King Kong

Creating the World of Kong – behind the wall

Behind the wall of secrecy that surrounds the world of King Kong, special effects directors and technicians are working on the virtual elements that will enhance the real-life look and feel of Kong as we will see it in 2005. At Weta Digital a city of computers is creating pre-vis, and the special CG effects that will bring the most life like and realistic version of the powerful fantasy film to the cinema screens of the world.

Visit to Weta Digital

Joe Lettari (visual effects supervisor and winner of two Academy awards for LOTR, Technical Achievement Award for his work on Gollum, The Two Towers and Return of the King) talks to Power Point slides. The design and building stages of the Empire State Building; New York City; T-Rex; a giant flesh-eating weta and an arm and hand of the king gorilla slide by demonstrating some of the digital complexities required to make the film real.

“For New York we are building the whole city. It is easier in the long run to have the flexibility to put the camera anywhere in New York where we want to have it because there are scenes that happen in two different places. It’s a period movie and we are building New York as it was in 1933. We have done a lot of research to figure what it actually looked like, starting with the Empire State building, so we have found the original blue prints for the building and built it accordingly.
Most of the Empire State Building has not changed too much since it was built but the top part has. The bit at the top where a lot of action takes place is completely different now. It’s overloaded with radio and TV aerials and there is a safety net and other things that did not exist in 1933. We are stripping all that off and rebuilding it as it was in 1933.
We have great old aerial surveys done of New York in the 1930’s and have lined up our New York with the old photos (shows a complete 3D CG virtual recreation of New York, 1933). We have taken out all the buildings that did not exist in 1933 and have recreated the city section by section. The set at Seaview will be used just for street level scenes and the rest will be CGI. This will allow us to do any height we need. For buildings we don’t know how they looked, we have researched all the architecture styles of the times so we know what all the windows, doorways, ledges, stairwells looked like in 1933. We have built a library of those elements and written software that will rebuild the city to what it would have looked like (shows shots of city). We are using Massive AI software we used in LOTR to do the crowd simulations to create a population for New York. We have looked at a lot of old photos of New York and tried to come up with the proper ethnic mix and built about thirty different types of people. We will use these to create different groups of people and we’ll have thousands of them in the scenes. (CG test photo of shiny old cars and clean people filing along 34th street in straight lines, showing what it might have looked like). The people in cars are driven by AI. About 300 extras will be used as part of the CG set. Trucks, vehicles, cars, fire hydrants and other elements, 1930’s style, will be used to recreate the city. We are still working on the cars and getting people here to drive like New Yorkers and it’s not so easy as traffic is a little calmer here. For the aeroplanes, biplanes no longer exist so we got blue prints, right down to the interiors to recreate on CG. There will be roughly the same number of planes in this film as in the original.

Lettari shows slides of creatures in the early stages of development.
Slide showing a virtual T-Rex swinging his open jaw as he lopes over the local Miramar Park grounds where kids play soccer in the week end.
Slide of a giant flesh eating weta. It looks pretty normal, just what you would expect to find in a log of dead wood in the back yard. But it is SO much bigger. The jaws, mandibles and long sticky legs and claws are immense. This is likely to produce pure terror in audiences who don’t like insects.
Slide of an arm and hand of Kong. Some challenges here are getting the fingerprints to scale on such a huge hand and putting the hair in digitally hair by individual hair so as to make it look real.

“This arm and hand have been sculpted for an eight metre gorilla. One of the tricky things about Kong is that he needs to perform on all fours and when he is upright. He is more menacing at times on all fours. To make Kong a natural, believable figure in the jungle he has to perform on all fours and we also want him to perform as the original did so he needs a skeleton that does both.
The whole musculature of a gorilla face is very similar to humans so they can do a lot of expressions we can. Although they don’t show emotion much we can read when they are happy or agitated, but the difference between a play sneer and an aggressive sneer is very subtle. The mouth shape does not change much. It’s whether they show their teeth or not, so we have to signal these subtle cues in such a way that people will understand what the emotion is as few people are gorilla experts.

How will you play the scene where Kong picks up Ann Darrow in his hand?
"She’ll have something they can puppeteer her with by hand and we will replace it with a digital Kong hand and get some articulation in there."

What can we expect for the dinosaurs?
"They will be true to the spirit of the original and we will go a bit further too. They have evolved in their own way on this island so will have their own characteristics."

Which fear is predominant?
"Probably isolation. One of the things we have been studying and learning about is that gorillas are extremely sociable. More so than even we are. So to have a gorilla you know is the last of his kind and who has no companionship would be extremely frightening for a real gorilla and to compound that by taking it out of its environment makes it even worse."

What is Kong going to do with real people?
"We have not decided that yet. We do not know how vicious he is going to be and are not sure how much he is going to be a natural creature and how much a monster. This is something Peter wants to work out as we go along. Right now he is concentrating on shooting all the live action bits so we are not sure how much he is going to be killing and eating people. We went through the same process with Gollum. The process of figuring out the personality. In The Two Towers where he does the Gollum/Smeagol scene, that came quite late in the process. That got written in very late and was one of the last scenes we did. When Peter, Fran and Phillipa wrote that scene and gave it to us it sort of solidified everything so I am expecting all that stuff will come out in the course of 2005."

Will you be keeping the old fashioned ways of looking at animals?
"That’s why we are keeping to the original so faithfully. If you can bring everyone into that feeling- where something like the Empire State Building was so brand new and people were not used to seeing things like gorillas. That’s what made the film so powerful when it opened. The Empire State Building had just been built. Most people had not seen or been to the top of it or even seen a gorilla. Yet here you are seeing the top of it and seeing a big gorilla up there. It’s great to have it set in the 1930’s rather than modern day because people are used to it now."

What kind of symbol is Kong in the 1930s and Kong in 2004?
"In the 1930s they played up the beauty and the beast theme. This time it will be more naturalistic than that. You just have the idea of Kong being in a foreign environment and what that does to him and that is all still evolving."

Visit to Weta SFX Workshop

Around the corner at Weta SFX Workshop Richard Taylor reveals the secrets of the Skull Island culture and some miniature realities behind the dense, forbidding jungle of Kong’s island kingdom.

