[This story contains spoilers for Mother/Android.]
On a freezing fall day in Massachusetts, Mother/Android filmmaker Mattson Tomlin and star Chloë Grace Moretz faced one of the most challenging days of their careers.
“It was equal parts emotionally brutal and really beautiful at the same time,” says Tomlin of shooting the film’s climactic moments. “I had to expose a lot of my own vulnerability. It’s about something really real for me.”
Tomlin, a first-time director, used the sci-fi trappings of Hulu’s Mother/Android to explore themes he’s been thinking about for years. The project centers on a young couple, Georgia (Moretz) and Sam (Algee Smith), who flees a robot uprising to give birth to their child in safety. While The Hollywood Reporter won’t go into specifics on what happens in the end, the 10-minute sequence was loosely inspired by Tomlin’s own birth parents, who worked to save their child amid the dangers of the Romanian Revolution. The filmmaker was born in 1990 and grew up in Massachusetts after being adopted by an American couple.
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“We’re shooting this scene and everybody is just crying,” says Tomlin, also the screenwriter behind films such as Project Power. “I’m looking over at Matt Glover, the boom operator, and he’s got tears running down his face. Everybody is shaking and also going, ‘We’re doing something really real here.'”
In the film, audiences hear Moretz’s Georgia narrate a letter in voiceover, but on that freezing cold day, she asked Tomlin to read it off camera.
“I didn’t want to ask too much of him, because it was impossible in a lot of ways,” says Moretz. “I’ve never had the amount of connection that I’ve had on this project. It’s him. It’s his story. This is his baby. This is his life.”
Moretz and Tomlin were introduced via mutual friend and collaborator Matt Reeves, who produced Mother/Android and also hired Tomlin to co-write the script to Reeves’ upcoming film, The Batman. Moretz, meanwhile, previously worked with Reeves on his 2010 feature, Let Me In. Tomlin and Moretz had a video call at the height of COVID last year to discuss the story and the safety protocols for the shoot.
“A lot of the questions centered around, ‘How are we going to do this,'” recalls Moretz, who adds that the film never had to shut down due to COVID.
The film was shot over 29 days in Massachusetts and saw Moretz wear a 21-pound silicone pregnancy belly for most of the production with the help of a corset, which constricted her rib cage.
“I wanted to feel a little bit of a vice grip of what the pregnancy means,” says Moretz. “To have that shallow breath and have that inability to have the agility you need in circ*mstances like that. And the heaviness of trying to hike across these mountains.”
Tomlin leaned on Moretz, who has been acting since she was a child, to help him through the crash course that is directing a debut feature.
“Everyone on that set is more experienced than I am,” says Tomlin, who was not afraid to admit what he didn’t know. “Rather than pretend, I felt, ‘I’m going to be really vocal. I don’t know how to do this. This is new to me. What I understand is this story. I understand this story and what it is I’m trying to say. Maybe there are better ways to do it. Anybody can weigh in at any time.'”
When it came to the ending, the production had a real baby on set, which enhanced Moretz’s performance and made it more emotionally draining, with the actor almost feeling like it was really her child in the moment.
“It was one of the hardest sequences I’ve ever had to do in my life, and I was not OK after,” says Moretz. “I think it took us a minute for everyone to catch their bearings. And we’re shivering and cold against the weather and the elements.”
Moretz gave it all she could and told Tomlin that was it. There was nothing left in the tank. Tomlin knew he had what he needed, and was grateful to Moretz and Algee for treating his story with such care.
Recalls the filmmaker to Moretz: “When you were done, we were done. It was great.”
