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Features
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The Hitchhiker's Stamp of Approval
Four years after Douglas Adams' sudden death, his cherished dream of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy feature is about to be realized by his friend Robbie Stamp.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
By Pam Grady
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Pam Grady
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Executive producer Robbie Stamp
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Robbie Stamp has a warm smile, kind eyes, and a gorgeous English accent, but on this afternoon at San Francisco's Ritz-Carlton Hotel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's executive producer's most arresting aspect isn't part of his person, but attached to his lapel. It is a small white pin depicting a robot.
"It's Marvin!" Stamp beams, confirming the pin's identity as Hitchhiker's depressive 'bot. In contrast to the BBC-TV series rendering of the character, the new Marvin is mostly white with black accents with an oversized round head, and he's quite short. In one sign of how much care has gone into this feature film rendering of the late Douglas Adams' space skipping adventure, it takes three people to operate Marvin's controls, while actor Warwick Davis sweats inside Marvin's metallic body. His constant kvetching is given voice by the velvet tones of a marvelously cranky Alan Rickman.
Adams' tale of mild-mannered Englishman Arthur Dent's galaxy hopping adventures in the company of his pal, extraterrestrial travel writer Ford Prefect, began life as a BBC radio series. Books, a TV series, a computer game, comics, even stage adaptations followed, but it was Adams' dream that his creation see life on the big screen.
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Mos Def
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Stamp, then a TV producer, first met Adams in the early 1990s. The two formed a company, Digital Village, to produce computer games and take advantage of the suddenly hot Internet. The business eventually failed, a casualty of the dot-com bust, although the website they pioneered to created a ‘real’ Hitchhiker's Guide, H2G2, continues to thrive, now as a property of the BBC.
The business may not have been the success the partners imagined, but the relationship evolved into a deep and abiding friendship and Stamp last spoke to Adams the day before he died. Stamp cherishes his friend's memory. "I just always loved Douglas' company so much," he reveals. "He was such a big intellectually curious man and he just had this appetite for ideas. I just loved that."
The 49-year-old Adams' death from a heart attack in May 2001 was sudden and shocking, and he passed on with a major dream unfulfilled. He had written a screenplay for the proposed Hitchhiker's feature, but the project had stalled. Stamp remembers that at the time, it looked like the movie was never going to happen, to Adams' abiding sorrow.
"It really overshadowed a lot of his life, to be quite honest,” confesses Stamp. “It was a source of immense frustration that it never got made for him.”
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Co-star Sam Rockwell
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In the wake of Adams' passing, his widow, Jane and Stamp agreed that the dream that Adams believed in so strongly had to be realized. The movie must be made. "I think that we felt that if we could get a movie made, if it was great, then it would be a vindication," Stamp suggests.
"It wouldn't take away from those very long years of being deeply sad and frustrated, but at least it would show he was right. It really does leave [a nice legacy] and that's the spirit with which we've approached it."
The possibility of a Hitchhiker's feature film had been bandied about since at least the early 1980s, when at one time, Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman and his partners held the option. In the late 1990s, director Jay Roach became attached, with Disney, under its Touchstone banner, producing, but at the time of Adams' death, the film's budget seemed like an insurmountable sticking point. The project was back on track within 18 months of Adams' demise when Spyglass Entertainment announced in the fall of 2002 that it had hired Chicken Run screenwriter Karey Kilpatrick to produce Hitchhiker's final screenplay, working from Adams' own script and notes.
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Del Rey Publishing
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Late author Douglas Adams
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A year later, the film received its final green light to move forward, but by that time Roach, who'd been kept on hold for six years, was forced to drop out in order to direct Meet the Fockers. Spike Jonze was initially tapped as a possible replacement, but other commitments precluded him from taking the job. But the meeting with Jonze proved fortuitous when he suggested that Stamp contact the English outfit Hammer & Tongs, a production company consisting of director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, whose work has been primarily in music videos and commercials and who Jonze described as "me three or four years ago."
Stamp visited the pair in London and came away convinced that Jonze's suggestion was absolutely spot on. "I was just blown away," he enthuses. "I thought these guys are right. They've got the absolutely right mixture of joyfulness, playfulness, and intelligence."
