Where to watch Her (2013)

Trivia & production notes

• Spike Jonze conceived the film after reading about a website in the early 2000s where users could instant message with artificial intelligence, though he found the actual interaction underwhelming after the initial novelty wore off.
• Jonze spent five months writing his first solo screenplay, drawing inspiration from Charlie Kaufman's approach of pouring all his current thoughts and feelings into the script.
• The film was semi-autobiographical, inspired by Jonze's divorce from Sofia Coppola roughly a decade before production began.
• Carey Mulligan was initially cast but left the project due to scheduling conflicts, leading to Rooney Mara joining as her replacement in April 2012.
• Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema deliberately avoided using the color blue throughout the film to distance it from typical sci-fi aesthetics and give the remaining colors more visual prominence.
• Samantha Morton performed Samantha's role on set from inside a soundproof four-by-four-foot booth while Joaquin Phoenix worked separately, and the two actors avoided seeing each other during filming at Jonze's direction.
• The production filmed for two additional weeks in Shanghai to capture cityscape and skyline elements that were composited into the Los Angeles setting.
• Samantha Morton was replaced by Scarlett Johansson during post-production when Jonze realized the character needed a different direction, with new scenes shot in August 2013 to accommodate the recast.
• Steven Soderbergh edited Jonze's original cut, which ran over 150 minutes, down to 90 minutes to help identify and remove unnecessary subplots, resulting in the removal of a Chris Cooper character and an entire documentary-within-the-film sequence.
• Animator David O'Reilly's work creating fictional video game sequences for the film inspired him to begin developing his own video games, leading to his debut title Mountain.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Her (2013 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.