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GOD
came down to Earth. We met Him; you didn’t. He was here to share his Newest
Testament, the film What Dreams May Come. We were blessed for He
spake with us. We met Him (at the Sheraton), and these are His Words…
Sam
and Aidan had been discussing What Dreams May Come’s reach #3 in
the American box office list; a week later it would be #1. On this course,
it is destined to become the most commercially successful film by a New
Zealand director, surpassing even Roger Donaldson’s Goldeneye. Enter
the maestro, Vincent Ward:
V(to
REP Distributor’s agent, Donna Mackenzie):
Did
you fill them in on the background? Of where we’re at in America?
A:
Congratulations, that’s great.
V:
Thankyou.
It’s a big relief for everybody.
S:
I’ve been keeping tabs with the film through the Internet and checking
out the reviews, etc. I notice that it’s doing extremely well at the box
office. I saw it last week and I was amazed with all the visual effects;
Monet and van Gogh in the Heaven sequences were very much the thing for
me. I suppose it’s very reflective of your background, because you were
at Ilam down in Christchurch and your earlier films seem to reflect that
expressionist style.
V:
Right; that German romantic that I respond to and I thought it was appropriate
for the story; I always had a sense of some force that you can’t quite
put a name on, some sense of the sublime.
S:
This is your biggest budget to date from Hollywood and you didn’t write
it: it was Ron Bass – Academy Award™ scriptwriter, Rain Man – so
is this a first for you, taking someone else’s script?
V:Yeah,
although I worked on the script for a year with Ron, so I was really able
to shape it, not so much the characters, because when I first read it –
it’s based on a Richard Matheson novel, a well-known American novelist
Producer
Stephen
Simon has] been trying to get this film project done for over twenty
years, following his film production of Somewhere In Time with Christopher
Reeve which came out in 1980 and was based on Richard Matheson’s book
Bid
Time Return. What Dreams May Come is based on a subsequent Matheson
book. Reading [Carol] Adrienne’s book along with James Redfield’s
Celestine
book series will give key perspectives on underlying points of the film.’
[Carol Adrienne, The Purpose of Your Life.] |
and
he’s written a lot of TV series – and the main thing I did, because I thought
that the relationships were very strong – wonderful character-writer, probably
one of the best dramatic writers in Hollywood – the main problem I had
with it was 75% of it is set in Heaven and Hell, and so when it first came
out it moved me a lot; but I said “Look I can’t see a way into it.” Later
I called him up and said “I’ve got an idea; we make Robin [Williams]’s
wife in this film a painter, like in a 19th-century vein;” then he could
wake up in Paradise, he could wake up in her painting to show how strongly
he felt for her and it would give you narratively a way that they could
communicate throughout Paradise, and that he could effect her painting
and so on. I wanted to make sure it was a visceral experience that could
operate as a quest and a love-story and a relationship, but primarily still
as a drama; so that idea really seemed to support the narrative and support
the idea that you can create a subjective afterlife.
S:
That’s really the main component of the story, that fact that it is this
love-story with her being this artist and then when Robin’s transported
to this world it’s very nice, it links it.
V:
Well,
it had a strong dialogue-driven narrative and I just allowed for a very
strongly visually-driven narrative to interact with that, so, much negotiation;
every line of dialogue with Ron was kind of like a negotiation. He fights
with every director he works with for his words; we all go, “Ron, too much
dialogue, cut it!” and then you eventually reach a kind of medium. I think
the reason he probably does it is – I don’t think the film has too much,
I was very happy with the dialogue in the film – but I think it’s probably
a strategy as a writer which is kind of interesting, the freelance writer,
he probably wants to make sure that the narrative is really really really
clear no matter how it’s shot; and then as soon as you bring in someone
who’s used to telling stories visually, who can communicate the narrative,
then you have to strip away quite a lot of the dialogue, otherwise you
do it twice.
A:
A
lot of the scenery has been compared with specific artists, like the Hell
sequences with Brueghel and Bosch and more the heavenly ones with the lighter
painters, the French school; were you focussing on individual styles or
artists at the time?
V:
Yeah, there are certain particular artists, but often they’re the ones
that are not quite as well known, like Hell is influenced quite a lot by
Doré: the Hell in Annie’s world, his distant city is very much like
a Doré engraving; the stairway is very much like a John Martin engraving,
a 19th-century apocalyptic engraver; and I made a lot of images up – like,
that thing, I drew; even though it’s in the style of a 19th-century engraver,
it’s the type of stuff I do to give my people something to work with. We
changed one of the ships to an aircraft carrier - they happened to be nearby
- and we had a lot of miniatures of various other ships.
S:
How
long was the production?
V:It
was seventy shooting days, but there’s been a lot of preproduction; we
had a longer preproduction because you have so much to envisage in incredible
detail.
S:
With the sequences in Heaven where Robin’s splashing around, what is that
process called? It’s a new technique?
V:
Yeah. Well, Robin calls it “virtual van Gogh”. In fact, there’s not a lot
of van Gogh in the piece; there’s more these 19th-century moody romantics,
a little kind of pre-Raphaelite, I guess, too. One process was called Leidau
which is adapted from the military and for nuclear-powered dams, where
you take a device that looks like a bazooka; we shoot regular film during
the day with my actors on location, and we send in the Leidau crew
at night and they scan 3-dimensionally - it’s a mapping tool, it 3-dimensionally
maps every surface for three hundred yards; it’s incredible. So, you can
move in a computer; once you’ve transferred the information to a computer,
you can move the camera around the trunk of a tree up or through its branches;
it’s quite extraordinary. And then you combine that map with the live-action
footage. And then you do another process which allows you to paint one
frame, and then it automatically tracks to the next frame you paint, which
might be frame 60. And that’s a breakthrough, it’s never been able to be
done before; and that took two years of programming and experiment, right
up to the end solving problems.
A:
You
had a Production House for that?
V:
We had 4 different visual-effects houses but one particular visual-effects
house did that part of the film; the different visual-effects houses use
different techniques for different parts of the film and that has different
problems to solve.
'July
8, 1997… POP Film, the visual effects branch of Pacific Ocean Post,
has been awarded a number of VFX sequences in the show.’
‘August
4, 1997… A refuge from this summer’s Warner Digital death, Ellen Sommers
has been hired as the Visual Effects Producer.
‘The
effects work for the film has been split between Mass Illusions
and POP Film. Mass will do the first half; POP will do the last
half.’
‘August
25, 1998… Although they were called upon late in the film’s production,
Digital
Domain did contribute about 100 visual effects shots to the film.’
[Internet ‘insider’, Bob Hoffman.] |
Continued...
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