Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) on Netflix
PG19971h 20mDocumentary
Four men describe the professions they have chosen. Dave Hoover trains wild animals, George Mendonça tends topiary, Ray Mendez studies naked mole-rats and Rodney Brooks builds robots at MIT.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.1/104,112 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes91%
Featurette
Plot summary
The film follows four men whose interviews carry its narration. Dave Hoover works as a wild-animal trainer. George Mendonça is a topiary gardener at Green Animals, a garden in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where he cuts shrubs and trees into bears and giraffes. Ray Mendez is an expert on naked mole-rats and has designed an exhibit about them for the Philadelphia Zoo. Rodney Brooks is a scientist at MIT who works in robotics, building machines that crawl like bugs. The men describe their lives, how they entered these fields, the difficulties of the work and what they expect in the years to come.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Errol Morris shot the interviews with a device he invented called the Interrotron, which lets a subject keep eye contact with the interviewer while staring straight into the camera lens, so on screen they appear to be looking directly at the audience.
- The title comes from a paper the robot scientist in the film, Rodney Brooks, published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1989, speculating that sending one hundred one-kilogram robots into space might beat sending a single hundred-kilogram robot.
- Cinematographer Robert Richardson, reusing techniques from Oliver Stone's JFK and Natural Born Killers, shot on both 35mm and Super 8mm, and some footage was even transferred to video and then filmed again as it played back on a low-resolution television set.
