After scoring spectacularly writing hit movies, Anthony McCarten ventures forth with a new novel, the surveillance state thriller “Going Zero” (Harper, $30).
In a beta test of a new, all-encompassing level of spyware, 10 Americans compete for a $3 million prize – if they can ‘Go Zero.’ Be off-grid and elude the super-sophisticated tracker dubbed Fusion for 30 days. The hunt, held in cooperation with the CIA (naturally!), is run by a slightly unstable CEO.
It was in 2016 when McCarten was inspired. He’d left a store without buying anything — and his mobile immediately pinged to buy something similar. He was targeted.
Is “Going Zero” a wake-up call for people to realize what dire straits personal privacy is in?
“Yeah, it started off about the all-pervasive reach of surveillance technology. We’re all old enough,” the native New Zealander, 61, said, “to remember a time when you could very easily disappear off the map. When I was a teenager I used to escape for days at a time by going into the hills — and no one could have found me.
“I had a nostalgia for that time when personal freedom was not challenged by this ubiquitous surveillance. This was the intellectual underpinning of the book. But on top of it, I wanted a thriller aspect as well.
“The complexities of constructing a really complex thriller surprised me. If anyone underestimates what it takes to write a good thriller, think again.”
McCarten’s heroine, Boston librarian Kaitlyn Day, is an unlikely cyber sophisticate. Why, he was asked in a phone interview from his London home, did he choose Boston?
“I’ve spent a lot of time the last five years in Boston shooting two different movies there,” he explained of his Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and “The Collaboration,” a film version of his Broadway hit due later this year.
“We’ve used a lot of Boston crews and Boston actors in both films, so I had quite a fun connection to the place.”
McCarten, a four- time Oscar nominee for “The Theory of Everything” and “The Two Popes,” scored his biggest hit with “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Currently on Broadway is his scripted Neil Diamond musical “A Beautiful Noise.”
As for the technology in “Zero,” “All very real: The scope of surveillance and how pernicious it is.
“The two great dangers we live with now is a ubiquitous level of surveillance which is eroding our personal freedoms and the replacement of independent thought and judgment by these automated systems of control and behavior manipulation.”
“Going Zero” releases April 11
