And it's almost like when you watch a medical drama, or a legal drama or whatever, it's not - I don't necessarily understand all the terminology, but I get - I get what's going on emotionally. I get what the stakes are.

RATH: I've seen a little bit on Twitter. It seems like you've been getting some good reaction from the hacker community.

ESMAIL: Which is huge - I mean, you know how much of a risk that is to not only do a show about technology and about hackers, but then to kind of sort of reference hacker groups. There's a popular Twitter feed for Anonymous and it's all, you know, unofficial, but when they gave us kudos, I was in heaven. I mean, that's a real huge endorsement. And, you know, look, if it went the other way, it would have been totally bad, you know what I mean?

(LAUGHTER)

RATH: It's definitely better to have Anonymous like you than not like you.

ESMAIL: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

RATH: Sam Esmail is the creator and executive producer of the exciting new show "Mr. Robot" which premieres this Wednesday on USA. Sam, great speaking with you. Thank you.

ESMAIL: Thank you. This was fun.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.