Before they even had the job nailed down, Jennings and Goldsmith began visualizing what the film should look like, preparation that served them well when they eventually met with the studio. "They went out on a limb," Stamp observes. "Well before they got the gig, they really went to town to say, 'Look, we can do this movie; let us show you how.'"
Once Disney and Spyglass gave their blessing to first-time director Jennings, their commitment remained steadfast. Jennings was allowed to hire crewmembers that were part of the Hammer & Tongs family, including the production and costume designers and his director of photography, while Goldsmith came on board as one Hitchhiker's producers.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Freeman (centre) at Golden Globes
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"Here was this project which had been around for 25 years, it took a long time to get off the ground, it was going to be made several thousand miles away," marvels Stamp. "All credit to Disney and Spyglass, they've been pretty impressive."
Once Jennings was in place, casting could begin in earnest. It was Jennings and Goldsmith's idea to cast Martin Freeman, best known for his role in the BBC sitcom The Office, as reluctant space traveler Arthur Dent. It's a decision that Stamp heartily agreed with after he saw Freeman's audition tape.
"I just thought, ‘He's nailed it,” Stamp enthuses. “‘He's going to be a great contemporary Arthur Dent. He'll play the befuddled earthman in space in his dressing gown and his pajamas, but he's got layers of intelligence and complexity, as well."
Originally, the producers were looking at Sam Rockwell as Dent's friend Ford Prefect, but Stamp thinks Rockwell wanted to play renegade galaxy president Zaphod Beeblebrox all along. It was an ambition he was able to fulfill when the producers eventually decided on Mos Def as Prefect, after one of the film's two casting directors caught the actor in his award-winning performance in the critically lauded play Top Dog/Underdog, and insisted that Jennings meet with him.
"Mos has just done a very funny, weird job with the role," Stamp says. "It's touching, it's funny; he's cool; he's knowledgeable. He's a guy who's been willing to hitchhike around the galaxy. But that was how he was cast, no appealing to any demographics, that was just what Nick and Garth thought of him."
According to Stamp, Jennings' approach has been to use whatever tool works in service of the look and content of the film. While that means the film is full of state-of-the-art CGI, Jennings was not above getting back to basics. "We’ve got some tricks in there that are as old as moviemaking itself. There's one trick with a dummy, it's just a really, really old filmmaking trick," Stamp laughs, adding, "The cry in this movie is not, 'We'll fix it in post;' it's 'make as much happen on camera as we can and then focus where we need to on the special effects.'"
One key contributor to the movie's aesthetic was the Jim Henson Company, who provided Hitchhiker's animatronics creatures. Stamp professes amazement at the level of sophistication the company achieved in giving life to Adams' vision.
| "Some of those bigger models have 35 server motors in them, and watching the guys [operate them is fantastic]," Stamp marvels. "The skill, the dexterity to drive the phonemes and the facial muscles, it's like watching a master pianist play these instruments. The two guys who did it were just sensational."
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Stamp believes Adams would have been delighted with this production, jazzed by the cast and crew's energy, enthusiasm, passion, and commitment to excellence. And Stamp is certain that the movie is one that would have made the writer proud. It is knowledge that both pleases and saddens Adams' good friend.
"It's been bittersweet for me, many, many times,” he reveals. “When it got green lit; when you see the first designs; when you see the first principal photography; and now that Douglas isn't here to share all this with, because I think it's about to become the phenomenon that he always wanted it to be.”
| Stamp is aware that Hitchhiker's has a huge following, with some fans having followed Adams' saga since that first radio series. He promises that the film won't disappoint them and he insists that even people who have never heard of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will find much to enjoy in the movie's blend of comedy and science fiction.
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It is a feeling, Stamp says, that was shared by Hitchhiker's entire film family. "It was wonderful just being with all that love and energy and passion, leaving even seasoned, hardened veterans, the grips and things, feeling that maybe they were involved with something that was going to have that really special quality to it, just something that was going to rise up out of the pack and just be something that everybody was going to be glad to say, 'I was there at the beginning of that one.'"
Of course, Adams wrote an entire series of Hitchhiker's tales, so this is hardly the definitive version of the Hitchhiker's legend. Stamp concurs with that assessment, as he promises, "It's not the end of a series; it's the beginning of one, the beginning of the next stage of the Hitchhiker's journey, this astonishing thing that has been all these other things."
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