Nothing being staler than tomorrow's news, imagining a credible future is sensationally hard. Godard did it with a poverty of means in Alphaville; Kubrick, with more cash, made it happen twice. For Johnny Mnemonic, artist Robert Longo's feature film debut, the future is where couriers dump childhood memories to upload for hire. Loosely based on an early short story by cyberpunk SF novelist William Gibson, who also wrote the screenplay, it stars Keanu Reeves as the titular blank slate, dressing like one of Sinatra's Rat Pack and delivering compound data like so much fast food.

When Johnny takes a job that literally threatens to blow his mind (he's taken one byte too many), it isn't long before he's on the run with a cyberpunkette named Mary, dodging the yakuza. As it turns out, Johnny's uploaded no less than the antidote to a Post-modern Plague, a virus known as Nerve Attenuation Syndrome. As it also turns out, Big Business is invested more in the problem than in the solution. And so Johnny runs, finding himself surfing the information underground, allied with rebels called Loteks and searching for answers.

“We were looking for something that conveyed more a sense of nostalgia for the future than a futuristic look,” says Gibson, speaking about the film's fusion of the new with the old, the highest tech with the lowest. “The world of Johnny Mnemonic is a world where the capital F future isn't going to arise, which I think is pretty much our situation today in 1995: we've given up on The Jetsons.”

Gibson himself seems less interested in the future itself than in desires for it. “The old futures have a way of hanging around,” he explains, “and I find that very poignant. We wanted to scatter that feeling through the film. There's a sense of dead technology and dead platforms, as they say in the computer-game business. This is like a world built out of eight-track tape recorders.” He adds, “I think now that everyone sort of knows that the real future is going to be cluttered with all the same junk we have today, except it will be old and beat up and there will be more of it.”

Johnny Mnemonic is the first of Gibson's published works to make it to celluloid. Though for years Kathryn Bigelow's name was linked to another Gibson short story, “New Rose Hotel”: Gibson says the last person he'd heard was looking at it was Abel Ferrara. “He had a very dark, extremely dark script that had been written by Zoë Lund,” says Gibson. “Dark and scary.”

Gibson describes his relationship to Johnny Mnemonic and Longo in unusually happy terms: certainly happy for a screenwriter. It's telling that when the pair talk about their moviemaking experiences, they invariably use the plural. As for the production, Gibson admits to having been “involved to an abnormal extent, by Hollywood standards. Since we were an artist and a novelist making a feature film we invented our own working relationship, which isn't at all the way it usually goes. I doubt having done it that way I'd want to do it the straight way.” He continues: “Going back to writing something and handing it in and waiting to see what they do with it doesn't seem interesting.”