In “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” scientists from around the globe are disappearing and it’s up to ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and aviator/hero Sky Captain (Jude Law) to discover what’s happening before the evil robots controlled by Dr. Totenkopf can destroy the planet.
KERRY CONRAN AND JON AVNET INTERVIEW:
It’s hard to believe this is your first film. What’s your background and what’s the history of “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?”
KERRY CONRAN: I had been in film school. I’d been out of there a couple of years and was trying to figure out how to make a movie. Studios are not prone to handing out a $100 million budget so I sort of just retreated. I didn’t want to go the route of working my way up in some lateral kind of move. I sort of took what I’d learned and I had this copious interest in computers and tried to kind of use the computer that was just emerging as a technology that was viable for filmmaking, and use a technique that was used traditionally forever – you know, the blue screen – but taken to a real extreme conclusion. At the time, these programs and software were just sort of starting to be available to, not consumers, but cheap enough that you could consider it. So really it was about a four year period.
I had intended originally to make the film – it was a black and white film, sort of like a news reel – and I was six minutes into it with four years having expired and realized I had to cry, “Uncle” (laughing). Marsha Oglesby, who produced the film with Jon, was a friend of my brother’s wife. She came over and we showed her the film, and she encouraged me to show Jon, which we did the next day. We are here now six years later as a result of that.
Jon, did you immediately jump at the prospect of making this movie?
JON AVNET: I looked at it and I said, “Okay, what do you want?” He said, “I want to make a movie – I want to make my movie.” I said, “I think I can do that.” We spent about two or three days talking about the tone of the movie, curiously, not the technical process, just to make sure we were on the same page, because he was going to write it. It wasn’t written at that point. And I tried to listen to what his vision was. I concluded that his talent that I thought was so obviously…I mean just this gorgeous, graphic lighting – the whole concept of it. I just thought, “I think this guy can do it.”
We spent two years working on the script. Both of us are hard-headed people and not shy about expressing our opinions, whether it’s verbal or otherwise (laughing). And during that time, I think we really forged a very decent, respectful kind of trusting collaboration, which meant that when we disagreed with each other, we didn’t punch each other. I felt he was responsive to what I said.
I’m not an idiot; I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve got more experience than him, yet it’s not my movie so there’s a kind of dance there that’s difficult in the collaborative medium of film. But I believe after that, that we could collaborate. The difficulties of doing any movie, which would be more so here, were things that we could overcome, and overcome with a little bit of grace and dignity in the process. And I was correct about that, and that’s a big gamble.
Armed with his script, I went out to get a cast that I thought would be a great cast that he would respond to. God knows what an unbelievable ride. It was such a kind of radical bunch of maverick nuts. We were just a grungy bunch of people who really didn’t know what we were doing in certain ways, who were trying to do this the way he showed it to me. I felt, “My God, he’s going to take video and make it look like film. I’ve never seen that. This is a major, major, major breakthrough. Does anybody know this?” I can go shouting into the jungle about this thing, you know? This is what he came up with.
