Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
We held the latest Jedi Council the other night, right after Mr. Beaks came from visiting the SKY CAPTAIN & THE WORLD OF TOMORROW production facility. I've seen some of the glowing, hyperbolic descriptions of this footage on other sites, and I know how much our own Grande Rojo is looking forward to the movie. I hope it's great. I really do. But I get worried any time a movie seems to be all about design, especially when it's in the hands of someone who has never worked with actors before. I'd hate to see this movie be a big, empty, pretty spectacle when all the ingredients are in place for it to be something special and fun. Which way does it look like it's going right now?
Well... here's Beaks with his take on things...
Jon Avnet knows precisely what he has with Kerry Conran’s SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, and he’s not afraid to say it: “This is a movie by a nerd, for nerds, that just happens to be accessible to normal people.” While we’ll have to wait and see on the validity of the latter half of that proclamation, there’s certainly no doubting the accuracy of the former. This is the mayhem laden sci-fi film daydreamed by geeks in study hall, scribbled onto the backs of notebooks, suddenly realized twenty years later through the expressive magic of CG. It’s the kind of movie no studio would make without forcing compromise upon compromise until the finished result was some watered-down non-starter like THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, which is why Avnet wisely opted to tap the independent finances of Aurelio De Laurentiis in order to bring the film as near to completion as possible before offering it the distribution rights.
But now that Paramount has signed on to this light show, it’s finally time to compromise, no?
“Not yet,” says Avnet. “We’re still cruising away here in Neverland.”
“Neverland” is a production facility housed in a drab office space nestled among even drabber one-story structures in a Van Nuys, California industrial park. A sweep of the block whilst jockeying for a parking spot tells you that tractor equipment is manufactured here, not films. The only symbol suggesting otherwise is the winged Totenkopf insignia affixed to the red-brick front of the building where I and representatives of every online site in fandom are mulling about waiting for our grand tour, which will include the most extensive presentation of footage from the film yet shown to the press.
Eventually, we’re granted access to this house of secrets, and guided through the cramped, but cheery workspaces into an ersatz screening room where we’re shown the twenty minute reel that was used to woo every single major studio in a highly unusual one-day courtship, which ended with an aggressive Paramount walking away with… what did they get anyway?
The “reel” that launched a thousand bids winds up posing twice as many questions before it’s finished, but the very first image decisively answers the doubts of those who’d say that the film is just a quaint, low(er) budgeted version of Lucas’s digital STAR WARS prequels. High above an ominously dark 1930’s Manhattan, a commercial zeppelin rumbles through the clouds on its way to being tethered to the top of the Empire State Building. The ship is called the Hindenburg III; thus, cleverly placing the film in a World of Tomorrow as might’ve been imagined by an early twentieth century futurist before the fiery end of the dirigible era. It’s important to note that the imagery in this reel is mostly black-and-white, with some very muted colors creeping in here and there, and is not representative of the finished product (though we got a peek of that near the end of our visit – more on that later). But it’s still breathtakingly beautiful in its own way; an expressionistic, soft-focus metropolis that calls to mind the work of the great industrial artists (in fact, Kevin Conran, Kerry’s brother and the film’s production designer, credits folks like Alex Raymond, Ramond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes for influencing this striking look).
After eliciting audible “oohs” and “aahs” from the assembled press, the narrative gets underway as we’re introduced to intrepid reporter (is there any other kind in these films?) Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow, who seems as luminous as her hyper-stylized surroundings). Lost in the hullabaloo over the Hindenburg’s spectacular arrival is Polly’s story about the disappearance of Doctor Jorge Vargas. It’s the latest mysterious vanishing of a notable scientist, and while the authorities are puzzled, Polly might be on the verge of cracking the story via the assistance of Doctor Walter Jennings, a specialist in nuclear enzymes, who has just arrived on the Hindenburg. Polly rushes to Radio City Music Hall to meet with the nervous Jennings. In a marvelous sequence set against the projection of THE WIZARD OF OZ, Jennings tells Polly of the insidious “Einheit Elf” (Unit 11) project convened in Berlin at the outset of World War I. But he’s only able to give Polly a rough sketch of their awful experimentation before the air raid sirens begin to roar outside the theater. Totenkopf has come to snatch up Jennings, the last scientist remaining from “Einheit Elf”.
