The Talented Mr. Ripley

By J.D. Lafrance and Lady Fitzsimmons

Fresh from the commercial and critical success of phenom The English Patient (1996), filmmaker Anthony Minghella dove back into the literary world for his next film – The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), based on the 1955 Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name. Adapted previously as Purple Noon (1960) starring Alain Delon, Minghella cast Matt Damon, still hot property from Good Will Hunting (1997) in the title role, and surrounded him with a new class of actors in ascension: Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The end result was a lavish adaptation full of rich period detail and a fascinatingly complex performance by Damon as a social-climbing sociopath.

“If I could just go back. If I could rub everything out. Starting with myself. Starting with borrowing a jacket.”

Thus begins our story with voiceover narration by protagonist Tom Ripley (Damon). We meet him at a party hosted by the Greenleaf family in 1950s New York City, where Tom makes quite the impression on wealthy shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf (James Rebhorn).  After the soiree, Tom shed ‘his’ Princeton blazer, revealing his for con of the film – posting as a Tiger for someone else. It pays off; the next day Herbert asks him to go to Italy and persuade his son Dickie (Law) to come back home for $1,000, which, by 1955 standards, is a tidy sum. Herbert is not happy with his son’s behavior overseas – “That’s my son’s talent,” he tells Tom, “spending his allowance.”

Tom, whose current employ is playing a piano at a cocktail bar, jumps at the chance to make some serious money – and rub elbows with the upper crust in Europe. Ever the astute social chameleon, we see Tom studying up on popular jazz songs and artists because it is a passion of Dickie’s and, more importantly, a way to immediately ingratiate himself. With one foot barely off the boat, Tom is already changing identities, telling fellow traveler Meredith Logue (Blanchett) that he is Dickie Greenleaf.

Tom orchestrates a chance encounter between himself, Dickie, and his girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Paltrow) on the beach in an amusing scene: Tom is all kinds of awkward as he sports lime green bathing trunks, which “compliment” his pasty white skin. I love how Dickie points this out (“Have you ever seen someone so white? Grey actually.”) and how quickly Tom makes fun of himself (“It’s just an undercoat.”). Tom is intensely serious in his plan to take on the character of a student on holiday, the way a rich playboy takes on a lover.

The seduction begins.

Tom impresses Dickie with an uncanny impression of his father and a mutual love of jazz. They become fast friends and are soon singing jazz in broken Italian at a hipster nightclub that Minghella captures in all of its dark, sweaty glory, masterfully capturing the energy of the moment. Tom agrees to help Dickie perpetuate a ruse – they will string his father along so that Dickie can continue to spend his money.

Tom is a student of human behavior, observing people for only a short while before being able to do an impression of them. For example, he studies the way Dickie signs his name and files it away for later use. Minghella shows Tom rehearsing in front of a mirror like an actor (where he creepily imitates a conversation between Marge and Dickie with eerie exactness). Like many great thespians, Tom is a blank slate, which allows him to become fully immersed in the “roles” he plays. During lunch he reveals his talents to Dickie and Marge – “Forging signatures, telling lies, impersonating practically anybody” – and his “purpose” for being there. Every single movement – we realize now – has, from the beginning, been surgically planned and impeccably executed, a black widow weaving the web or perhaps, more appropriately, the funnel spider, launching the fatal attack from a place unexpected, at a time unthinkable.

The web is completed a mere 24 minutes and 30 seconds into the film as we watch the spider plot his “attack.” This section, this leg of Tom’s trip, is the film’s transition to a psycho-drama; Tom is becoming Dickie, and Dickie is coming closer to the edge of the cliff. It’s also worth mentioning the subtle homoerotic nuances of Damon’s facial movements, the lingering looks fostered by the sensuality.

