Finch Director Miguel Sapochnik on Bringing the Apocalyptic Adventure to Life

Movie fans have seen apocalyptic adventures unfold in a variety of ways, with some leaning into the inherent horror of the concept while others embrace the scientific elements in hopes of serving as a warning to viewers as others merely embrace dystopic iconography for an action-packed experience. With Finch, director Miguel Sapochnik emphasizes the dramatic and emotionally human side of the realities of such situations, depicting a story about a man (Tom Hanks) merely wanting to ensure the safety of the thing that matters most to him. Finch will begin streaming on Apple TV+ starting on Friday, November 5th.

"I think it was really important to pay attention to the potential for optimism and hope in this film," Sapochnik shared during a press event that ComicBook.com attended. "At any time, it's a tough call to make a post-apocalyptic movie, but particularly it became tougher and tougher as we were making this film pre-pandemic, and then we had to shut down just before we finished it, and then come back up after the first lockdown in Los Angeles to finish the movie. So, although, the pandemic didn't influence our movie, it really gave it a context and relevance that we couldn't have really imagined. Finding hope, I think, was a really, really important part. I've always liked the saying 'hope is what keeps us alive.' One of the things that we strive to do is to hit that balance properly. It felt like we needed to make sure we began with a distinct absence of hope because you need the journey."

He continued, "And we also used the dog really to embody the idea of hope, although it wasn't immediately apparent, I think over the course of the story. Finch's explanation of how he chanced upon Goodyear starts to make you realize that this dog ... It's just the relationship he has with the dog, but the dog means something for him, and represents a whole bunch of things for Finch. So there were a lot of angles that we were coming at, coming from, I should say, to make sure that the movie wasn't too bleak. I've got to say, I find bleak relatively easy to do. I find dark relatively easy to do. It's kind of it's in my wheelhouse. It feels comfortable, I feel comfortable doing it. But hope and optimism and lightheartedness is definitely a challenge, and I think far more challenging for me than I thought it would be."

In Finch, a man, a robot, and a dog form an unlikely family in a powerful and moving adventure of one man's quest to ensure that his beloved canine companion will be cared for after he's gone. Tom Hanks stars as Finch, a robotics engineer and one of the few survivors of a cataclysmic solar event that has left the world a wasteland. But Finch, who has been living in an underground bunker for a decade, has built a world of his own that he shares with his dog, Goodyear. He creates a robot, played by Caleb Landry Jones, to watch over Goodyear when he no longer can. As the trio embarks on a perilous journey into a desolate American West, Finch strives to show his creation, who names himself Jeff, the joy and wonder of what it means to be alive. Their road trip is paved with both challenges and humor, as it's as difficult for Finch to goad Jeff and Goodyear to get along as it is for him to manage the dangers of the new world.

Given that he would ultimately be a CGI creation in the film itself, Sapochnik went on to detail how the most challenging element of the project was developing the robot's look.

"I think we spent probably more time on Jeff's design than any other single aspect of the film, apart from the script," the filmmaker explained. "I used to spend my Sundays while I was doing Season 8 on [Game of Thrones] on a Zoom call with Tom Meyer, who's a production designer, going through all the various different iterations that the concept artists had been working on. I did my own doodles and drawings, and Tom also did that. So we really just spent a long time trying to figure out, what were we after? Because I think we started with probably a very unclear idea of what we wanted Jeff to be, and that's more to do with wanting his character to evolve organically through the process of research, so that went on for a good year and a half, I would say, possibly longer."

He added, "And then once we cast Caleb, Caleb wasn't involved in the design of Jeff from an aesthetic, visual perspective, but everything that is Jeff the character was initiated and brought to fruition by Caleb. I mean, Caleb really did take Jeff to a whole new level and we spent a lot of time just being in awe of the way that he approached it. Everything from the voice that begins as this Speak-and-Spell voice and becomes this weird Slavic accent, and then eventually ends up in this Texas drawl, to the twitchy fingers and all of that stuff. That's all Caleb."

Jeff wasn't only the unconventional character in the story that had to carry dramatic weight, with the dog Goodyear also being responsible for some of the film's most affecting sequences.

"The interesting thing about Shamus, who played Goodyear, is Shamus was a rescue dog that Mark Forbes, his trainer, took in, I think trained to a certain level, is my understanding," Sapochnik recalled. "But it wasn't until we cast Shamus as Goodyear in our film that Mark really focused down on the skillset that we would be requiring from the dog. And the irony for us is that we quickly realized in the process of writing the script, that to really have a chance at hitting the right note and the right tone, we had to be very careful not to anthropomorphize the dog and really let the dog just be a dog. So the skillset that we required from Shamus was to be a dog. As a result, we really did get this ... Sometimes he was smelly. He was as 'doggy' as you could possibly imagine, but he had these really big eyebrows and they were very, very expressive.

He pointed out, "He would always seem somewhat disinterested in what was going on. He didn't have ... He loved getting hugs from the crew. We went out of our way to make sure that he had a good experience, which seemed like a really important part of the process. We didn't want to be exploiting this dog in any way. Then you would turn the camera on him and you'd say, 'Let's do a take,' and everyone would settle down into this slightly ... We all sigh and we'd think, 'Okay, here we go, this is the "don't work with dogs and children" bit.' We'd roll the camera and he would just come alive. And if it was just him, he had so many natural tricks up his sleeve and all would be ... Everything was controlled by Mark Forbes being just off screen and he had a little whistle and a little clicker."

"It was really strange and kind of fascinating to watch the dog react to these different sounds, and then take those reactions, put them into the edit, and find the appropriate response to the actors," the director detailed. "So that you ultimately believe that the dog was the one that was reacting in this very specific way to the actors and their requests, or their questions, or their voices. So it was very manufactured on the one hand and, at the same time, there was something terribly organic about the process."

Finch will begin streaming on Apple TV+ starting on Friday, November 5th.

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