All is chaos out in the streets. Police scramble to clear the streets as they prepare to do battle against, yes, giant fucking robots (these things are just too big and too badass to be described differently). We catch our first glimpse of them through Polly’s eyes as they clomp down Fifth Avenue smashing cars and raking the sides of buildings with their shoulders (apparently, the avenues in New York City were not designed for giant fucking robots marching in pairs). Unable to slow their progress, the police call in their last hope: Sky Captain (Jude Law). Signaled hilariously by what looks like the RKO tower, Sky Captain and his Flying Legion come screaming out of the skies to save the day. Because they’re impervious to bullets, Sky Captain has to get a little imaginative with his efforts to fell these mechanical monstrosities, succeeding in the nick of time, and, of course, saving Polly in the process. But the robots, after zapping an underground power grid, seem to get what they came for, and take to the skies once again.
The succeeding scenes in the reel economically provide a bit of backstory – would it surprise you to learn that Sky Captain and Polly are ex-lovers? After a quick round of Hawks-ian banter wherein we learn that Sky Captain blames Polly for sabotaging his plane in order to get a scoop, while Polly believes Sky Captain conducted an affair with a “mystery girl in Nanjing”, the action picks up again with another frenzied aerial battle through the streets of New York City. This time, it’s Sky Captain and Polly in pursuit of an elusive fleet of “flying wings”. Like the rest of the succeeding sequences in this reel, this was mostly bluescreen, but we did catch glimpses of the finished chase as we toured the facility, and, if nothing else, it looked gorgeous.
Everything beyond this point mostly served to give us a better sense of the story, which becomes quite the globetrotting affair, stretching all the way to Nepal (where we’re introduced to Sky Captain’s Sallah-esque pal, Kaji), and what I assume will be a dense jungle setting (I can’t wait to see what these guys do with such diverse environs). Still, my favorite “location” is the “flying fortress” of Captain Frank Cook (the eye-patched Angelina Jolie), which is exactly what its name suggests, and is big enough to accommodate the landing of a P-40 Warhawk. Though we weren’t shown a finished version of this aeronautically improbable creation, what we did see was enough to send my jaw floor-ward.
Following the screening, it was up to Jon Avnet to make sense of what we just saw, while describing the unusual route this project has taken to its eventual exhibition. A veteran producer and occasional director who’s no stranger to introducing audiences to uniquely gifted filmmakers (he shepherded Paul Brickman’s brilliant 1983 debut, RISKY BUSINESS, to the screen), Avnet was first introduced to Kerry Conran by longtime business partner, Marsha Oglesby. As Avnet puts it, “I had done a lot of movies at Disney that I wasn’t wild about. They were successful, some of them were fun. But as a producer, I just look for something where you can maybe break a talent like what I did with RISKY BUSINESS with (Paul) Brickman and his first movie, which I did find stimulating and exciting.” After taking a gander at an animated six minute presentation made by CalArts grad Conran, he knew he had found something special. “I thought it was a really fascinating piece of film. It was shot all digitally. It was shot all on bluescreen. And he manipulated it on his Apple computer, literally in his garage, and it created these images. And I went, “Wow!” It was just a level of sophistication – you saw the shots. So, I was responding to that level of design, which I thought was quite impressive.”
While Conran possessed what Avnet refers to as the “boys-with-toys” technical acumen, the producer saw where he could implement his own expertise as a director of more intimate human dramas like FRIED GREEN TOMATOES. What they ended up with was a breezy, repartee heavy script bursting with the director’s desire for boundlessly imaginative sequences that would be cost prohibitive in a traditional studio production (according to Kevin, his brother “dreams big. His ambitions are outsized.”)
With a script in place, it, um, *wasn’t* time to cast. According to Avnet, “The notion was (Kerry) would shoot the entire movie before we went with our actors on a bluescreen with basically extras, and storyboard what he was going to shoot, and then cut it in a kind of crude animatics of the entire movie. So, in fact, storyboarding the entire movie, shooting the entire movie before we ever put any actors in. And he did it.” With the skeleton of the film in place, it was then time to supply the vital organs; i.e. the actors, which is when one Avnet made one of the project’s key decisions. “Whereas (Kerry) wanted to do it as a very, very small film, I thought, ‘Well, why don’t we try to get really great actors?’ Because usually, with all due respect, a lot of these big movies tend to either have new actors, or you don’t tend to get actors who are really refined actors.” As a result, they turned to the actor with the initials J.L. who doesn’t conjure memories of infamously bad bluescreen acting, Jude Law, which in turn attracted the likes of Paltrow and Jolie.