Matt Damon does a fantastic job of presenting Tom as a socially awkward nerd, disarming Dickie and Marge who “realize” that he’s not threat to them. This allows them to act both good-naturedly and condescending towards him – they don’t see him as an equal. Dickie and Marge are all about social niceties; these will end up being used against them. Damon is all tentative gestures and aw shucks self-deprecation…but in private, he offers glimmers of Tom’s true self – something that is gradually revealed over the course of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Taking this role was a shrewd move on Damon’s part. He capitalized on the buzz from Good Will Hunting by then taking a chance on a different and difficult role instead of taking the easy route, and doing a romantic comedy or something safely within his wheelhouse.

The mesmirizingly handsome Jude Law is well-cast as spoiled playboy Dickie, a young man that spends most of his time traveling all over Italy, spending his father’s money. Dickie is the kind of person who’s into whatever is fashionable at the moment, like Charlie Parker-era jazz, and befriends people like Tom until he loses interest in/becomes bored with them. He’s a flake that thinks loving such things makes him a deep person and Law conveys this extraordinarily well. Dickie’s short attention span and spoiled-brat attitude of instant gratification anticipates the prevailing attitude of what society has become today. Marge sums him up best when she confides in Tom:

“The thing with Dickie … It is like the sun shines on you and it’s glorious … and then he forgets you and it’s very very cold,” to which he replies, “…so I’m learning…” She says, “When you have his attention you feel like the only person in the world. That’s why everybody loves him.”

Gwyneth Paltrow plays the perfect WASP socialite, tired of the “whole Park Avenue crowd,” and fled to Paris to work on her novel. She has problems of the idle rich and initially appears to be Dickie’s superficial equal. It’s Marge, however, that is the first person to suspect Tom’s real agenda but because she’s a woman – and it’s the ‘50s – she’s dismissed as being distraught. Fresh from the phenomenal success of Shakespeare in Love (1998), Paltrow was at the height of her mainstream popularity; getting her was a real casting coup for Minghella. She definitely looks the part and conveys an air of entitlement. Ultimately, Marge is a sympathetic, even tragic character as evidenced in a nice scene between her and Tom. She explains Dickie’s shifting attention from him to Freddie, hinting that she is aware of her boyfriend’s affairs with other women. Marge seems resigned to her lot in life with an air of sadness that humanizes her.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Dickie’s friend Freddie Miles and makes a dramatic entrance, befitting his larger than life persona, arriving in a sporty convertible that sends scores of pigeons scattering. He hops out and says with a mischievous grin, “I wish I could fuck every woman just once.” Hoffman makes an immediate impression – a high society accent and phony laugh intact – as he grabbily steals Dickie away from Tom. Freddie is a bully that delights in putting Tom in his place by reminding him of his lower-class status. It’s easy to see why Freddie and Dickie are friends – they are nasty people that treat others badly with little or no remorse for their actions. We don’t feel all that bad about their ultimate destinations.

Tom loves Dickie so much that he wants to be him. Throughout the first half of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Minghella offers several moments that show Tom’s fixation on Dickie. He studies Dickie’s mannerisms because Tom wants to be him: eventually, he adopts the young man’s identity. The second half of the film is a fascinating study of how Tom attempts to maintain two identities without anyone catching on to his deception. At times, it’s a tricky juggling act that Tom works hard to maintain as he manages to narrowly avoid being discovered. Minghella gradually increases the tension as Tom’s ruse gets harder to maintain, especially with the Italian police breathing down his neck.

It would be easy to say that Tom suffers from multiple personality disorder but he does not. He is one man, with one mind, given to flights of fancy that lead to human degradation of the basest kind. He daydreams, he kills. The first third of The Talented Mr. Ripley resembles a Technicolor classic Hollywood movie like Roman Holiday (1953), then shifts gears into a psychological thriller a la Roman Polanski, and finally segues into a crime thriller as Tom tries to cover his tracks – and we wonder if he’s going to get away with it. The film gets darker and darker as the humanity is being drained from it every time Tom takes a life. It shows the absolute depravity that someone is capable of as Tom paints himself into a corner with the blood of his victims.