“We have been working on King Kong for over 2 years running, in tandem with The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Universal turned us down 8 years ago for Kong, and that may have been a blessing in disguise. If we had done Kong then we may not have done LOTR. Now I feel we are equipped to do justice to what is arguably one of America’s greatest entertainment icons.

What have been the challenges in creating Skull Island?
"We love to research and involve ourselves deeply in the cultures of worlds. Tolkien had created a world with Middle Earth and we worked with that. The first 10% of the job is the most rewarding because it is the opportunity to envelop yourself completely in the research and the cultures. We are treating Skull island as if it really existed so we have had to find the ecology and the cultural reference that pre-dates the story, that has allowed us to build the history, the fauna and fauna and the evolution of the creatures which ultimately live on the island. In that way it has been similar to LOTR.
We were extremely green when we did LOTR. Now we come to Kong 7 ½ years later with a greater level of confidence, we can do justice to the film and achieve a staggeringly large amount of work in a very short time."

What do you find moving in the original film?
"I was asked recently if I am concerned that I am using technology to drive the creature that plays such a prominent part in the film. Technology was how they drove the original creature. Today it would appear to be relatively crude technology, but then it was the height of cinematic innovation. Through it they brought Kpng successfully to life. But regardless of the technology used then and now, Kong succeeds as a film because it succeeds at the most base level of film making, and that is the need for the audience to form an intimate relationship with the characters on the screen. You genuinely care for Ann and the peril she is in and very quickly, as the story goes through an incredible and subtle change, you grow to care for Kong. He goes from a beast to a very intimate and evocative character. When he loses his life at the end of the film you feel the loss for this creature. I also see an analogous relationship between what he represents and what we are doing to the world."

What have you carried over from the original story?
"Except for necessary story changes to bring it to a modern audience very little is changed. We haven’t copied it frame for frame. This is Peter and Fran Walsh’s version of the original movie and therefore the emotional content and the heightened level at which you grow to know and love the characters has been brought to the fore. The same premises are there. We have looked to a much greater degree at the back story of Skull Island – why it is the way it is and who the people were that lived there before the natives. We have heightened this in the story. But the original story has a very sound base and that is what we are building on."


Can you tell us about the background to Skull Island?
“I’d love to! But we can do this more easily by looking through the workshop”.
Downstairs in the Weta SFX workshop, a former warehouse, the party treks after Taylor, pausing in front of miniature rock formations that are parts of Skull Island. Some of the miniatures tower above the humans, others are smaller.
On LOTR we built 72 miniatures in about 51/2 years and for King Kong we have to build 42 in just over a year so we complete a miniature every week and half. 2 conceptual designers do 30 to 40 paintings per model and the paintings are given to the pre-vis department who animate the sequence for Peter’s approval. We then get back the pre-vis as 2 D printouts. We create cross sections that we then enlarge and from that we are able to build our miniatures. We have to keep very closely to a strip that we call the red carpet. This is the area that the actors will run down in the miniature, so the footfalls in the pre-vis correspond to the footfalls of the actors when they will be shot on blue screen and touch our model”.
(He points to a large, rocky cliff).
“This is a tenth scale section of cliff that Ann runs down with a T-Rex chasing her. She slips over and slides on her bum down a muddy slope and ends up at the bottom”.
The cliff looks realistically rocky but is made of insulation foam.
“We take silicon molds from rock faces along the coastline of Wellington bring them back and inject them with polyurethane”.

A miniature of the wall comes into view. This is a tiny version of the set they are shooting on at Massey’s Memorial – where Ann will be sacrificed tonight over and over again.

“The wall was built on a massive scale by an ancient race of people, sort of like the Aztecs*. They lived in harmony with the animals on the island and the wall contained the large animals and kept them out of the city. But due to possibly to seismic movement the island has sunk and the only bit of wall left is this full stretch across the headland. This is all that is left of a Biblical style city and all the original inhabitants have long since died out. About four generations before our story starts a canoe of natives had been washed up on the island and they had ended up on this promontory of rocks. They can’t enter the island because of the dinosaurs running amok so they subsist in the catacombs of this windswept rocky outcrop of the island, on this side of the wall. You are standing in the sea at this moment. This maquette is what used to be the grand causeway down to the harbour mouth where all the trade happened for this huge city. It has fallen into ruin and collapsed and all the buildings are dishevelled.
The doors still exist from the original culture. They were built as an entrance-way into the city and are fortified in a futile way by the natives. They have reinforced it by putting these massive shafts of bamboo through the door, thinking it will stop Kong bursting through. Little do they know!..

* In the Aztec myth of the journey through hell, the realm of the dead is a blood-framed skull, the center of the world… The underworld vessels of death and transformation have the shape of devouring skulls, with eyes and bared teeth.

Taylor leads through to the next workshop where there is a small forest of stunted, twisted trees.
“These are the miniature trees we are building for the model you have just seen next door. The fauna and flora of Skull Island is a major part of our job. We have a team of people who cultivate the trunks of the trees off a mountain range that is north of Wellington. That mountain range is hit by the winds that come direct from the South Pole. It is so intense that it dwarfs the growth of the plants on the mountainside. The team has been going up there in 4 wheel drives for over a year, cultivating twisted plants for us. They are then brought back to Wellington and the trees are grafted together using bolts. All the foliage is removed and artificial leaves called “Babies tears” are re-grafted onto the ends of them. They are articulated to move appropriately when blasted with wind and shot at 48 frames per second. We have also cultivated dwarf ferns in the Orongaronga Mountains. But we have created foliage that will feel primordial, specific to the island, and not look New Zealand.
One technician has been creating vines and root systems for two years and we have had to put weights inside our vines so they hang with the right parabolic curve when hanging between two places.

The geometric shape of New York is ideal to do digitally but the jungle on Skull Island is near impossible because of the chaotic randomness, the visceral and gritty realism you need in the surface textures of plant life and land cover. It’s easier to build these things as physical properties”.

