The more I see and hear about Sky Captain, the more I think it’s right up my alley. From Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood:
Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 30′s and 40′s: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like ”Flash Gordon” alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era’s noir thrillers.
I may have to try this:
But like the old serials it emulates, ”Sky Captain” is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ”blue-screen” background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it.”The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation,” Conran said. The reason? ”First and foremost, to do it cheaper.” It’s a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people’s money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930′s) but doesn’t have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy.
For Conran, the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.
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He realized he could build whatever he wanted, and what’s more, it could be gigantic. Rockets that dwarfed skyscrapers. Airplane hangars so large that you could not see someone on the other side. Because, he explained, ”what does it cost to hit the scale button and make something enormous? Nothing.”And it didn’t matter whether the actors were on a big expensive sound stage or in Conran’s tiny apartment. By 1994, he had struck upon the idea of filming an entire movie by himself, at home, with a blue screen set up right in his apartment. He began to create what he was calling ”the World of Tomorrow.”
If I may geek out for a moment, this sounds awesome:
Together, Kerry and Kevin [his brother] filigreed the film with cathedral-like touches that only they and the angels will see: the ship that carried King Kong in the 1933 movie, lying on the ocean floor; a line of deactivated robots, leaning against a wall in the exact same positions the Fleischer brothers had them in their moody 1941 Superman cartoon, ”The Mechanical Monsters.”