Chris Weitz has been a fan of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy since 2000 when he read them while working on About a Boy. Initially, Weitz read them just for pleasure. “It was quite a while before I realized that I was to make a movie out of it. I absolutely fell in love with the books. I just think that they're greatest works of fantasy in the English language actually,” laughed Weitz. “So the opportunity to turn them into a film is my dream job.”
The first book in Pullman’s trilogy, The Golden Compass, introduces audiences to 12-year-old Lyra (played in the film by newcomer Dakota Blue Richards). Lyra’s a curious, intelligent young girl who’s presented with an unusual golden compass only she can read. The special compass – known as an Alethiometer – answers her questions by pointing to various symbols. Only Lyra can translate what the compass says into logical instructions. The compass becomes central to Lyra’s adventures when her best friend is kidnapped and she must travel into foreign lands in order to try and rescue him.
Even though he was a huge fan of the books, Weitz wasn’t always sure he was the right guy to direct the film adaptation of the first book in Pullman’s series. After signing on to helm the film and adapt the screenplay, in December 2004 Weitz withdrew as director citing the technical challenges of making such an epic as the reason he passed on the project.
At the Los Angeles press junket for The Golden Compass, Weitz explained what prompted that decision. "It was because there was a point at which I became really terrified by the sheer size of the logistical components and technical components of making the film. When I first got the job Peter Jackson, who I hadn't met but is just a kind of all-around good Joe, said, 'Come to New Zealand and look at our facilities and meet my co-workers and learn about visual effects.'
I went there for four days and I saw all that stuff and it scared the crap out of me. It was like, 'I have no idea how to do this. I've now learned enough to really frighten myself,’ because they were deep in the world of doing motion capture for the guys who were running away from Kong, and doing computer pre-vis. I had never heard of pre-vis before. And then we sat down with Peter and he was looking at a piece of scenery that was going to be in the back of a green screen shot, I didn't understand what the hell he was looking at.”
Weitz continued, “I went to New Line and I honestly said, 'I don't think that I can do this.' So I stepped down as director and stayed on as the screenwriter. Then in the process of taking what was originally about a 180-page first draft down to about a 110 shooting script, I started to get a sense of the execution of these effects and these landscapes, and gained some confidence in myself.”
Once Weitz came back onboard as director, it didn’t take long for him to get comfortable with the scope of the movie and the effects. “[It was] pretty quickly once we got under way because the thing is I know a bit more about visual effects, or I know as much as a director really needs to know if they have a great visual effects supervisor, and we did have that,” said Weitz. “Mike Fink is one of the kind of lynchpins of getting this film done because he has decades of experience and a great aesthetic. If you have the best people it means that nobody is ever saying, 'Actually, you can't look that way because the mountains are going to stop and it's just going to be green.' Or, 'You can't sit in that chair because the monkey is supposed to be there.' Instead you're able to say, 'Well, can Nicole [Kidman] do this action that she'd like to do? Will we be able to compensate by having the monkey do whatever it is that the monkey is going to do?'
It comes down to being able to hand over to the visual effects people the live footage that will allow them to render the visual effects in a way that's kind of responsive to the live action, rather than the other way around. That means editing things sometimes sooner than you would normally want to, editing scenes together so that they achieve a certain degree of concreteness before the postproduction process. Then the visual effects can be as sympathetic to what you're shooting as possible.”
The visual effects aren’t the only stars of the movie. Although they don’t have major roles in part one of the trilogy, the actors who play Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter are two of the biggest names in Hollywood. “I think that obviously it helps us a lot to have these major stars because our lead is a complete unknown, but frankly it was because we could get them,” explained Weitz as to why they cast A-list actors in the two supporting roles. “The reason that we can get them is because of the books and because of Phillip Pullman's achievement. Daniel Craig just loved the books and wanted to be in the film. We're not going to turn that down. And Nicole Kidman is just the perfect person to play that character. But also knowing that I'm trying to set the table for the second and third films in which the characters do become more and more important. In this world the characters are very grand figures who will have a huge effect on shaping sort of cosmic history and so having big stars is not an inimical to the whole idea.”
Page 2: Nicole Kidman, Cutting Scenes, and an Extended Release on DVD