This makes a contrast with the order of New York?
“Yes but we are also trying to draw visual parallels between the two as well. These huge soaring trees will take on the almost cathedral like nature of the streets of New York. It is interesting the things you don’t think about – Kong would never have seen his own reflection but in New York it is all reflection with the windows. He only has to step into the street and look to one side and there reflected in rows and columns of buildings he sees himself.
We are saying that Skull Island is somewhere in the Indonesian Islands but we have also chosen for it a very unique culture of architecture. They have utilised a natural product on their island to build with. We have called it basalt logs. It is like on the Giant’s causeway where you get the huge geometric six sided shafts of basalt and they have managed to mine it and use it to knit together the architecture. It allows them to create the very unusual, sweeping, Asiatic shapes in their buildings.

Next door there is a miniature of the Venture.
“The Venture has been built as a set and is also a live action, real ship that Peter bought from Tonga. It came with a full shipment of frozen fish that he had to get rid of and now we are also building it as a 12 scale miniature for any storm sequence interaction.
A perfect 14-foot miniature replica sits in the middle of the workshop with technicians working at benches around it.
“The ship has been made to exacting levels of detail right down to the telephone inside the Captain’s cabin in case we see through the windows. It’s fully internally lit. The camera will shoot extremely closely on this model using a snorkel lense to get as close as possible.
The ship is built on a live gimbal so we can puppeteer it by hand as we did the Master and Commander ships and it will be on a 6 way hydrolic motion mover so we can drive it. He rocks the ship with a finger.
It will never be shot in water – that will be digitally composited around the ship”.

Visit to the 10th scale miniature set “The Fight Clearing”.
Kong vanquishes 3 T. Rexes.

Alex Funke (30 years as a cinematographer, Oscar winner and winner of 3 Academy Awards for work on Total Recall and LOTR) shows detailed work in process on Skull Island miniatures.

“The clearing does not have the classic Skull Island lush jungle look. It is very sparse and barren because it’s a clearing but it does give a good idea of the detail in the miniatures. To get the movement of the trees in the wind to look real, 10ths scale at a frame speed of 64 frames per second gives us the right look. The branches have been chopped, sections have been taken out of strategic branches, and spring wire and little sinkers are loaded into them and covered up again, so that when they move the movement of the trees looks realistic. The way miniature trees move, as they don’t have the weight of a large tree, they do not look as realistic when they sway in the wind.
There are three RE 435 advance motion control cameras and what they are doing is tiling the set. They take little snap shots of the set and digital then have these different pieces that they then all piece together to create a real environment digitally by stitching all the tiles together. Compared with LOTR this is a different environment with different challenges. LOTR had quite a bare environment with a lot of buildings and there was not the same kind of movement. You also need more light when movement is involved and more power. It gets very hot in here - 45 degrees Celsius yesterday.

We need to pay attention to a lot of detail on the sets. There is a mixture of real and fake plants. We have cultivated a lot of our own miniature plant life. The real plants help to give the real look of the film a boost. The orange marks on set and the blue screen enable digital to create a 3D map as guides to put in characters and other CG images."

On the miniature set of “The Killing Ground” beneath the rock face sculptured primitive faces peer out of the rock wall. This is where Kong hangs out and tears up his victims. The people searching for Ann have just come across this and find it littered with bones.

“This would make an enormous set but by doing it by miniature we get a much better sense of space. When they do live action shots they are sent to us by digital so we know exactly what goes on. We shrink it down to 10ths size and reproduce it so everything matches and locks in.
We are using a combination of vines and plants made in the Weta workshop. Plants are made in China which is the world centre for fabricating artificial plants. We also use real plants as they have flexibility in motion that artificial ones don’t.
Peter is doing something here that nobody has tried to do before which is shooting the miniatures in wind. He has decided that one of the things that makes the miniature shot believable is when there is actually motion within the set. Once you start shrinking things down to the 10th of the original size they start getting very stiff. Peter is really stretching the envelope in this, the way he did on Rings. He wants to be way ahead of what anything anybody else has ever tried. Peter wants the jungle to be realistic and also more bizarre and more jungly than anybody has ever seen. So the leaves have to be believable but they also have to be the most amazing leaves you have ever seen."

Peter has said it will be the “Jungle from Hell”
"He wants people to feel like it is just like jungles they have seen in documentaries or National Geographic. It has its feet in the real, but it is pushed so much past that, so you really are afraid to be in it. So when these guys are clambering up some muddy slope and constantly slipping back he wants you to feel, “I know exactly what that must be like”. We have a lot more gadgets and tricks than they did in 1933, and yet nothing is modernised.

This bit of set is where they have the fight between Kong and the three T-Rexes. Kong takes them all out. In this sequence there are over 300 shots and Ann appears in only a few shots. Most sequences have some miniature work in them as Peter has found it very efficient to build a partial set and then extend it with miniatures."

Set where brontosaurus stampede – a model of extensive high cliff that mounts and descends with sheer slippery looking pathways beside an abyss that will plunge dinosaurs and humans hundred of metres to their death. A tiny model of a brontosaurus shows the immensity of the environment.
"Carl Denham and his camera guys come across a huge herd of brontosauruses peacefully grazing and they start filming it. Some carnivores suddenly come upon them and they start stampeding. These guys who are exploring the island have to race ahead of the brontos in the course of which they get stepped on... (Funke stops suddenly as if he realises he risks divulging too much of the action)
"The development of this sequence is quite a major one with 278 shots. This is a maquette of the entire set it happens in. This is 1000th scale and it shows the entire set as it will be, starting here with a temple complex and then where the stampede starts. And of course we don’t shoot the whole thing, just sections – the bits we will be seeing and those are the bits we need to build miniature sets for – like this deep trench which is like a city street.
This maquette is the first step. The action has already been worked out in pre-vis – a rough animation that shows how fast the brontosauruses are running, where the actors are – and they will be shot on green screen or a treadmill, because they are running like mad. This maquette shows the detail of where the 20 or so brontosauruses are in the scene and where the walls are.
This piece over here (another model of a broken away piece of rocky terrain, 100th scale) is where they race across. Chunks of stone are falling off, brontosauruses are falling into the abyss, men are falling into the abyss, and they tear around the corner and shoot off down there … and it’s the end of the scene. We will build another at 10th scale which will be about 8 meters tall and used for live shots.
Shots that have been designed by Peter and the animators are brought into this stage which is like half way between animation and the real thing. It gives it a certain amount of life and also Peter can look at it and make adjustments, say for example – “I want it to be toppling like that, we want this wall to lean over more … Give me another one falling there …”

