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Beyond the Lens
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Blue Screen Blues
The most refreshing aspect of next year’s Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks collaboration The Terminal is its gargantuan set in the Palmdale desert.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
By Todd Gilchrist
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It was my recent privilege to attend a set visit for the latest Spielberg film The Terminal (Dream~works SKG, June 2004). Upon arriving at the location, a massive building tucked away an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, I discovered that the hangar-sized sound stage did not hold multiple blue-screened sets against which Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones acted their little hearts out, but a full-fledged, down-to-the-last-detail airport terminal.
Production designer Alex McDowell gave us a complete tour of the facility, which was a massive steel and iron affair, with granite floors and two and a half thousand 1000-Watt light bulbs illuminating every corner, crevice and crack of its enormous three floors. In addition, nearly three dozen retailers such as Borders Books, Dean & Deluca, and Hugo Boss (my personal favorite) reflected the commercial climate of today’s terminals, providing the background against which Hanks’ character holds down the proverbial fort for a period of eleven months. In the film Hanks plays an Eastern European expatriate who calls the terminal home after his visa is voided by the eruption of a coup in his homeland.
Impressive as the very construction of the terminal was, with only real planes lacking, it dawned on me just how cool it was to see a set that was constructed from real objects - physical, tangible objects - in an age when the bottom line usually is how much cheaper, quicker or easier a “set” can be created inside a computer.
Having also recently watched the superlative Indiana Jones DVD box set, which recounts the vagaries of its extensive location shooting and live production, I had to wonder: has Hollywood gone nuts for digital effects? It certainly seems to be the case. After all, how many films that we see now don’t possess some element of subtle addition (Stuck On You’s dexterous burger-flipping, for example), subtraction (such as erasing those pesky matte lines or mike drops), or madcap invention (say, the glowing beams of light that pour out of many a universe-destroying orb)?
George Lucas, of course, is the poet laureate/ mad scientist of digital trickery, having invented the modern age of special effects with Star Wars. His Phantom Menace and Attack Of the Clones pictures brought the art form to new heights, creating entirely digital sets and replacing many actors and extras with computer-generated algorithms - I mean, characters. While that remains the next wave of technological advancement (though God forbid it happen with Jar-Jar Binks), it posits an interesting scenario for future generations.
Have we become so accustomed to effects-laden films that we can’t differentiate between the reality of the on screen world and the one outside the camera? I’m sure if Lucas had his druthers, we’d all be interacting via video phones while instant-messaging, cell-phoning and sending transmissions via brainwaves, but what few seem to realize is how much this “all-access” technology is distancing us from one another.
While I’m sure it’s a necessary evil to create a fictional environment in which Anakin Skywalker plunges miles upon miles through the nighttime sky of Coruscant, do we really need to assemble his dramatic scenes with the same detachment, going as far as to eliminate all extraneous bits of furniture to make the filmmaking process more “efficient?”
It’s a disheartening prospect to imagine that in just a few short years, studios like England’s Pinewood and Italy’s Cinecitta, which once housed massive sets spanning hundreds of thousands of man hours for Batman, Gangs Of New York and Alien (amongst many others), they might be soon be abandoned for the less tactile simplicity of a CGI artist’s stylus. The digital sets look and register texture with such a disparity of quality that it’s hard to look at older films and those of Lucas and the Wachowski brothers and imagine they occupy space in the same cinematic universe.
| Then again, Peter Jackson seems to have a grasp on the balance between reality and fantasy. His programmers created new software that allowed the Uruk-hai armies to exist independently of one another, even flee into the hills when they were not faced with an immediate adversary. While this, in and of itself, may present similarly troubling possibilities for the future (if they can run and fight now, imagine two or three years hence when their ability to emote surpasses that of their human counterparts), such creativity is integrated into a real environment - be it actual size or a scale model.
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The DVD for the extended version of The Two Towers demonstrates the validity - nay, the necessity - of including human actors to play these roles, whether they’re featured performers or extras sent into the fray to give the battle scenes depth. The actors, who often stood around waiting for long periods of time while shots were blocked and fights choreographed, sang songs and created war chants that made their way into the final picture, creating a palpable sense of interaction between the principal cast members and the hordes they were enlisted to kill.
| Such idiosyncratic behaviors would never have been “invented” by computer-generated characters, no matter how many irregularities could be programmed into their behavior. The difference is all up on the screen - never has an army of soldiers seemed so formidable, or the odds so stacked against our heroes. But Jackson’s attention to human detail, the inclusion of ideas and suggestions from the filmmaking crew and cast, elevates his sequences, and the films as a whole, to a level unsurpassed by any other filmmaker working today.
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His is the one vision that sustains my faith in the creativity of the film industry, that the actors and sets and real people behind the scenes will not disappear in an age when, as Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, people “were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Far be it from me to cast a stone - I was first in line to watch Star Wars and I’ll be first to watch the final installment next summer - but at least I know when I throw mine, it will be picked up off the ground rather than borrowed from the imagination of some unknown programmer.
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