GOING ZERO BY ANTHONY McCARTEN
If Michael Crichton were alive today, he may have
written a book about one the biggest threats to humanity: surveillance. 4-time
Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten’s breakneck paced, wickedly entertaining novel
GOING ZERO (Harper, $30.00; Hardcover; ISBN: 9780063227071; on-sale:
4/11/2023) is that technothriller for the times we live in.
The premise: ten Americans have been carefully
selected to Beta test a ground-breaking piece of spyware. Pioneered by
tech-wunderkind Cy Baxter in collaboration with the CIA, FUSION can track
anyone on earth. But does it work?
Each participant to this test is given two hours to ‘Go
Zero’ – to go off-grid and disappear - and then thirty days to elude the highly
sophisticated Capture Teams sent to find them. Any “Zero” that beats FUSION
will receive $3 million. If Cy’s system prevails, he wins a $90 billion-dollar
government contract to revolutionize surveillance forever.
But one of the contestants may have been
underestimated. Kaitlyn Day is an unassuming Boston librarian with some secrets
up her sleeves. Her stakes are far higher than money, and more personal than
anyone imagines. Kaitlyn needs to win as badly as Cy needs to realize his own
ambitions. They have no choice but to finish the game and when the timer hits
zero, there will only be one winner…
This unique
thriller is written by four-time Oscar nominee Anthony McCarten, one
of the most in-demand writer-producers at work today. The New Zealand born
screenwriter, playwright, novelist,
and journalist known for his work on The Theory of Everything, Darkest
Hour, The Two Popes, and Bohemian Rhapsody, has a very big
fall coming. His Neil Diamond Broadway musical A Beautiful Noise
ran starting on December 4th, his play The Collaboration
about the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michele Basquiat opens on
Broadway on December 20th, and the world premiere of his Oscar buzzworthy
feature film I Wanna Dance With Somebody
about Whitney Houston released on December 22nd. GOING ZERO - which has already been sold into over twenty
two countries – will be adapted by McCarten for the screen.
Q&A with Anthony McCarten on GOING ZERO:
1.
Please tell us
about your latest novel, Going Zero.
The first pang of
this thriller began in the summer of 2016, around a dinner table with friends,
where – as it will often do – the subject of the ever-changing nature of modern
life came up. The question arose: if you had to evade all detection, literally
disappear off the map for some reason, how would you do so and could there be a
way that nobody, no matter how well equipped, could find you?
I am old enough to
remember a time where one could more easily slip off the radar. These days, not only governments but private
corporations, controlled by unregulated individuals, have the power to know
almost more about us that we know about ourselves. The benefits of a
surveillance state (the one we all now find ourselves living in) and the
attendant threat to personal privacy, has emerged as a
major theme of our time. But beneath that lies an even deeper question: How is
our personal information being used to influence our views and attitudes,
without our knowledge, or permission? Are we any longer in total control of who
we are?
I
was off to the races, and the more I read and learned on
this subject the more irritated I became. The list of positive changes the
digital age has ushered in is vast and need no enumeration, but the need for
new laws that will force companies to be less dominant and do less damage with
the weapons of mass instruction and detection and influence they now possess is
urgent and great.
Going Zero is a work
of fiction but I think not unrealistic. It is meant to scare you, because most
of the surveillance tools you will read about are already, and most often
secretly, in widespread use.
2.
Your background
clearly shows that you write in a number of different forms – plays,
screenplays, books, both fiction and non-fiction – do you have a favorite form,
and if not, what do you like about each?
All three forms now feel relatively natural to me
(if sitting in a room for years making stuff up is natural.) And each
form offers a variety of pleasures as well as technical and emotional
challenges and creative anguish.The skills you learn are in part transferable
between the mediums. Play writing for example taught me how much of the action
could be contained purely in what is said. Screenplays, on the other hand, are
more about action than dialogue and from this you learn how character can also
be revealed by what a character does, rather than what they say. So, in my novel,
a extended section of dialogue, may be followed by a purely action-based
sequence. I like that contrast, having the reader only hear at one point and
then only see at an other.
3.
You were born in
New Zealand, live in the UK, and often work in the US – what are your favorite
things about each and where is home to you now?
Although I now live
in England much of the time, and work a lot in the US, I keep a beach house in
New Zealand and try to go back there once a year, to be among my own kind. I
first left in my twenties and perhaps there was an element of frustration in my
reasons for doing so. But there was also simple curiosity: as I writer I felt
in need to be in conversation with a larger sample of the human race. Britain
offered me a more intense cross-section of humanity. The great pressure of
numbers creates social phenomenon not found so obviously in a smaller
population. It served as a new inspiration and now is my home. The United
States delights me, and has done since my first visits here in my late 20’s. I
had great fun back then, and even now some part of my brain releases a shot of
endorphin whenever I land at JFK or LAX. You quickly love a country that puts a
smile on your face.
4.
What’s next in
terms of your fiction? Are you planning a sequel to Going Zero? And when will a film of the novel come out?
I generally don’t believe in sequels, unless they
were planned at the outset, which doesn’t really make them sequels so much as
the next act in a larger, pee-conceived story. But I am already at work on the
screenplay for Going Zero – more very soon.