In the next area 3 technicians are manipulating images on monitors from the other half of the Fight Clearing set. There is more blue screen, rocks, cliffs and stunted trees clawing at existence under the bright lights.
“We shoot on two cameras at once just to get the work done quicker”, explains Funke. “This is 10th scale. We put Ann in there as actor scale reference when we do a shot. The handover to the digital guys is crucial. They only know what they see on their monitors, we see the set, cameras, and we know where things are. So how do you tell them where the ground plan is, where vertical is, how far away things are. We are working very hard to send information to them, letting them know dimensions and scale – this is one metre, this is where level is and so on. Before, the film went physically to the guy who was putting it together and there was an interface, but now, when we have finished it disappears, so you hope the guys who are putting it together know what they have to do."

Walking past a pile of brown rubber vines and bark that looks like giant sea kelp washed up on the shore, Funke concludes by telling how they make the vegetation that helps to make the jungle from hell even more hellish.
"We take molds on real bark and reproduce and mix them with human created plants and vines. We recycle these constantly and make them into other parts of other sets.
We blend natural and artificial plants so you don’t really know which is which. We have an amazing talent pool to draw on here in NZ – they can do anything and bring a depth of experience and vision to whatever they turn their hand to. And then there is Peter’s vision as well."

Perfect Creature

When Horror Gives Humanism a Hand

New Zealand director Glenn Standring, (The Irrefutable Truth About Demons) has created a dark, gritty, alternate reality where vampires and humans live in a symbiotic relationship until genetic alchemy upsets the balance. In 2004 Standring talked about his latest film, Perfect Creature, to HF.


What is Perfect Creature about?
The movie is set in an alternate 1969. Three hundred years ago things happened differently and this changed the way history has gone. So rather than it being the world as we knew it with modernism, clean fuels and the swinging sixties, you have this world that is built around a later and greater industrial revolution, which has just kept going and pumping. Science and religion never split off, and there has been a discovery of a new race of human beings – the next evolutionary step, who, for want of a better word, are vampires.
Rather than being supernatural monsters they are like more perfected human beings. In this society they have become associated with a huge church which is a kind of metaphor for the Catholic Church. The vampires are known as the Brothers and are responsible for giving spiritual support and guidance to human beings, so its almost like God has sent angels to look after people.

And they live off human blood? The vampire Brotherhood live off human blood, which is gifted to them in rituals, ceremoniously and willingly by human beings rather than the vampires going out in the night. The blood is given as part of this total symbiotic relationship, and the vampires are seen as God’s emissaries on earth.

What goes wrong?
The people living in this industrial slum of a world think of the Brothers as being sent by God to protect them. The Brothers are born at random and there have been attempts to control the births so there can be more of them in the world to help human beings.
An alchemist has had a very crude insight into genetics and evolution – not in the way that we would understand necessarily, but in a very alchemistic way.
They experiment with a very crude form of genetics and end up creating a mutant virus. The virus drives one of the Brothers, Edgar (Leo Gregory) insane and he starts to behave as we would expect a vampire to behave, killing people and spreading the virus. Thematically it’s about playing with the stuff of life rather than any supernatural element.

How do the characters play out this theme?
Lilly (Saffron Burrows), a woman cop, joins forces with Silus to catch the predator. Silus, the lead character (Dougray Scott), is a priest of the Brotherhood, who is quite high up in the church. Edgar and Silus have the same mother, and are brothers in the true sense as well.
In his insanity, Edgar wants Silus to join him and he learns very quickly that Silus has formed a bond with Lilly. Silus is watching Lilly’s life and she struggles because it’s a very hard world. I think Silus sees something beautiful in her continuing struggle even though the world is completely shitty and horrible.
It’s like two noble people recognising that quality in each other. Edgar sees this and twists it, trying to use Lilly to bring Silus round to being more like him.
Augustus (Stuart Wilson), the senior Brother, is leader of the church, and has to make some heart wrenching decisions when things go wrong. He is at first a mentor to Silus, then opposes him as Silus struggles to save innocent lives.
Scott Wills plays Jones, a world-weary cop, who has trouble accepting the status of the Brotherhood. He is a natural cynic with a soft spot for Lilly and competes with Silus to be her protector.

How has the casting worked out?
That was quite interesting. We thought we had cast Edgar and then the actor in question decided he didn’t want to be away from England for three months. It was kind of late in the day and we didn’t want to screw this up because he was such an important character. We went to Hubbard’s in the UK with whom Tim had worked on LOTR and they recommended this really shit hot young actor, Leo Gregory, who has got a real edge about him. He’s like a young De Niro mixed with Klaus Klimsky so he brings that necessary intensity and makes it real.
Saffron and Dougray are both very skilled in their craft, which comes from working with other good directors, writers and actors. Saffron is a brilliant human being, highly educated and well read, from a liberal, activist, Bloomsbury background. For some of the crew a little bit of them died when the film wrapped because she is such a great person to be around.

The names of the characters and their world have an old ring.
Nuovo Zelandia is the old term for New Zealand when Tasman and those guys were floating around. It’s a descriptive name from the times. The film is rooted in Europe in many ways, because for six months of the year, the Queen of the Empire moves her court to the Antipodes, which is why it is a power base and a centre for the story. The film is not contemporary and it is not wholly Victorian. The best way to describe it is a period drama or period action movie, but that period has never existed before.
Some of the issues from the 1960s on have filtered through, via the genetic engineering and the racial tensions between the vampires and the humans. I was also interested to see how I could bind notions of alchemy into the whole thing after spending six months doing solid research.
Thematically and in terms of the amount of texture and ideas in the film it’s quite rich and gives a really established genre figure, the vampire, a completely original twist. It is quite a simple story on the top but there are lots of thematic complexities and resonances in it. Now we have cut it the film has a lot more dramatic resonance than a genre movie is normally going to have.

