Rick Carter - The idea of this version of “War of the Worlds” is that it really takes place in our world. So it’s not as though we’ve created a new world that the aliens come into. It’s our world so that starting in New Jersey on the East Coast, in Newark, first of all, that reflects a little bit of the Orson Welles version. But it’s really about sort of setting it somewhere that we think we recognize in any of the movies that we’ve might have seen over the last years, or even just real life.
It’s actually based upon the main character, played by Tom Cruise as ‘Ray’, being a dock worker. He actually works at a dock you see with Manhattan in the background. You see where he lives. That community that he lives [in], we didn’t do anything there. You see all the American flags there, that’s actually those people and who they are. The place that the first incident occurs is right in downtown Ironbound, Newark, New Jersey. I think it’s designed so that people feel that this could happen, maybe even has happened somewhere in your psyche. An event like this could happen here.
‘Hyper-real’ just means that it’s taking what it’s real and then putting something into it that makes something happen more than we’ve seen actually happen on our soil. Imagine it as a big pod and someone from above, who’s been watching us, starts throwing stones into it. Now you watch all the fish start to scatter. And then step-by-step it just increases.
Doug Chiang – One of the things is, for me, it really gets down to sort of the core essence of what science fiction meant for me. I mean, this is a real story with real events. Whereas in typical science fiction recently there has been a tendency to kind of make it too fantastic and detach itself from reality. And for this story here, what really appealed to me was that it was a real story and it was a very serious take on the whole thing. What would really happen if aliens really came down and how would we address it? And it wasn’t being glamorized. It was like this is what would happen. And it was really gritty, and it’s really real.
I think it really gets down to why I love science fiction. Because it does really appeal to you because it presents a scenario out there in a very believable, convincing way. That’s kind of the approach working with Rick. It’s like, “Let’s take this as if this was real life. If this was not a science fiction film, this is real life, what would we do?”
Why are the aliens no longer from Mars?
Rick Carter – I don’t know if anyone believes that there’s anything on Mars now. I think it’s just more from ‘out there.’
What was the biggest challenge of creating the world in the film?
Doug Chiang - For us, it was really to make it very ‘everyday’ [America], beyond let’s say the alien and all that kind of encounter. It’s like taking an everyday scenario and what would happen if an alien attacked something? How would we portray that destruction? How would we portray that look and how would we portray those abductions? Not taking the sort of, in my opinion, not taking the sort of Hollywood version of it, but what would it be like if it was a real event? That’s sort of the angle and approach that I was kind of going into. A lot of the sets are very much like, as Rick was saying, what we see everyday. But it’s how we actually portray the event.
