Scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce was surprised to find unexpected echoes of an earlier project. “The strange thing about William and Maria being genetically related to one another,” says Cottrell Boyce, “is that it generates all these powerful emotions they can’t quite understand or control. They don’t really know what those feelings are, and they don’t know what to do with them.
“I was actually thinking about William and Dorothy Wordsworth, who I’d written about in my earlier screenplay for Julien Temple’s Pandemonium. They were brother and sister but they grew up apart, so when they were finally reunited it created a lot of static and sexualized feelings which they didn’t know how to cope with.”
Cottrell Boyce was excited by the idea of a pair of doomed lovers who, like the characters in a Greek myth, find themselves at the mercy of an ineluctable Fate. Also, there were intriguing parallels with modern ideas about the ways in which some aspects of human behavior are genetically determined. “What makes all those Greek stories so compelling is the idea of Fate,” says Cottrell Boyce. “And as a society we’re now replacing the idea of Fate with the idea of genes. People are going around saying, ‘I can’t help myself, it’s my genes which are predisposing me to be fat, or angry, or in love, or whatever.’”
Producer Andrew Eaton knew from the outset that creating a convincing vision of the future on a moderate budget would be a major challenge – even if that future was meant to be just around the corner. One key strategy was to ground Code 46’s imagined view of the future in the known present. “There’s hardly anything in the film that doesn’t have some basis in current fact,” says Eaton. “In the case of climate change and some of the technology, we’ve taken a few leaps of imagination, but they’re not a million miles away from what exists now. Probably the most fantastical element is the Empathy Virus, the idea that you would be able to take a pill and then effectively read somebody else’s mind. But everything else – global warming, the cloning of humans, problems with cross-border travel – are just extrapolations from the present.”
A significant background influence on Code 46 was Michael Winterbottom’s experience making his last film, In This World, which recorded the epic journey undertaken by two young Afghani men from a refugee camp in Peshawar (northwest Pakistan) to London. “There was quite a lot in Code 46 that grew out of our experience making In This World,” acknowledges Winterbottom. “One important thing was the frustration of passports, visas and all the bureaucracy that goes with traveling through a lot of different countries – the problem of not having the right paperwork. That became part of the back story – the need for papelles, the road-blocks and security, and the difficulties of cross-border travel in general.”
Given the project’s limited resources and Michael Winterbottom’s preference for filming on location, the idea of spending three-quarters of the budget on futuristic studio sets was not appealing. On the contrary, it was something Winterbottom, Eaton and production designer Mark Tildesley consciously wished to avoid. All three were sure this approach would pay dividends, not only financially but also aesthetically. Eaton says, “Rather than spending £3 million building a Blade Runner-style set, which would have meant imagining everything and then building it from scratch, we decided to use ‘found’ spaces. Michael suggested going to places like Shanghai and Dubai, which have this extraordinary, contradictory architecture. In Shanghai there is third world poverty in the shadow of some of the most modern skyscrapers in the world. In Dubai there is the skyscraper area of the city and then just behind it is the desert. It was those curious juxtapositions which were interesting and attractive.”
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