Hackers
research and casting, at Fourth Floor Productions, 2013
A documentary short for Motorola Mobility, directed by Errol Morris, built around interviews with the people who actually build things rather than the people who talk about building things.
Hackers: How The World’s Brightest Minds Solve Problems, developed with Errol Morris for Motorola Mobility, then part of Google, through Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. The form was the one Morris uses when a subject is better served by many voices than one: a roster of people, each shot down the lens on the Interrotron, grouped by what they make. Hardware, business, space, politics, energy, culture, education.
The casting is the work. The list ran to Vint Cerf, Steve Wozniak, Limor Fried, Bre Pettis, Salman Khan, Mitchel Resnick, Jessica Matthews, Aaron Koblin and OK Go, and the recruitment letters went out set in Computer Modern, on the theory that a hacker reads a typeface as a claim about who is asking. Several of them said yes.
The brief that came in from the agency had a different idea of who counts as a hacker, and most of the names on it ran technology companies rather than built anything. Getting from that list to this one was the argument worth having.