Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun dive headfirst into a love story between a buoy and a satellite spanning billions of years after the end of human civilization in the new film "Love Me."
The project, in theaters Jan. 31 from filmmakers Andy and Sam Zuchero in their feature film directorial debut, explores themes of identity, love and what it truly means to exist.
Yeun said what drew him to the project was the "real wild and earnest swing that it was."
Stewart called the film "a cool opportunity to call into question authenticity, because we're so obsessed with it," adding that being called fake is "worse than the F-word."
"It is like a long, big, elaborate acting exercise that kind of results in this acknowledgement of individuality being important, but also the fact that we are so linked," Stewart continued. "Humans are... we're all the same."
The predominant way in which Stewart and Yeun's buoy and satellite characters evolve throughout the course of the film -- going from robots to being animated and finally resulting in live-action forms of themselves -- is by learning about humanity via one of the only things left behind by humans: social media.
Review: The 10 best movies of 2024The primary subjects on which they base themselves are a YouTube influencer couple, Déja and Liam, who do things like celebrate cheesy date nights, unironically love "Friends" and have a catchphrase -- "Welcome to 'another day, another Déja … and Liam.'"
The directors said the initial idea was to get actual influencers to play Déja and Liam, but ultimately they asked Stewart and Yeun -- the former isn't on social media and the latter isn't very active on social media -- to play them in addition to their AI counterparts.
Of the evolution of their characters, Yeun said his satellite "wants to be defined by somebody or something" when he meets Stewart's buoy -- an event he says makes the character eventually "come to terms with the fact that he wouldn't have ever been defined or exist in this way if it wasn't for the other person."
"I think even now, having had distance from the film but then coming back here, you realize that your mind can really cook up a lot of projections of what you think reality is," Yeun added.
Stewart's character, meanwhile, is the instigator of questioning who they are from the beginning.
"As soon as you put a period on any sentence -- lack of change, lack of growth -- that's death," she said. "I feel like the strive towards expression is so much more defining of who you are versus how you finish that sentence and how you put a period on it."
"We get to know ourselves every single day, and it's fun to try and put that into words," Stewart continued. "And we have to do it in order to, like, stay engaged with being alive."
Stewart, who has become an arthouse darling since "Twilight" by opting for projects like "Clouds of Sils Maria," "Personal Shopper" and "Spencer," praised Yeun for being "a muscular actor" to share a scene with in such a thought-provoking film as "Love Me."
"He is down," Stewart said of her co-star's willingness. "Steven's got this, like, very serious fieriness."
Yeun, who rose to fame on the zombie horror series "The Walking Dead" and has earned critical acclaim for his work in "Burning," "Minari" and "Beef," said it was Stewart's "deep honesty" that drew him to working with her, praising her "connection and willingness and courage."
Sam Zuchero said what drew her to casting Stewart and Yeun was the fact that "they're explorers, they're risk takers, and they, you know, are interested in things that are outside of the box."
Review: 10 best TV shows of 2024For Andy Zuchero, it was that he believed these two actors both had "curious and flexible minds where they could, you know, make a love story -- but in the context of humanity's extinction."
With "Love Me," Andy Zuchero said he thought it would be "really fun to shoot a live-action WALL-E,'" referencing the 2008 Pixar film about a garbage-cleaning robot who falls in love with another robot named EVE.
In addition to being a more adult and conceptual film, "Love Me" also differs from "WALL-E" in that it explores one of the biggest technological jumps of recent years: the emergence of AI.
"These things are extensions of us. If anything, the thing that's difficult ... to talk about [when it come to AI] is you're really kind of talking about a portion of yourself, of ourselves," Yeun said, with Stewart agreeing that "they're mirrors" of us.
"Almost like the part that you don't want to lose control of, which is so scary," Stewart continued. "When we're like, 'Who knows what it could do.' It's like … are you talking about yourself right now? Are you scared of the evil within? Because, me too."
The film doesn't view AI through the lens of good or -- as it is more often in sci-fi offerings -- bad, but more so as a means to explore the characters, and by extension ourselves, as they continue to evolve.
"At the time, we had a ... 3-year-old son who I thought a lot about, like, how he's going to learn how to be human through this kind of branded social content that we have on the internet that's driven by algorithms that don't have emotions," Sam Zuchero said. "And so that was, you know, an inspiration for it."
Instead of making a judgment on whether AI is to be loved or feared, Andy Zuchero pointed out that AI in the film continues on even after all of humanity is gone, saying it's "a warning to us that maybe the next love story won't feature us if we don't get our act together."