The look of The Talented Mr. Ripley mirrors its protagonist. It starts off with warm, sun-kissed colors, courtesy of John Seale’s cinematography, and gradually darkens as Tom gets deeper and deeper in trouble. The seaside color palette of the Italy in the film is worlds away from the regular day-to-day color palette of the New York City where we first meet Tom. However, when it comes to both clothing and architecture, vacationing by the seaside, houses are generally not your everyday bricks and mortar – they are light blue, coral and pink stucco. The same can be said about vacationing wardrobes. Gone are the grey flannel suits and navy blazers of the Upper East Side and in are shirttails out with white pants and Docksiders. Women’s hair is in ponytails, worn with bathing suits and pleated shorts. Gone are reading glasses, only to be replaced by designer sunglasses. It is the graceful ease of seaside living, for the rich, that is. As we near the third act of the movie, it is like summer vacation is over and we’re back to our mainland wardrobe – darker hues and heavier materials – a prime example of this is Tom wandering the decks of the ship wearing a poor boy’s black coat. Ripley is a visually gorgeous film…but beyond that, it is also rife with rich symbolism. For example, there are several times throughout where islands of rock are either passed in boats or in the background as part of the landscape. They are reminders of the magnificent L’Avventura (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s haunting masterpiece involving whimsical young adulthood, idyllic scenery, and dark philosophical mystery.

Patricia Highsmith wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955 while moving from Massachusetts to Santa Fe before going to Europe, where she lived most of her adult life. A child of divorce, she made a living early on writing for action comic books. Tom Ripley would become her favorite character and after the first novel, she wrote four more featuring him. She said of Tom, “He could be called psychotic but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational … I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to.”

Producer William Horberg had read Highsmith’s novel in the mid-1980s and was immediately intrigued by the story. He left Paramount Pictures in 1992 to become a producer with Sydney Pollack’s company, Mirage Enterprises. He gave Pollack a first-edition hardcover copy of The Talented Mr. Ripley as a gift in the hopes that he’d be interested in making it into a film.

When Horberg made inquiries about the film rights to Ripley, he found that French producer Robert Hakim, who made the 1960 adaptation Purple Noon, still controlled the property. Horberg said, “Over the years I had heard many stories about filmmakers who pursued the property only to run into problems with him.” Producer Tom Sternberg knew the Hakim family and was also an admirer of Highsmith’s novel. After Robert died, his family asked Sternberg to set up Ripley as a film project in the United States.

Through his lawyer, Sternberg heard that Horberg and Pollack were also interested adapting the book. As it turned out, Hakim’s widow was a big fan of The Firm (1993), which Pollack directed. She and her daughters met with the filmmaker and agreed to sell the rights to his company. Paramount agreed to finance the project and helped in its development.

Horberg and Pollack were big fans of Anthony Minghella and sent him a copy of the book. He had first read the novel in 1980 and felt an affinity for its protagonist but “not in terms of what he did, but why he did it, and what he did that was at the heart of it, which was a sort of self-loathing, a sense of inadequacy, of being an outsider, a sense of yearning, to love and be loved.” He was the son of working class Italian parents and grew up on the Isle of Wight, where he felt that “every English person was a Dickie Greenleaf.” He was drawn to the material because he felt it had “one extraordinary idea in it, which is the idea of a man who commits murder but is never caught. I thought that was an audacious subject for an American movie particularly, which is so used to moral closure.”

He was about to make The English Patient but had to wait until his leading man – Ralph Fiennes – was finished his Broadway run of Hamlet. He finished the first draft of the screenplay as The English Patient started rehearsals in Rome and found the material so compelling that he wanted to direct Ripley as well. He asked the studio to wait until he finished his film and they did.

When it came to casting the role of Tom Ripley, Minghella saw Good Will Hunting and was impressed with Matt Damon’s performance, as well as his turn in Courage Under Fire (1996). The two men met and found that they were on the same page on how to depict Tom. To prepare for the role, Damon lost 25 pounds in order to appear pale and skinny, and spent a month learning how to play the piano, finding that his playing posture informed the way Tom sat and walked.

