Upgrade

I really think my generation had great timing. I was born in 1977, the year Star Wars came out, which means I was a kid in the 80s and a teenager in the 90s. Great times to be both. One thing I get very nostalgic about from that time is the grimy, practical effects driven genre films that filled up the shelves of video stores back then. Movies like The Terminator, where a big sci-fi idea was achieved on a low budget. That masterpiece was on my mind when I wrote Upgrade. Originally titled Stem, I wanted it to reflect my love of those scrappy 80s movies where they had more ideas than cash. Eventually, I shot the film in my hometown of Melbourne for a budget of 5 million dollars. To achieve the sci-fi and action aspects of the story, our crew had to get very creative indeed - transforming a 1984 Toyota Corolla into a car of the future and flipping an abandoned, dilapidated former school into a mini backlot complete with a morgue, a dive bar and the headquarters of a hacker collective among other things. That’s just two examples of the incredible work they did to put Upgrade on screen. Here is the shooting draft of the script.