The Soul in the Machine

From Star Trek: Discovery to Locke & Key and this year’s The Spiderwick Chronicles, screenwriter Aron Eli Coleite feels at home in fantastical worlds.

His latest project, Netflix’s sci-fi adventure Atlas, sees Jennifer Lopez (The Mother) as Atlas Shepherd, an operative who launches into space to hunt down Harlan (Simu Liu, Arthur the King), a rogue artificial intelligence that her mother built—and whom Harlan killed—when Atlas was a child. After Harlan and his forces ambush Atlas and her colleagues, Atlas must survive on a desolate planet by operating a mech suit with the help of an AI copilot named Smith (voiced by Gregory James Cohan).

Atlas doesn’t trust people, let alone Smith, which resembles an amoeba of light hovering above the dashboard. Yet with all the fears and concerns surrounding AI, Coleite sees Atlas less about warming up to tech and more about connection.

“You have to trust something and someone to let them into your head and into your heart, let them into your space. And in doing so, you connect to them. And in that connection, you make yourself a better person. You widen the aperture of your vision of the universe,” he says. “You know, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General, said we’re in an epidemic of isolation. And that resonates more deeply with me [about] the theme of this than AI ever does. Our need to connect to other people, friends, family. We need to be there for each other. We need to we need to have people in our lives. You can’t go it alone.”

Perhaps ironically, Coleite doesn’t use AI when he writes. Here, he shares more about his creative process, what drew him to Atlas, and what he looks for in any speculative or science-fiction story.

A classic personality clash

Atlas debuts the same week Scarlett Johansson (North Star) complained that OpenAI had mimicked her voice for one of its ChatGPT products without her permission, causing the company to remove it. Yet the film didn’t rush into production. Coleite says he’s worked on it for five years.

“The timing became so strange. Heading into the writers’ strike [in 2023], one of our main issues was talking about the use of AI. Here was this movie that took a more optimistic stance on AI, and here I am fighting for the livelihood of not only myself but of writers to come against this nefarious AI,” he says. “Thankfully, the movie is not outdated. In fact, it’s talking about things that are still yet to come, which are how we will interface with AI going into the future. … But it’s really amazing to watch the future coming true in the present.”

Coleite is the second writer attached to Atlas after Leo Sardarian (StartUp), who crafted the initial story. While the core concept always was the relationship between a human and an AI, Coleite says he noticed similarities in Atlas’s and Smith’s personalities that reminded him of “classic two-hander films in the vein of things that I loved growing up, from Lethal Weapon to Training Day.”

While Atlas isn’t a comedy, it has some humor as Smith tries to understand Atlas’s sarcasm, developing some of its own. That’s what Coleite finds “genius about sci-fi,” that the funniest character is often the strait-laced one. “I think that Spock is funnier than Kirk. I think that Data is funnier than Picard. Sorry to make two Trek references,” he says with a laugh. “[Atlas] is the cut-and-dried one, and [Smith] gets to be funnier based on her reactions.”

While that humanizes the AI, “it’s really an evolving process in the way that any friendship evolves, which is what I was really leaning into. When you first meet somebody, especially an introvert like myself, I am standoffish not because of anything the other person is doing but because of my personality type. It takes me a bit to like warm up and to really lean in, and then you find your cadence and a rhythm and you find how you really connect. That’s what we wanted to mimic with Smith and Atlas.”

Storytelling as a “tactile experience”

Coleite consulted with Michel Maharbiz, a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. This research added to the development of Harlan and why it goes rogue, but also how Atlas and Smith become a counterpoint of faith in humanity and hope between two different species.

Yet while he’s learned more about AI, Coleite says he has not tried ChatGPT or other AI tools when brainstorming or writing.

“I’m an old-timey writer, like, if it doesn’t come through my fingers, it doesn’t stick … I’ve got to read it on my whiteboard. I have to read it in my journal, and then I’ve got to type it, and only then do I start really ingesting the story. I feel like ChatGPT—for me, personally—takes a shortcut where that I won’t connect to the story in the same fashion,” he says.

“Storytelling is really a tactile experience for me. And it’s not just dialogue, action, description. It is a purely tactile experience of living the story, as you’re telling it. You want you to be eating, breathing, drinking, feeling the story; it has to possess you, much to my family’s chagrin,” he adds. “I’ll be out at family events at dinner. And my Notes app is filled with ideas for whatever script I’m working on. … because you’re constantly thinking about how to improve the story.”

Doing the math to follow the theme

This creative process and an analytical mind have helped him weather the highs, lows, and feedback during development.

“I often say I have a math brain for writing: story math, or how the story adds up to its inevitable conclusion. And in story math, just like regular math, you have to show your work,” he says.

It’s not enough to say, “This doesn’t work” when you get a note from a producer, an executive, a director, an actor, or anyone during the process. “That’s not conducive to collaboration; that’s just a killer conversation,” he says. “Sometimes you have to say, ‘OK, I’m going to explore this thought.’ I need to give it my best shot, even if I feel like it’s not going to work. And then I can be either proven right or proven wrong by execution. … Sometimes it goes down roads that are amazing, and illuminate so many cool things that you didn’t know before. And sometimes it goes down wrong roads, and it’s like, ‘Oh, no, sorry. We need to go back four drafts; we had it right before.’ But you still had to explore that path, even if it led to a dead end.”

While that can feel frustrating, the one thing Coleite ensures adds up on any speculative, sci-fi or fantasy project is the theme.

“I think I’ve almost exclusively worked in genre, because it is such a powerful way of telling a story that can really talk about deep things by not talking on point about them. It’s like when I first read my first X-Men comic book, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is about racism. This is about antisemitism. This is about homophobia.’ I felt so smart because I got it, and recreating that feeling in an audience is all I’m after. I want them to feel smart. I want them to feel engaged and active.”

Before diving into detailed worldbuilding and characters, first ask, “Why does this story need to be told? And why now?”

“What’s the theme that’s really driving this? How is this going to impact the culture? How is this going to create a conversation? How is this going to change somebody’s life?” Coleite says. “I’ve certainly written plenty of scripts for hire; I’ve got to make a living. But even then, I’m still gravitating towards, at the core of it, what’s at the heart of the story? Because everything has to go back to that.”

Atlas is now available to watch on Netflix.