For the role of Dickie Greenleaf, Minghella met with many American actors but found that they couldn’t evoke the character’s “class snobbery” and he thought of Jude Law for the role. Initially, the actor was not keen on playing Dickie but Minghella won him over. Law was drawn to the part due to being “fascinated by the challenge of trying to make nasty characters likeable.” Minghella wrote the role of Marge Sherwood with Gwyneth Paltrow in mind and she was the first person he cast. Initially, she didn’t understand how interesting the character was but during the rehearsal process, she discovered “how full and complicated the role is.”

To prepare for making Ripley, Minghella rewatched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and I Vitelloni (1953), as well as reading the memoirs of Paul Goodman and Paul Monette in order to get a handle on the cultural touchstones of the young American characters in Ripley. He also read Calvin Trillin’s “Remembering Denny,” about the writer’s Yale 1957 classmate Denny Hansen, a closeted gay varsity athlete who went to Europe as a Rhodes scholar.

The Talented Mr. Ripley received mostly positive to mixed reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “The movie is an intelligent thriller as you’ll see this year.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin praised Jude Law’s “star-making role for the preternaturally talented English actor Jude Law. Beyond being devastatingly good-looking, Mr. Law gives Dickie the manic, teasing powers of manipulation that make him ardently courted by every man or woman he knows.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film an “A-“ rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “Damon is at once an obvious choice for the part and a hard sell to audiences soothed by his amiable boyishness … But the façade works surprisingly well when Damon holds that gleaming smile just a few seconds too long, his Eagle Scout eyes fixed just a blink more than the calm gaze of any non-murdering young man. And in that opacity we see horror.”

The New York Observer’s Andrew Sarris wrote, “The Talented Mr. Ripley, as a case in point, is an often brilliant but ultimately confused murder melodrama in which there is no mystery to be solved, and no characters sympathetic enough to generate suspense about their fate in the patented Hitchcock manner.” However, in her review for the Village Voice, Amy Taubin criticized Minghella for turning, “The Talented Mr. Ripley into a splashy tourist trap of a movie. The effect is rather like reading The National Inquirer in a café overlooking the Adriatic.” The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote, “It ends up a dismayingly unthrilling thriller and bafflingly unconvincing character study. Ripley says he’d rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody – but a fake nobody is all we’re offered…”

“I always thought it’s better to be a fake somebody then a real nobody,” Tom says towards the closing of the film. The last shot – his reflection in a closet mirror as he replays the latest murder in his mind. Tom’s mirror image is a repeating motif throughout The Talented Mr. Ripley; one imagines his life as a hall of mirrors. Which one is the real Tom Ripley? Are we seeing the “real” Tom before the closet door closes into darkness and the film ends? Its final shot brilliantly, visually sums up what Tom is: a sociopath unable to truly love because when he gets too close to the object of his affection, his impulse is to destroy, lest he reveal too much of his real self.

SOURCES

“Cinderella Minghella.” The Guardian. February 16, 2000.

Luscombe, Belinda. “Matt Damon Acts Out.” Time. March 6, 2000.

Rich, Frank. “American Pseudo.” The New York Times. December 12, 1999.

Simon, Alex. “The Talented Mr. Minghella.” Venice Magazine. February 2000.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley: Part 1. Empire.

“The Talented Mr. Ripley: Part 2. Empire.

The Talented Mr. Ripley Production Notes. Miramax Pictures. 1999.

Contagion

For over two decades, director Steven Soderbergh has gone back and forth from independent to studio films with personal, experimental efforts like Schizopolis (1996) and big budget crowd pleasers like Erin Brockovich (2000). He’s fashioned himself something of a journeyman director trying his hand at a variety of genres over the years, from period history (King of the Hill) to the heist film (Ocean’s Eleven) to the war movie (Che), adopting a distinctive style for each one. With Contagion (2011), he can now add the disaster movie to the list. This film deals specifically with the deadly virus subgenre as he tracks an infectious disease that affects the entire world with alarming speed. Would Soderbergh go the high road with thought-provoking science fiction a la The Andromeda Strain (1971) and Twelve Monkeys (1995), or would he go the low-budget horror B-movie route like The Crazies (1973) and Warning Sign (1985)? Whereas most of these films rely on horror and science fiction tropes, Soderbergh eschews them for a much more realistic take, albeit with a sly wink to the master of disaster films, Irwin Allen by populating Contagion with a star-studded cast of A-listers (many of whom have either won or been nominated for Academy Awards) only to kill some of them off. However, this is where the similarities begin and end as Soderbergh applies the Traffic (2000) aesthetic, juggling multiple characters and storylines to show how technology not only helps identify the threat quickly but also helps it spread rapidly thanks to globalization and disinformation.


