Wells’ descriptions are very specific. Did you follow them?
Doug Chiang – As much as we could, yeah. We wanted to be faithful to it. I think it’s best to go to the source material versus other interpretations, as great as the other interpretations may have been. It’s always nice to see where the inspiration came from. And then Steven, of course, takes it to a whole new level.
…We do try to make it look feasible. That’s part of our job, is to make it so that these things, whatever they look like, have a logic behind it. I mean, there’s a reason for why they move the way they do and stuff, or look the way they do. We do try and figure that in. Whether or not anybody sees it ultimately, at the end, is kind of not the point. But for us as designers for it, we really try and make it make sense.
Are you keeping the red weeds from the book?
Rick Carter - Yes.
Will they be CG?
Rick Carter – Well, you’ll see a lot of blood on the set, on the real set, and half it’s mine. There’s a perfect example of where in CG you can – or Doug can – make an image that in reality trying to make it come alive is very difficult. That’s not to say it would be better in CG because it might not have the actual tactile sensibility of being in our world. So to actually have the red weed be in our world, and not this kind of cheesy science fiction thing that throws you out of the movie, has been really difficult. But I think we’re pulling it off. So I would just say, yes, the red weed is there and it’s a part of how they - in their culture - are using our planet. Whether you specifically know exactly why they did it, that’s a whole other thing.
Now the one other level I would bring up is just that – I’m going to be very unspecific about this but I do want to say it because I think it informed the moviemaking and the design, especially the moviemaking – you will see that the heroes of this piece are the heroes of this piece, meaning that it’s in the book. Again, if there’s a parallel world to ours, it’s right here on our planet. Those ‘levels’ are the heroes. You can go to the book and you know what it is and you saw it in the movie, so I’m not really revealing anything. I’m just saying, tracking that level as actually a part of the movie that’s reflecting us, whether it’s literal or not, I think that it’s just important to know that we took seriously some of these things that H.G. Wells [wrote].
What kind of approach did you use to create the alien perspective of Earth?
Doug Chiang – It’s two-fold. One is the psychology of it so that it’s, “What would they want from us?” That goes from, “Okay, they’d want our water,” to “Do they want something more from us?” I’m just saying that the fear is wide-spread so that the way that it impacts people is so great that it reflects back on what you perceive to be their point of view. But that point of view is never fully open to us, because we’re not them. Yet they’re here and so there’s pervasiveness to it. That’s the part that I think may be why this would be more akin to Orson Welles’ version than to George Pal’s. Because whatever that reflected in the 30s about that paranoia, which would allow people to get freaked out that this is really happening, that’s the visceral kind of everyday quality that I think this wants to have.
Did you dehumanize the aliens and make them incredibly different than people?
Doug Chiang - …They have to be a symbol of fear so I mean we don’t try to make them likeable in any way. This is a very vicious race and we don’t quite know why they’re doing this. All we see is the end result of what they’re doing. In some ways the film portrays them perhaps very one-sided because we don’t know what their true motives are. But they’re killing people so…
Rick Carter – There is another level that I don’t know if this will even come across in the film. Since you go so, even in the book, down to that micro level – there, I’ve said it – and you go all the way up to this broader perspective that looks at us which is a microbe. That’s that maybe it’s the ‘powers of 10’ but that’s not literal in the movie. It’s just that there’s an aspect of where we are in the range. Once you start doing that, you’ve lost your moorings a little bit in terms of what your reality is other than the one you know when you go in the theater. Conceptually, you’re in a range, a free-fall.You can go either direction. Where I’m going with this is that from that perspective, it’s all a civil war. It’s an intergalactic civil war. How far back do you want to go? Right here, you won’t be living that in the movie – you care about us. And we’re with us. I think that that’s the part that is really fascinating. You can actually tap into a level that is a little bit transcendent, terrifying, but actually goes somewhere so that that sense of ‘all in it together’ is something not in the way that I’ve thought about it, to be honest.
