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sky captain and the world of tomorrow
ALTHOUGH IT HAS GONE FROM ONE MAN’S OBSESSION TO MAJOR
STUDIO MOVIE, SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW HAS ALWAYS STAYED TRUE TO KERRY CONRAN’S VISION OF A FUTURE
THAT COMBINES THE UNIVERSE OF FLASH GORDON WITH THE
TECHNOLOGY OF THE 21ST CENTURY - AND HAS GWYNETH PALTROW, JUDE LAW AND ANGELINA JOLIE THROWN IN FOR GOOD MEASURE. SAM CONNOLLY REPORTS ON A FILM THAT REALLY DOES PUSH THE ENVELOPE.
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It’s not something Kerry Conran finds easy to explain - and it’s not something that, initially, he really wanted anyone else to see. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow started as an interest, turned into an obsession, and finally became Conran’s mission in life. Even a decade or so later, by which time it was well on its way to becoming a major movie featuring stars of the calibre of Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Jude Law, Conran was still having trouble talking about it. Says Paltrow: “You always feel like when he comes up, he’s about to apologise to you before he says anything!”
For a while, Sky Captain looked like it was unlikely ever to fly: for the first four years of its existence, in which Conran spent all his spare time shut up in a room in his apartment in Sherman Oaks, it had been his private world. Like many young film buffs, he was making his own movie. But he wasn’t doing it with his friends: his brother wasn’t dressed up as a Klingon. The back yard didn’t double for the jungles of Borneo. There was just Conran and his Apple Mac. And, after four years, he had completed precisely six minutes.
“I didn’t want to show it,” he recalls. “I did not sit down to make a six-minute film. I sat down to make a feature and I was six minutes into it, and it was four years later. I thought I might need some help, ’cause this was obviously going to take a while.” Given that most feature films last just short of two hours, simple maths point to a release date sometime in the summer of 2074.
Above and top of page, Gwyneth Paltrow as ace reporter Polly Perkins
Luckily enough for us, however, thanks to producer Jon Avnet, Paramount Pictures, Jude Law, Aurelio and Raffaella De Laurentiis and a host of others too numerous to mention, Sky Captain has managed to jump the gun by some 40 years, and is due to open in the US next month (September 2004). In the first instance, we have Conran’s brother, Kevin, to thank for this. Kevin had done some of the drawings which Kerry had scanned into his computer as settings for Sky Captain. And it was Kevin who invited Marsha Oglesby, a friend of his wife’s, to dinner to take a look at the six minutes of film and gain a little “outside perspective”.
If Oglesby had any of the usual initial reactions of a producer asked to take a look at someone’s short film, she kept them to herself. But restraint went out of the window once she saw Kerry’s work. When the six minutes were up, all she said was: “Can I see that again, please?”
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