Hypnotic is Rodriguez’s long-awaited film. The Alita: Battle Angel filmmaker initially envisioned it in 2002, calling it “one of my favorite stories.” It was sidelined by Spy Kids, Sin City, Machete, Alita, and Netflix’s We Can Be Heroes. Rodriguez always wanted Hypnotic, and the epidemic gave him the chance.
“I never thought you could have a shelf life that long,” Rodriguez tells Inverse. “Now that I’ve seen it coming out, we made it at the perfect time.”
Ben Affleck, who plays a bereaved detective pursuing a hypnotized bank robber (William Fichtner), joined Hypnosis in 2019. 2021 brought Alice Braga. Later that year, Fichtner joined the cast as the ominous, mysterious villain who appears to know more about Affleck’s detective than he lets on.
“I wouldn’t have had these guys back even five years ago, so the timing was actually perfect.”
Fichtner joined Hypnotic without knowing its extensive history. “I found out that he almost made this film a few years ago, and the pandemic happened, and then everything was changing,” he tells Inverse. “Listen, I don’t know who he was going to get for this part back then, or if he even decided, but whatever happened in between, it ended up being me.”
Fichtner is appreciative. Despite portraying villains like Prison Break’s major bad, he didn’t regret playing Dellrayne in Hypnotic, the film’s most terrifying character.
“I’ve said no to films that are just a bad guy twirling his mustache. However, characters with roots are intriguing. I think you can make a character authentic by finding out what they care about.
Dellrayne’s concerns? Hypnotic’s convoluted narrative makes the solution tricky. Detective Danny Rourke’s daughter is kidnapped. It involves a secret club of elite hypnotics who can control brains with a word (think Charles Xavier, not birthday party performance).
It may involve infant brain studies. Dellrayne, played by Fichtner, knows more and less than expected. Rodriguez purposefully made it difficult to follow.
“I wanted that meta version happening in the movie where you start peeling back the layers and realize, oh, it’s happened to me multiple times within this movie,” Rodriguez adds. “And you didn’t know real from unreal.”
Rodriguez made Hypnotic after years of promising. Rodriguez’s children, who all worked on the film, understand its importance. “They were so little when I came up with this, they’d always heard whispers of this Hypnotic movie I was going to make someday,” he explains.
Rodriguez’s white whale was a sci-fi thriller involving super hypnosis. Rodriguez claims he enjoyed filmmaking. “I liked that it was about filmmaking and storytellers.”