One of the major concerns one might have with a technically savvy, but reportedly shy fellow like Conran would be his facility with actors. “It took a little while for him to say ‘Action’ out loud,” jokes Avnet. In all seriousness, though, it did take some time for Conran to warm up to his performers. “In the initial rehearsals,” says Avnet, “he was kind of quiet. But as they progressed over a couple of days, he got more active. Because he knew the movie, he started to assert himself. Now, I bet if you asked him right now, he would tell you that he could do better, and that he would like another chance to do better. He’s not coming from the theater having worked with actors, but he acquitted himself pretty damn well.” In response to the other inevitable road bumps for a first time director, and how they might impact the finished product, Avnet simply invoked the great cinematographer Caleb Deschanel. “The most amazing thing about film is how forgiving it is.”
Shot with an HD 24-P DV camera, it probably isn’t amazing how crisp the images have turned out, but what’s surprising about it is the degree of stylization, which stands in marked contrast to the clean look of Lucas’s STAR WARS prequels. Essentially, Conran and crew are compositing in black and white, and adding in the color later to give it the look of the old Three-Strip Technicolor process. Since the film will largely be distributed on film, Avnet states that “our goal is to make it look like film.” And he’s certainly quite pleased with the way things are working out. “This mimics film’s quality. That will happen no matter what simply by the ones and zeroes that are available on the computer. You’ll be able to hit, ‘I want to do Technicolor Three-Strip; I want to do BEN-HUR.’ That’ll happen. That will be available to people. Here, this is the first that I’ve seen where you can do film on it. As such, that’s a big deal.”
Once we were done chatting with Avnet, we got a more in-depth tour of the facilities, starting with Kevin Conran’s design room, which is covered from wall to ceiling with hundreds of literally fantastic sketches. A soft-spoken, bespectacled fellow, Kevin’s drawings represent the outsized thinking of his brother, while giving us a preview of the film’s underwater battle sequence, and its other, as-yet-unseen, giant fucking robots. (There was one sketch of giant, manacled hands reaching through a jail cell for what looked like a teeny-tiny Sky Captain, which intrigued me because it doesn’t match up with anything in the script that I, er, have not read.) Though I could’ve easily hung out in there all day, Kevin, while friendly, appeared ready to swing back into work. Indeed, with a release date of June 11th, there’s an undeniable sense of mounting pressure throughout Chateau du Sky Captain. In talking with Kevin, it’s not hard to detect a certain uneasiness with the way this one-time homemade project has turned into a hotly anticipated summer movie. Still, he’s not about to sound an ungrateful note. “It would really sound awful for me to sit here and have this great opportunity and act like it’s not a great opportunity. At the same time, we didn’t set out to make SPIDER-MAN 2, or something ambitious and enormous.”
Judging from the CG work we saw on the rest of the tour, it certainly doesn’t look that way. From the intricate sculpting of a miniature elephant, to its integration in the finished scene, the process appears every bit as astonishing as those I’ve witnessed in other f/x houses. Even more impressive than the elephant, however, was the degree of detail in the actors’ surroundings. Given our step-by-step breakdown of the scene, I was acutely aware of the fact that this was shot against a bluescreen, but by the time we arrived at the finished sequence, there’s no way you could convince me that they weren’t on a fully constructed set. If nothing else, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW boasts some of the most convincing virtual scenery to date.
One of our last stops on the tour was a dip into an editing bay, where we were shown the (almost) final version of the first robot attack as seen on the preview reel. Suddenly, the Three-Strip Technicolor comment made sense; the colors really popped in this cut, making me excited to see what’s in store for the film’s more exotic locales. The action had also been noticeably tightened up from the earlier cut, which bodes well for the finished product.
And that’s the most salient question at hand. Will SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW add up to more than the sum of its eye popping design work, or will it join the boundary pushing, but dramatically inert likes of TRON and DICK TRACY? With Avnet promising non-stop cliffhangers in the mold of the old serials, and franchise talk starting to bubble around the project, there seems to be every reason to believe that Conran and company have delivered. Still, with a hectic stretch-run staring them in the face, a second film is the last thing anyone wants to talk about.
Says Kevin Conran, “I hope *they* have fun making the sequel.”
Faithfully submitted,
Does it ever get boring for me to tell you what a great job you do for us, Beaks? Even if it does, let me repeat it. Nice report. Thanks.
"Moriarty" out.