In a television interview Saffron Burrows said how attracted she was by the complexity of the characters and themes.
It’s been important to give the characters a real background and to give a little air for them to have character moments. That way the audience can come to identify with the characters, so when they are in jeopardy you care so much about them. It’s always a balancing act because it’s also about creating the world of the movie and the suspense scenes.
A classic example is James Cameron’s Alien and the way he creates the very human character played by Sigourney Weaver. We see that she has nightmares, and that basically she too is a broken person. The only way she can heal herself is to face the past and face what she has been through. This makes you really want to go on to the journey with her.

What other films have inspired you?
In some ways the story is almost like Oliver Twist meets Blade Runner. At the beginning I gave a mission statement to my heads of department and made obvious references to Blade Runner; Fritz Lang’s, Metropolis; the first Alien movie and Seven. But the more I’ve looked at the film, the thing that has turned me on most, is the fact it is just its own thing. You step into this whole other world, which is strange and different, and makes sense and feels populated.

What kind of action scenes can we expect?
Lilly is attacked by Edgar at one point where he bites her and nearly kills her. But the way he bites her and the way we’ve done it is very different from what you’ve seen in other vampire movies. [Sardonic, camp tone] Rather than it being really lovely and sensuous with your classic close up of two fangs going into The Vein on Neck and the Woman swooning and going, ‘Oh no, oh yes, oh no’ – it’s violent, and it’s a guy, yes with teeth, but tearing a woman’s throat open. And you don’t see it.
I made a point of not doing the cliché – the close up when the eyes go red and the fangs go in and blood drips out and the woman swoons – well that’s a bore, it’s been done a million times. So I chose, when Lilly is bitten, to play it all on her face and play her reaction to the gritty horror of it. All you see is the back of Edgar’s head and arterial blood spraying in a squirt on a wall.
I knew it was better to sometimes not show it all, and to let the audience imagine, but on the day we shot it we all sat around the monitor saying,
“Oh my god, it’s so violent,” And because you’re focused on the character of Lilly and like her, and focused on her reaction, it just seems so much more dangerous and real and less kind of camp. It’s not camp at all.
The emotional effect of the horror scenes also comes from the fact that we give time in the story for Lilly’s character and her personal history to slowly come out, so that you understand that she’s a broken human being who is trying to put herself back together. People can connect with her. She’s very human and it’s also a very tough world. We can also understand how a being such as Silus, who is almost like something from Wings of Desire, sees the beauty of this classic human struggle and responds to how Lilly fights back after tragedy and move on.
Lilly’s fear when she is being attacked also has to do with the fact that Leo Gregory is quite a scary dude.

Saffron Burrows has said “The world Glenn has created is fantastically exciting and his vision has obviously bled through to the art and visuals, the look of the whole thing.” I did have a very clear idea of that world and what I wanted it to be like, and I write in a highly descriptive way, so the art department knew exactly the kind of external and internal locations to look for and create. That’s one thing, but if you cast the wrong people or have heads of department who fight against it, it’s not fun. Through Tim’s efforts (producer Tim Sanders) and to a certain extent my own, by casting the right people in the right positions, you pump and everyone does their best work.

What has been the role of special effects in building this world?
Animation Research was involved in our pre-pre-production work and our animatic, which was a vital part of our prep and selling the film in advance. We then set up our own VFX department as part of the production instead of farming out shots to FX houses. This department was responsible for all conceptual work, all on-set work (including real time comping and other "world first" type stuff) and for overseeing and supervising the work of several individual FX houses working to our direction

The team was great. They operated without ego, as I try to do, so anyone can contribute an idea as long as it’s within the framework of what’s going to work for the film. Charlie Maclellan the effects producer and John Shields the special effects director understood that with this analogue, dirty, cold, smoky, rainy world the last thing we wanted to do was to have bright and shiny computer effects all over the place. So they tried to make all the effects feel like they were part of that world. That really drove the aesthetics and we used real world examples wherever we could.

There are tons of special effects. We dressed the streets with costumed characters from our world. Then beyond the roofs of the buildings CG extrapolated that world out and beyond to create a greater sense of what the world is about. For example they added a thousand zepplins into the sky which are the major form of mass transport and freightage.

As for makeup, one example is the effects of the virus. Edgar is infected and driven insane. He starts infecting human beings with it. People become sick, so make up has to come to the party in terms of prosthetic appliances and swollen glands, but always going for the real. So we didn’t go [Sardonic tone] “Let’s put in the monster eye lenses”. If there was a mutant form of influenza, what would it do to people. Is it like ebola, is it like small pox? Again, the real world sources we used make the film less camp and more believable.

The film is shot in Auckland, the South Island city of Dunedin, and the town of Oamaru where the mid- 19th century stone architecture gives the film its Victorian feel. How important were the locations?
Locations were a crucial element to the whole film. In some films you have a street scene at the beginning and the rest is all in rooms. That kind of film closes down. We wanted the world of the film to really expand out. So yes you do see that world in the street scenes, and from then it gets bigger. So it was very important to choose real locations for what we wanted, and could afford to build, as a set. This enriches the texture.
The beauty about Oamaru was that we were able to take a whole street over for about a month and do what we liked. We paid the businesses what they would have got in takings. The street became almost like a backcloth, but one filmed with real texture - a real street to which we could add and retro fit things from our world.

What were the main challenges?
Staying true to the story and remembering the emotional journeys for the characters. It was also a challenge to maintain the story’s integrity while dealing with continual changes of locations and building in the special effects references which can get in the way of the drama if you let them. The special effects team were clear though that the story and the characters were the most important elements”.