The film starts off on Day 2 of the outbreak with infected people in England, Japan and Hong Kong where we meet Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) on a business trip. She comes home to her husband Mitch (Matt Damon) and family in Minneapolis suffering from what seems like flu-like symptoms. She assumes that it is nothing more than jetlag but within a day she and her son are dead. The doctors can’t tell Mitch why they died and he’s left to take care of his daughter (Anna Jacoby-Heron) on his own. The World Health Organization in Geneva begins to identify all the cities where victims of the MEV-1 virus are appearing and are trying in vain to contain it. They send Dr. Lenora Orantes (Marion Cotillard) to Hong Kong in an attempt to track down the origins of the virus. Meanwhile, muckraking blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) posts a clip of a man collapsing on a train in Japan and tries to peddle it to a newspaper in San Francisco but they aren’t interested. However, he soon assembles an impressive global readership that hangs on his every opinion and conspiracy theory, which not only spreads disinformation but also draws the attention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) is leading an investigation into the outbreak in the United States and enlists the help of Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) who travels to Minneapolis and investigates Beth Emhoff’s death. Their goal is to try and control the spread of the virus.

Soderbergh shows how the CDC interact with local and national governing bodies to identify and deal with the virus while also taking us inside their laboratories where Dr. Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) is working hard to find a vaccine. Soon, Homeland Security steps in and their representative (Bryan Cranston) meets with Cheever to raise concerns that the virus could be weaponized and used by terrorists to attack the United States. However, it soon becomes apparent that the problem is much more serious, affecting a large portion of the world. Soderbergh inserts all kinds of shots of people’s hands interacting with objects and other people. Every time someone coughs you wonder is this person sick and are they spreading the virus to others?

The always-reliable Matt Damon is Contagion’s emotional core, playing the character we get to know the best and therefore care about what happens to the most. He is heartbreaking early on as Mitch watches both his wife and son die and then finds out that his spouse was also cheating on him. He then has to pull it together and take care of his daughter. Damon is given moments to show how the strain of this all is taking its toll on Mitch and the actor really grounds the film in something tangible for the audience to hold onto. Think of him as the equivalent to Benicio del Toro’s soulful border cop in Traffic. Damon is so good as the relatable everyman trying to deal with things as best he can. Without him, Contagion would come across as a little too cold and clinical.

With the help of Cliff Martinez’s brooding, atmospheric electronic score, Soderbergh gradually cranks up the dread as the virus spreads and the situation gets increasingly worse as order breaks down – bureaucratically and then everything else follows in a domino effect with looting and rioting as people think about protecting themselves. Soon, we are hit with sobering apocalyptic imagery that starts off with deserted city streets filled with garbage and abandoned cars to government officials filling mass graves with scores of dead bodies.

Soderbergh is clearly drawing a parallel between the virus and technology, both of which spread great distances and in very little time thanks to cell phones and the Internet. He explores the notion of community breaking down with people becoming isolated, even more so thanks to technology. The film matches this speed by maintaining a brisk pace but does allow for the occasional moment where key characters reflect on what’s happening and how it affects not only them but their loved ones, co-workers, and so on. It is these moments where Scott Z. Burns’ smart, ambitious screenplay shines, allowing archetypes, like Laurence Fishburne’s no-nonsense executive, to show their human frailties.

