Interview: Tommy Pallotta 

IGN: What was it about A Scanner Darkly that attracted you?

PALLOTTA: It was a book that I loved. It was a sci-fi story that had just never been told before. It was a very special story for me as a fan of Phillip K. Dick, knowing that it was such an autobiographical tale of his. I think it was probably the one that he drew most from his own personal life -- out of all the books and stories that he wrote. And working with Richard Linklater on it really made sense, given his style of filmmaking. We had talked about the possibility of other Dick adaptations, but now I can't imagine him doing any other book.


IGN: As a fan of Phillip K. Dick, I imagine you wanted to be especially faithful to the source material...

PALLOTTA: When we initially approached the estate, we told them that we wanted to do a really faithful adaptation. You know, Phillip K. Dick is the most successfully translated sci-fi author to screen. But being a big fan of his work and a fan of the films that have been made of his work, it occurred to us that there hadn't really been that close of an adaptation. There are a lot of things missing from the other films that I really enjoyed in his stories... like the humor. And we knew that humor would work really well in this form. A lot of people haven't really seen the Phillip K. Dick vision on screen the way that we saw it. And I think this story in particular there was really no way to make it something that it wasn't.  This one always felt like it was going to be a very literal adaptation. I'm actually talking now about doing another Dick adaptation, but it wouldn't be as literal as this one.