Ghost in the Shell has been one of the most popular, if not the most popular manga and animated feature films of all time. With that being said, Nerdist recently sat down with Scarlett Johansson who is playing the main character Major Motoko Kusanagi. In the film, however, she will be known as Major. Ghost in the Shell represents a future where humans are enhanced with cybernetics. Johansson's character "Major" happens to be one of them who is part of the Public Security Section 9, a special-ops task force charged with investigating cyber crimes. The feature film is set to venture deep into Major's own soul as she searches for what it means to be human inside a cybernetic body.
In the world that Major lives in, she is continually trying to figure out what it means to be human and what makes you a human. From the body to the mind and soul, this will be present in her character. Johansson talked about how she created the character and how she would deal with moving in a body that is mostly cybernetic. She stated,
“You can go deep in one direction and play a very unfeeling, mechanical sort of gait and stride. Her mannerisms are cold. But you don’t want to be, of course, shut off from the feeling audience, and also from this character’s inner experience. So you kind of work with varying ways of going too far in different directions.”
She even noted some of the mannerisms that we can expect from her character by saying, “she doesn’t have those kinds of mannerisms and tics [that let] you see when we’re impatient or nervous or decision-making… She doesn’t have that stuff and I think maybe the absence of those mannerisms is what gives her her physical character.”
There is always debat whether or not actors should have prior knowledge of the adaptations that they do. Though she had no prior knowledge of Ghost in the Shell, Johansson still realized what this type of character means to so many people. When asked about the daunting task of bringing Major to life she stated:
“I think when you have a character that’s so beloved, and certainly even with Black Widow [her role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe], bringing that character to life was sort of daunting. Just because, of course people have a lot of opinions about these characters that they love, and grew up with, and are inspired by and so forth. I try to kind of clean the slate and really follow my instincts with the character and hope that I give the character as much integrity as people expect. And you know, while still understanding the world in which we’re creating here on set.” It is great to hear that she gives the same amount of respect to Major as she did the Black Widow.
She continued, “Bringing these pages to life is a kind of challenge. Because you can’t rip it off the page, it’s totally different. It’s not really a person, but it’s a human brain, it’s someone who’s having this life experience. Which is very different from just ripping stuff off from the manga. One thing that will be very different, probably, is we’re not making the Frank Miller world where those graphic novels come to life. We have kind of the iconic iconography of the manga and stuff, but I think people will be surprised at the gritty kind of realness of this. For a person that doesn’t have a heart, it has a lot of heart, I think. The way that we’re telling it. Anyway, that’s the hope.”
Johansson also opened up on what kind of world her character would be in the film. “It is a really cool world and I think we’re very used to the idea of the future in an armageddon context or a post-apocalyptic kind of idea or it’s very stringent, like Spike [Jonze] did with Her,” she said. “Everything’s digitized and computerized and clean or absence of character. This movie, [Sanders] described it to me as cities built on cities and the abundance of waste. It’s a kind of collage of cultures and it’s identity-less in that as a whole melange of different kinds of textures and colors and, it’s really rich."
It will be very interesting to see some of the stuff she talks about come to life in the feature film. Ghost in the Shell is set to release on March 31st, 2017. Are you just as excited as we are to finally get a live action adaption?