You have studied archeology and philosophy. How does the film reflect your personal philosophy and beliefs?
My film career started off with a short film Lenny Minute which was selected for the competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993. It was kind of experimental animation and that was great, but when I was watching some of the feature films at Cannes I thought, “I don’t want to make films that are arty for their own sake. I want to make films that have stories that grip people, and take them into a new world they can believe in, where they can play with thematic and philosophical ideas. That’s what I love about science fiction books – as much as they are about experiments in the world and imagination, they are also filled with philosophical ideas - like Philip K. Dick’s Man and the High Castle, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
And with archelogy it’s understanding how societies have been built and evolve. When you study something like that, you see great empires rise and fall, and you realise that, as much as we are arrogant now and think we’ll be here forever, all this will end and another thing will take over, whether it’s an Islamic world, or whatever. That’s the nature of life and change and that kind of idea gets inputted into a film like Perfect Creature.

After I did Demons I realised it wasn’t as humanistic as I thought it was going to be so I decided I would do a film that represented my values. Sometimes they are edgy and not politically correct. I’m a humanist at heart, which is why I think the film has ended up as gritty and scary as dark and grimy as it is, just like Charles Dickens’s novels which I love because they are grimy, sad and tragic and very humanist.

Lilly is a character repairing herself and Silus is helping her. In doing so he has to face choices, either to help Lilly and the human beings or to think about his career. The Church has become a technocracy run by technocrats who are forgetting more and more what it’s really meant to be about – protecting and caring for human beings.

Silus believes the brothers are sent to earth by God to preserve, maintain and protect human beings. He believes this fervently and yet sees the Church becoming more and more corrupt. Edgar being infected with the virus and creating mayhem is a sign of that corruption.

Who is doing the music?
Anne Douglas (sound track for The Crying Game and an Oscar for Monty) is doing the music. She can work in both an electronic medium and with classical instruments. Her last work was called Ancient and Modern and its theme and sound really fits the tone of Perfect Creature.
There are no release dates as yet. The film will be completed in January 2005 and we would expect it in theatres some time later in 2005.

Do you have plans for other films?
I have been developing a project called This Virtual Life based on the short film I made in 1993 and took to Cannes. It’s around the character Lenny Minute who is a kind of noir detective living 200 years in the future. So when we have put Perfect Creature together we’ll go straight into that using the same kind of co-production structure that has worked so well for this film.

[Perfect Creature had a $20,000,000 budget. 25% came out of the New Zealand Film Commission’s film fund and the rest came from UK companies, Mo-Vision and Spice Factory.]

Bridge to Terabithia (film)

Interview with director, Gabor Csupo in New Zealand

Gabor Csupo is a lively, slightly built man. With his sharp blue eyes, several days’ stubble around his cheeks and chin, and dishevelled hair escaping beneath a brown baseball cap, he could be one of the magical woodland creatures from the film he is directing.

Still busy wrapping the final stages of production Csupo gives time on a Saturday morning for an interview. The interview takes place at a cafe on the Auckland waterfront where he is planning to go fishing later with his son. Csupo laughs frequently throughout the interview, obviously enjoying the fantasy elements of the film he is creating, as well as relating strongly to the emotional aspects of a book that has captured the hearts and imaginations of children and adults the world over.

What is your interest in making a film of this particular book, given that it is also your first film that is not animation:

Yes I know [laughs]. I had some ideas many years ago about getting into live action. Cary Granat kept sending me books and scripts but I didn’t feel any of it was appropriate. I knew I had it in me to do live action one day, but reading all that stuff none of it felt like it would be my first movie.
Then one day he called me and said ‘We have this great book, you should read it’. I had heard about it but never read it and I was blown away by its emotional message. It is basically a story about friendship and loyalty and outcast children; how they cope with their fantasy world and all that. And it actually reminded me of myself [chuckles] and of the way I grew up.

How was that?
Being kind of artistic and drawing all the time. You know, other kids are playing football and stuff. They don’t understand you, so I always felt a little bit outcast. But of course later on when I got into art school all of my friends were of the same genre and we understood each other.
My parents were also very, very poor and were not able to provide much for us, although they were loving people and all that but I always felt that because of the difficulties of just putting bread on the table, my father was in a similar situation as [Jess’s father] in the book.
So I thought all these things are the kind of stories and characters and themes that, by God, I could probably understand and paint nicely if I did it. I called up Cary and said if we have a great script then this could be a great movie. We signed a deal and started looking for writers. Jeff Stockwell had written the first two or three drafts of the screen play based on the original screenplay written years ago by David Paterson, the son of Katherine Paterson the author.

Why didn’t you go with the original screenplay?
That was an option but none of us seriously considered going with it. It was basically an edited version of the book, which he had just translated into a 95 page version of the book. It just wasn’t cinematic and didn’t add anything to it. So we hired Jeff Stockwell and immediately the first draft got everybody excited. He really captured the essence of the book and he added all the cinematic moments to it that were kind of lacking in the book.
But I also liked that about the book - it gives the children [readers and characters] so much to work on with their imagination. That is one of the reasons I think the book was so successful, because everyone could have their own different ideas about what Terabithia could be. Of course we now have this very difficult task of showing people what we think Terabithia is.
Hopefully the children will react by saying, “Oh wow that is great”.

Right from the beginning we decided not to make it very “cutesy” and young, but a little bit more sophisticated and unexpected on the side of design. I approached it more as Ridley-Scott or Terry Gilliam would approach it, not from the very “cutesy” side but more from a darker, dirtier, scarier, more inventive side.

It is very organic, the creatures seem to grow out of the forest.
Yes, we thought it would be nice if the children didn’t make just random creatures out of nowhere with no reference to their own lives, but they create these creatures out of their own experience and what they went through.
At school the two boys, Gary Fulcher and Scott Hoager are always harassing the children so in the forest Jess makes Gary Fulcher into a Hairy Vulture, and Scott Hogar becomes the Squogre. That is the ogre and the squirrel mixed up. It is a mean and nasty, vicious little Squogre, about the size of a small dog, but there is a bunch of them and they attack all at once, so they can be fairly dangerous [chuckles at length].

