Bay notes, “Jordan is completely passive about the restrictions on her life. She believes there is an island, but she has a bond with Lincoln that makes her go along with him when he tells her, ‘There is no island; you have to trust me.’”
Johansson adds, “Jordan is shocked, but every instinct tells her to go with him, so she does. She trusts him more than as a friend. They are attracted to each other—not really physically; it’s more of a soulful connection. They don’t know anything about sexual intimacy. They are totally naïve because they have been living in a kind of plastic bubble with no knowledge of the outside world. It’s a wonderful love story in a way, because it shows that, against all odds, people who are supposed to come together, will.”
Johansson says that the development of her character’s relationship with Lincoln is only one of the things that brought her to “The Island.” “I am a big fan of genre movies, and when I read the script, I was excited to know what was going to happen next. I really wanted to work with Ewan and Michael, too, so all of those elements made me want to do this movie.”
Bay remarks that casting Scarlett opposite Ewan was based largely on instinct. “Once we had Ewan, we knew we had to find someone who was not only a good actress, but would pair up well with him. I hadn’t met Scarlett before, but I knew she was a very fine actress. Sometimes you have to take a gamble when you try to find a good onscreen pairing, but Ewan and Scarlett ended up having great chemistry.”
When we meet Lincoln, Jordan and their fellow residents, they are watching a recorded message from a former inhabitant named Starkweather, who is elated to have been chosen to go The Island. Later, it is seeing Starkweather’s actual fate that opens Lincoln’s eyes to the truth behind the lie. Starkweather is played by Michael Clarke Duncan, who states, “My character sets things in motion. One minute he’s saying ‘I’ll see you on The Island,’ and then he wakes up on an operating table. He sits up and just starts running for his life. He’s scared to death and he’s thinking, ‘Where am I? You told me I was going to The Island. This can’t be it.’”
Duncan only worked on “The Island” for two days, but Michael Bay, who had previously directed him in “Armageddon,” made sure they were memorable. “Mike will tell you I tortured him for those two days,” Bay laughs. “I made him run, I made him cry, I made him be strapped down on that table for like eight hours, until he was saying, ‘You get one more take,’ and I’d say, ‘Come on, Mike, give me five more.’ I just love messing with him.”
“Michael Bay is a piece of work,” Duncan counters. “The few days I was there, he was always thinking of something new to do to me. Actually, I give him a hard time, but I really think he is one of the greatest directors of our time.”
The inhabitants of the sterile, contained facility have no way of knowing that they are living deep beneath an uncontaminated outside world…or that above them is a complex known to that world as Merrick Biotech. The residents only know the name Merrick as that of the man who seems to take a somewhat benevolent, albeit intrusive, interest in their health and well-being.
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