‘Mickey 17’ Production Designer Explains How the Human Printer Works: ‘It Can Look a Bit Like an MRI’

variety.com:

Abigail Lee SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Mickey 17,” currently playing in theaters. In the near-future space travels of the Bong Joon Ho film, “Mickey 17,” Robert Pattinson plays an Expendable – a person designated to be used for often-fatal scientific experiments and revived through a human printer that makes an exact copy of their body, memories intact, each time.

Production designer Fiona Crombie said that to come up with the printer’s visual look, she looked at medical equipment and “high-tech weaving machines.” Although the printer is the “most advanced” part of the spaceship, the goal with the overall “Mickey 17” aesthetic was to ensure that the futuristic nature of the setting was balanced by the use of existing references. “It is based in a reality, like we’re looking around us and seeing, ‘What is a real-world version of this that we can extrapolate and push and take further?'” Crombie said. “There’s lots of things we recognize, and then you have a few key elements that we don’t know.” The human printer is one such example that draws from real materials while also providing an inventive look at how a machine could theoretically reconstruct a person.

Crombie spoke with Variety to break down her approach to the printer as well as clues in the machine’s design that indicate how exactly it’s creating Pattinson’s character, Mickey, each time.

The artisans dubbed the machine’s outer color “IBM beige” because it’s supposed to be “like that old kind of computer,” Crombie said.