This reflects the way the kids are feeling about being bullied at school?
Absolutely. The other major character in the movie is Janice Avery who again turns into the giant troll in its classic sense. She will have some resemblance to the monstrous, crazy looking figure with green toenails. The only weak spot the creature has is that she is ticklish. The way they find to overcome the creature is when Prince Terrien [the dog Jess gives Leslie] runs between the giant’s toes and she runs away giggling [laughs].

You have created the fantasy elements yourself. This seems to be a major difference between the book and the screenplay.
We created all of the creatures. None of this is in the book. We wanted to make sure we gave enough to the children watching movie, but not too much. It is not effects-heavy, it’s more like a very sensitive human drama, a classic story where children escape to their own world and creations. But we also made it in modern times so children could identify with it. It’s not a period piece.

Katherine Paterson’s young son was so depressed [in the ‘70s] after his friend died that she wrote the book to calm him down and help him to understand about the legacy and the good spirit people leave behind when they die. I very much liked that message in the book and responded to it.
Children tend to understand the meaning of [death] around 10 and 11 years old. Before that they tend to think everybody lives forever. So when someone loses a close friend and companionship like that it affects them deeply; especially in this boy’s [Jess’s] case when he was so alone and outcast. Even his sisters didn’t talk to him, although the little sister May Belle, adores him but it isn’t cool for a 10 year old boy to be friends with a little sister, everyone knows that. So at the end when he passes on everything he learned from Leslie to her is really a beautiful moment.

What determined your choice of actors?
When we were casting we saw a lot of children. But when Anna Sophia Robb and Josh Hutcherson became possibilities we were very much intrigued by their talent and their physical looks. They are both cinematically very beautiful children. Josh [Jess] comes from a very poor family so he dresses very simply, kind of little boyish. There is also a very beautiful moment in the movie where he is inheriting one of his older sisters’ tennis shoes - I mean you can tell they are a girl’s shoes - and he is so embarrassed and covering them up with markers. [Csupo is visibly moved by this and has tears in his eyes].
He can’t afford anything nice and Anna Sophia Robb [Leslie] comes from a richer family. They are writers and can afford more. But even then we thought we wouldn’t have her going and buy off the shelf, beautiful clothing, we thought we would make her more inventive than that. She makes her own variation of her clothes in the forest, little buttons and things - she is a very creative, special child.


The forest is the mysterious place of fairytale where one discovers unexpected things.
The forest is a very safe world for children. They can hide from the real world and at the same time with their imagination or even with real life possibilities and moments there can be danger there. That is why I think most children like to hide and play in the forest is because they feel they are in adventure land even if nothing really happens. Because beyond that wall of trees you don’t really know what is lurking [laughs].
We take advantage of those fantasies children have about the forest and finding a hideaway. Leslie and Jess find an old ruin of a fort, a stronghold in the trees and they fix it up and make it their own.

What is the fort like?
The fort is really, really amazing. Robert Gillies designed it. It is really better than I ever anticipated. We had all sorts of drawings, even clippings of the world’s best tree houses that children or their parents have built. Robert got all kinds of ideas and inspiration and took them out to the location. We thought initially it was going to be a fort up in the branches of one big tree then Robert came up with the interesting idea of two trees far apart from each other and the stronghold across the two trees. [like the bridge] It’s every kid’s dream - majestic, tall, secret, hidden.

You are really bringing the concrete world together with the imagination here in a serious and playful way.
That was important for me. A lot of people thought that the guy who worked on The Simpsons, Rugrats and Thornberries and silly cartoons will probabely make something over the top and silly. But I was very consciously making the decision whatever I am going to do I want to make something very serious at the same time. I don’t mind humour in it here and there, I also don’t like over acting and over the top things. I think it is a lot stronger if you don’t overdo things. The emotions work a lot better if you [suggest it] on the surface, give the audience a chance to think deeper into it and to understand, instead of punching them in the face with everything. The audience is more sophisticated and smarter than most film makers tend to think in Hollywood. There is a tendency to overdo everything in Hollywood. So the movie is going to be scary and adventureful here and there, a bit non-traditional, and not make children think it is something silly. I know I will be proud of what I am doing. I am working with the best cinematographer in the world, and with the production design, everything in this movie is just the way I thought it should be. The New Zealand crew has been just first rate, all 110% dedicated. It has been a fantastic experience for me.


The story is also tragic and you have made an emotional map of it. How are you going to take the audience through this?
Yes I am taking on some very dangerous work where one of the main characters - specifically the main heroine who is also a child - dies after two thirds of the movie. This was one of the reasons Fox passed on this project at the last minute, although we were in heavy development with them for over a year. They realised it was going to be a marketing challenge. But what attracted me to the project was that it was different, not easy, it is heavy subject matter, but for me the pay off was worth it. What Leslie leaves behind is stronger than if she lives forever. So that is why we are trying to make a very strong emotional message. I don’t want to make a downer, or for people to come out of the theatre feeling really depressed and sad. I want them to come out feeling uplifted and stronger than ever and understanding that the human condition is like that.
The movie’s message is that, yes we die, but what we live for or leave behind is more important.

Is it also like a rite of passage, a crossing through childhood, going through grief?
It moves on a lot of different layers. When he is just about to fall in love with this little girl she dies, and the film explores how he deals with it. He could be depressed and sad forever or angry. It all goes through his mind and then he learns from it and is creative with it. The bridge is such a metaphor. In Jess’s mind he is making the way to the world of the imagination safer. There will be no more deaths by using that silly rope. He makes the passage easier for other children to find their dreamland [and their own inner resources].
The Terabithians welcome them at the end. The idea is to keep your mind wide open and fantasise. Anything you wish for can happen.
[Leslie tries to swing across the creek when it is in flood and dies while Jess is visiting an art gallery with his beautiful music teacher, Miss Edmonds, played by Zooey Deschanel]


Tell us about the artwork and the concept development for the creatures.
Jeff Stockwell came up with some of the earlier descriptions of the creatures in his script, and then I had this amazingly talented artist in my office, Dima Malanitchev who has worked for me for many years and was production designer on all of my movies in Los Angeles. Although he mainly works in the cartoon field and in art animation he is also a very good friend of Igor Kovalyov who is probabely the Fellini of animation and does short films. He wins every possible award around the world. Dima always helps him in background and character designs - he’s just an amazingly great artist. I gave Dima the script and underlined the characters and said - “What can you come up with.” In the next day or day two he brought me these sketches and I said - “Great, don’t touch it!
We never did any modification on it, people, everyone at Fox and Walden just loved it the way it was from the beginning. So we are happy Weta Digital are working on it too and showing a great respect for the integrity of the original art. They are modifying a tiny bit some of the creatures to resemble the real kids in the school - tweaking just a little.

