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| sky captain and the world of tomorrow
SIDEKICKS AND SETTINGS
Angelina Jolie also stars as the not always welcome
Frankie Cook, commander of the amphibious squadron, with Giovanni Ribisi (below) as boffin Dex in an adventure that ranges from New York to the snowy wastes of the Himalayas.
Law’s reference to the world of the classic movie serials proved pretty close to the mark as far as the director was concerned: Flash Gordon had been a childhood obsession of the Conran brothers. But, as they grew older, they became even more fascinated by the futuristic utopias imagined by HG Wells and others, and by the utopian optimism embodied in the 1939 New York World’s Fair - an event which could so easily have been the start of a new age if events elsewhere in the world had not made it, instead, the end of an era.
“I think the World’s Fairs remain so magical to a lot of people because of what they succeeded in building,” says brother Kevin, who did much of the design work on the film. “There was a real sense of wonderment about it, optimism about what the future was going to be and, indeed, about the world of tomorrow. It’s easy to be cynical now, looking back. But there was genuine optimism for the future, for all the wonders technology could bring.”
But there were threats as well - every utopia has its dystopia - and the plot of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow focuses on an aspect of this. The world’s scientists are beginning to disappear, one by one, and ace reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) finds that all roads lead to the evil Dr Totenkopf. Enlisting the aid of old flame Sky Captain - and with the not always welcome assistance of Frankie Cook (Angelina Jolie), commander of the all-female amphibious squadron - Polly pursues the evil doctor (who is embodied, in an ingenious use of archive footage, by the late Sir Laurence Olivier) to the Himalayas and on to the mythical valley of Shangri-La, stopping off on the way at a landing strip thousands of feet in the sky.
All of this, Conran achieved without ever leaving the San Fernando Valley: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow almost certainly qualifies as the most ambitious blue-screen movie ever made. There were no sets, just a (very) few props and a giant, blue-painted soundstage. Blue-screen - the process of shooting against an entirely blue backdrop which can then be replaced with sets and backgrounds - is something which has been in use for a good 20 years. But never this way.
“Other films that have used it still went on location,” explains Conran. “They built sets, constructed props. We never left the sound stage. The entire film was shot in this one room.” The only things that existed in the ‘real’ world were the actors and a limited number of props. The results are stunning.
When Conran first started on the project, working alone at his computer, he had “to wait 20 minutes for a single frame to update before I could advance to the next one,” he recalls. “These days, a Playstation can do that kind of stuff in real time.”
Working with his brother, a skilled illustrator, Conran began to create his world of tomorrow. “I hope the audience appreciates the work we did in terms of creating images that weren’t necessarily all the time going for reality,” he says. “We were trying to create something a little bit artful. It’s just a different way of seeing things.”
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