Michael Almereyda has written and directed fourteen feature films, most recently Cymbeline, Experimenter, Marjorie Prime, Escapes, and Tesla. He has edited and contributed essays for books on Vladimir Mayakovsky, William Eggleston, Manny Farber, and Garry Winogrand.

Chapter 1: NASTY MICROBES

What drew me to Nikola Tesla when I was a teenager, more than forty years ago, is not quite the same as what drew me to make a movie about him in 2019, and the coordinates shifted altogether during 2020, a shared hallucination of a year, when this book was written and time, it’s been commonly agreed, feels different: muffled, staggered, destabilized, alternately freezing and skipping forward, as we’ve found ourselves jostled between quarantine and protest, detachment, division, and some semblance of solidarity.

I haven’t been able to resist thinking about how I’d make my film over again, if I could start fresh or simply apply a new coat of paint. I’d pretty surely pay more heed to Tesla’s germaphobia. In My Inventions, the autobiography serialized in Electrical Experimenter magazine in 1919, written when Tesla was sixty-two (startlingly, not much older than I am now), he describes his experience with cholera, when an epidemic descended upon his home town of Gospic, in what’s now Croatia. He was eighteen, returning from school:

It is incredible how absolutely ignorant people were as to the causes of this scourge…They thought that the deadly agents were transmitted thru the air and filled it with pungent odors and smoke. In the meantime they drank infested water and died in heaps. I contracted the dreadful disease on the very day of my arrival and although surviving the crisis I was confined to bed for 9 months with scarcely any ability to move. My energy was completely exhausted and for the second time I found myself at Death’s door. In one of the sinking spells which was thought to be the last, my father rushed into the room. I still see his pallid face as he tried to cheer me in tones belying his assurance. “Perhaps,” I said, “I may get well if you will let me study engineering.”

That is an origin story, of a kind, building on Tesla’s first visit “at death’s door,” just a few years earlier, when he was fifteen, bedridden with malaria. (The malaria, transmitted by mosquitoes, had lingered, leaving him particularly vulnerable to cholera.) Images of lethal micro-organisms chased Tesla throughout his life. In Paris, shortly before leaving for the U.S. in 1884, with an introduction to Thomas Edison in hand, he worked with a scientist studying the properties of drinking water. As recounted in a letter written sixteen years later to his friend Robert Underwood Johnson, the invitation to look through a microscope perpetually heightened Tesla’s horror of germs:

If you would watch only for a few minutes the horrible creatures, hairy and ugly beyond anything you can conceive, tearing each other up with the juices diffusing throughout the water—you would never again drink a drop of unboiled or unsterilized water.

I wasn’t interested in making a matter-of-fact biopic showing young Tesla moving through his travails and triumphs, but the inventor’s lifelong fear of contamination is acknowledged throughout the film. His memory of the cholera epidemic surfaces in an important patch of dialogue, with a bitter nod to the superstition that guided his countrymen to mismanage the crisis. He’s shown wiping glasses and cups before drinking, avoiding handshakes, wearing gloves, and, while seated in a restaurant, working through a stack of cloth napkins to clean utensils and plates. But I now wonder if we could have underlined this a bit more, given how far and deep Tesla’s fear reached, and how the present moment is saturated with a commensurate dread.

In the fifth installment of My Inventions, after praising the departed J.P. Morgan, an investor who had, in reality, left him high and dry, inspiring a string of private pleas and complaints, Tesla offers a curse to unspecified enemies. “I am unwilling to accord to some small-minded and jealous individuals the satisfaction of having thwarted my efforts. These men are to me nothing more than microbes of a nasty disease.” For Tesla, no insult could be loaded with more contempt – nothing’s worse than “microbes of a nasty disease.” But his next lines swerve to self-justification and prophesy, a tone that characterizes Tesla’s written pronouncements, inviting a martyrdom that many of his fans continue to embrace. My movie carries him up to 1901, drawing the curtain with the failure of a grand scheme for the worldwide transmission of wireless energy, involving the construction of an enormous tower in Wardenclyffe, Long Island. This was the enterprise J.P. Morgan had withdrawn from after giving Tesla the equivalent of four million dollars in today’s money. With the dismantling of the Wardenclyffe tower, Tesla was, indeed, thwarted and finished. But he was hardly able to admit this to the readers of Electrical Experimenter, or to face his own role in the defeat. “My project was retarded by laws of nature,” he concludes. “The world was not prepared for it. It was too far ahead of time. But the same laws will prevail in the end and make it a triumphal success.”

Tesla lived another twenty-four years after writing these words, long enough to see the future consumed by the Second World War. By then, he had suffered more setbacks, and became increasingly reclusive and unhinged, the predictor of doomsday scenarios, the promoter of an unrealized death beam. I had included scenes of the wraithlike, elderly Tesla in my original script: a gaunt old man in a barren suite in the New Yorker Hotel, where he kept pigeons while instructing the staff to maintain a three-foot distance from him at all times. Budget constraints convinced me to cut this material, but the image of a skeletal, self-isolating germaphobe continues to haunt me. I chose to focus on a different Tesla, the inventor of technological breakthroughs that still define the way we generate and receive light and power. A proud, recessive outsider, motivated by an idealism that was seldom practical. I wanted to honor him, a scientist of mind-bending resourcefulness and prescience who was also hapless with money and even more hapless in making and keeping personal connections. I saw the movie as a story about love and money, even or especially if the brilliant protagonist had little talent for managing their flow.