Some of them look a little like creatures you might expect in a Hieronymous Bosch painting (a giant snail with a human head) and yet totally original.
Yes we told him from the beginning we didn’t want any cutesy stuff - not the cartoony Sesame Street stuff. Let’s do something different, creatures you hopefully won’t have seen before.

You are a musician. This is a very emotional film. What kind of sound effects and music can we expect and how will you avoid it being a “tear jerker”?
The sound effects and music will play a major role in this. There is a lot of emotional ups and downs and adventure. There is sadness and happiness, joy, grief - all sorts [laughs]. We really have to navigate the landscape of all that. But I don’t want it to be scored in a traditional Hollywood sense where the big string orchestra comes in a very busy Hollywood style. I have very specific ideas on the kind of music I want to use - artistic but also approachable enough for the general audience. I don’t want to do a self-indulgently beautiful art house film that noone goes to see. It might be satisfactory for me, but it isn’t great if people don’t see your work. And at the same time I don’t want to do something so commercial that everybody [has heard before]. There are formulas about how to score these kinds of emotions and I don’t want to go after the obvious. I’m trying to approach it with something different, or with counter-play. With big action if you play almost minimalistically slow music it is almost more powerful than if you do the ultra-busy “chchcchchc” [vigorously demonstrates big Hollywood music sounds] stuff. John Gilbert and I are constantly listening to music.
I want something contemporary and for children to recognise it is contemporary, speaking in their language, not old fashioned. I don’t like the old fashioned approach, this is the era of iPods after all. So my goal is to do something powerful but very unexpected. And it has to work with the emotions.

What have been the main challenges for you as it is the first time you are directing people on a set?
The closest thing I ever did to this was directing voices in a recording booth for cartoons. Basically there you close your eyes and listen to the performances’ audio quality and the way they pronounce everything. With live directing you have to see their eyes, their faces, their body language - everything. It is much more complex, but at the same time when it works it is very satisfying. And on the spot you feel it in the moment when the cameras roll and you yell “CUT!” You just FEEL that was GREAT [vigorously]. You don’t even want to go for another take. You feel sometimes everything worked out so well that anything else you try will not be as good. And you also don’t want to drain your actors. It’s an instinct. You just feel it when you have achieved it.

How has it been for you making a film in New Zealand, using New Zealand locations, given that the book is in a United States setting?
I think the experience is great. We found a very good school, a beautiful church and a great museum. The only challenge was when we were showing the traffic - you know the cars driving on the opposite side to the US, but they somehow managed to block streets and drive the other way round. I find coming over easier too, it is only 12 hours flight. You get on a plane, sleep and it’s the morning when you arrive. I have spent three months in production here but I’ll be commuting more during post-production in Wellington.

That is the kind of work you are used to.
Yes I love that. Anything that’s post-production, sound and music, I do it all the time. You know this isn’t so much the big action movie [as your magazine usually writes about], but I sometimes feel that less is more. It gives the audience a chance to figure things out on their own. I mean, a typical example of this, not related to this movie, is like Jaws or Alien when you only see the creature towards the very end. But the whole movie is very suspenseful [chuckles loudly]. If you show it too soon you take the power out of it.

Do you think you will go on to make others?
Yes I will see. So far everyone is happy with the footage and the crew and the whole experience is very good. So we will see how it turns out. I am very critical of myself. I have a big screen in my house and watch three movies a night and I buy every media released DVD so I am pretty critical. There are very few movies I like. I have a handful of directors I really respect and I sometimes hate the movies that are the most successful at the box office, so my taste does not necessarily flow with what makes the most money.

Which directors inspire you?
Obviously Ridley-Scott and Lars von Trier or Wong Ka Wai - I like those filmmakers, and the early days of Goddard; Ingmar Bergman’s stuff. All the early black and white movies - they were the movies I grew up with. I felt there was a master filmmaker behind these pictures. And I love Woody Allen, Coppola and Scorsese. Although they don’t always make perfect movies I respect their film making genius.
I wanted to prove to myself I could make a movie after being so critical for so many years of other people’s work [laughs]. It is so easy to say but do it better yourself! So now I am in the position of having to prove it to myself - that I can make a pretty good, little movie. The budget is something like US $24 million. If the audience agrees with me I would probably like to do some more.

It is not for the money that I am taking time away from my very profitable business in Los Angeles. It is for my personal commitment, for the experience and satisfaction basically. I want to prove that I can do it to myself, to friends who believe in me and I’m also doing it for Cary Granat who kept sending me scripts. So I am doing my very best and so is everyone else. That always shows up on the screen.

Gabor Csupo, biography
Csupo was born in 1952 in Budapest, Hungary, and received his animation education at Hungary's Pannonia studio. He left Hungary for political reasons in 1975 and went to Stockholm where he helped produce Sweden's first animated feature. There he met his future partner, American graphic designer Arlene Klasky. Together they formed Klasky Csupo, Inc., in 1981.
Klasky Csupo, Inc. has created and produced popular animated television series that includes "The Simpsons," "Rugrats," "Duckman," "Aaahh!!! Real Monsters" ,"Santo Bugito" and “As Told by Ginger”.
In 1998 Csupo, along with Arlene Klasky, produced the company’s first feature film, “The Rugrats Movie, ” (the first non-disney animated film to gross over US$100 million) as well as its hit sequel, “Rugrats in Paris.”
Passionate about music, Csupo also founded record labels, Tone Casualities and Casual Tonalities and has released two CDs himself. Csupo’s art work is featured on the cover of his idol and friend Frank Zappa’s latest release entitled “The Lost Episodes.”