Burns has clearly done his homework as he presents a scarily plausible viral outbreak based on the rare Nipah virus, which spread from pigs to farmers in Malaysia in the late 1990’s. Contagion is eerily relevant as it evokes real-life outbreaks like SARS, avian flu and the H1N1 swine flu, several of which are mentioned in the film. The script also shows the reaction to an outbreak on a personal level with Mitch and his daughter while also showing its global impact when the fear of transmitting the virus takes hold. This is important because the film throws around a lot of technical jargon and dispenses a lot of facts but Soderbergh has wisely enlisted an all-star cast to make it more palatable. Contagion is not the horror film Soderbergh has suggested it might be, nor is it Hollywood fluff like Outbreak (1995), but rather a slick, sophisticated disaster movie that should provide the director with his first substantial commercial hit in years.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was a film bound to polarize audiences and critics alike. Loving homage or blatant rip-off? It really depends on whether you love or hate this movie. Personally, I was transported away to this cinematic dreamland for the entire running time. Kerry Conran’s labor of love is an unabashed tribute to the old pulp serials of the 1920s and 1930s (Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, etc.). It succeeds where previous pulp serial homages of the 1990s failed (The Shadow, The Phantom, Dick Tracy). Like those films, Sky Captain successfully captures the look and feel of these vintage serials but, most importantly, it also stays true to their spirit — something that these other films failed to do (The Rocketeer as the lone exception). The road to its creation is a fascinating one, from a black and white independent film to big budget film released by a major studio.

A striking image opens the film: a gigantic zeppelin docks with the Empire State Building while the night sky is filled with lightly falling snow. The world’s top scientists have gone missing and ambitious newspaper reporter Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow in Lois Lane mode) is covering the story for The Chronicle. She meets secretly with the last scientist who hints at a top-secret project. She soon has an idea of just how important this project is as huge, flying robots swarm over the city’s skies. They begin attacking the city, turning cars over like tinker toys.

Before you can activate your Commander Cody decoder ring, Joe “Sky Captain” Sullivan (Jude Law) and his squad of fighter planes arrive to save the day. It becomes obvious that Joe and Polly have a history together. There is a sexual tension between them as they form an uneasy alliance: she shares information with him in exchange for an exclusive scoop on the source of the robots and the mysterious Dr. Totenkopf (Laurence Olivier). They are aided in their adventure by Joe’s trusty sidekick, Dex (Giovanni Ribisi), a whiz technician capable of inventing a deadly ray gun, and Captain Franky Cook (Angelina Jolie), Joe’s ex-girlfriend and commander of a squadron of flying fortresses.

Kerry Conran grew up on films and comic books of the ‘30s and 1940s and commented in an interview, “The stuff that was most visually striking were the covers of the ‘30s and ‘40s. The graphic images just in the covers, I thought, told stories on such a grand scale...The artwork of that era, they just dreamed up things on that level.” He and his brother, Kevin, were encouraged by their parents to develop their creative side at a young age. According to Kevin, their mom “didn’t buy us coloring books and have us color them in, she’d bring us blank pads of paper with pencils and you’d make your own picture and color it in, that sort of stuff, which didn’t seem like a big deal, but it sort of is. We always had a lot of support in that respect.” The Conran brothers were also influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes who did work for the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Geddes also designed an Air Ship that was to fly from Chicago to London. Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 World’s Fair and who designed bridges and huge housing complexes.

Conran went to CalArts, a feeder program for Disney animators and became interested in 2-D computer animation. While there, he realized that it was possible to apply some of the techniques associated with animation to live-action. He remembers trying to “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.” Conran had been out of film school for two years and was trying to figure out how to make a film. He figured that Hollywood would never take a chance on him — an inexperienced, first-time filmmaker. So, he decided to go the independent route and make the movie himself.

In 1994, Conran set up a blue screen in his living room and began assembling the tools he would need to create his movie. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh. Initially, the Conrans had nothing more than “just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like Indiana Jones and all the stuff we liked.” Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashion newsreel on his Macintosh personal computer. Once he was finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother’s wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a film. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the film because, according to Avnet, he wanted to “make sure we were on the same page, because he was going to write it. It wasn’t written at that point.”

Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay and developing a working relationship. Then, the producer took the script and the trailer and began approaching actors. In order to protect Conran’s vision, Avnet decided to shoot the movie independently with a lot of his own money. “I couldn’t protect him from the studios. I prayed we could shoot the movie and then show it to the studios. And we’re lucky, they all wanted it.” The producer realized that “the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, which was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio.”

When it came to casting actors in the movie, Avnet used his connections and reputation and started “looking for people who fit the look, looking for people who had the right theatrical pedigree, if possible, looking for people who weren’t over-exposed.” In 2002, he showed Jude Law the teaser trailer and the actor was very impressed by what he saw. He remembers, “All I got at that early stage was that he’d used pretty advanced and unused technology to create a very retrospective look.” Avnet gave him the script to read and some preliminary artwork to look at.

Law: “What was clear was also that at the center was a really great cinematic relationship, which you could put into any genre and it would work. You know, the kind of bickering [relationship]. I always like to call it African Queen (1951) meets Buck Rogers.”

Avnet wanted to work with Law because he knew that the actor had “worked both period, who worked both having theatrical experience, who worked on blue screen, who hadn’t hit yet as a major action star.” The actor had just come off doing Cold Mountain (2003) and was intrigued at going from filming on real locations to working on a film done completely on a soundstage. Law recalls, “At the time, there was no money attached, and he [Conran] was a first time director. It took us a year and a half to put it together and even then, we didn’t have a studio deal.” The actor believed so much in Conran’s movie that he also became one of the producers and used his clout to get Gwyneth Paltrow involved. Once her name came up, Law did not remember “any other name coming up. It just seems that she was perfect. She was as enthusiastic about the script and about the visual references that were sort of put to her, and jumped on board.” Paltrow said in an interview, “I thought that this is the time to do a movie like this where it’s kind of breaking into new territory and it’s not your basic formulaic action-adventure movie.”

Giovanni Ribisi met with Avnet and, initially, was not sure that he wanted to do the movie but after seeing the teaser trailer, he signed on without hesitation. Angelina Jolie had literally come from the set of Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003) and agreed to work on the movie for three days. Despite her small role, she had conducted hours of interviews with fighter pilots in order to absorb their jargon and get a feel for the role.

Avnet went to Aurelio De Laurentiis and convinced her to finance the film without a distribution deal. Nine months before filming, Avnet had Conran meet the actors and begin rehearsals in an attempt to get the shy filmmaker out of his shell. Avnet recalls, “By the end of three days of rehearsals, I remember where he said something, describing the ice cave where the dynamite is, and I could see the actors looking really, really intently on him. I realized that he got them.”

Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage. To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, like To Have and Have Not (1944) with Lauren Bacall for Paltrow’s performance and The Thin Man (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly.

Working on a soundstage surrounded entirely by blue screens required a new way of looking at the acting process. Ribisi remembers, “The analogy that you say to yourself is it’s like doing theater or avant-garde theater. There’s just a stage and the actors and all of that. But no, it is different, and it’s something that actors are going to have to be getting used to and [they need to] develop some degree of technique for that.” Law echoed these sentiments: “It almost felt like make-believe playing, rather than limiting because I couldn’t see something specific.” Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage. He told Conran, “Look, you’ve got these great actors, you’ve got a great relationship, don’t hamstring them. Give them some freedom.”

Conran and Avnet were able to cut costs considerably by shooting the entire film in 26 days (not the usual three to four months that this kind of film normally takes) and working entirely on blue screen soundstages. After filming ended, they put together a 24-minute presentation and took it to every studio in June of 2002. There was a lot of interest and Avnet went with the studio that gave Conran the most creative control. They needed studio backing to finish the film’s ambitious visuals. At one point, the producer remembers that Conran was “working 18 to 20 hours a day for a long period of time. It’s 2,000 some odd CGI shots done in one year, and we literally had to write code to figure out how to do this stuff!”

Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the film by first moving its release date from the summer (it was supposed to open a week before Spider-Man 2) to September, then courting the Internet press and finally making an appearance at the San Diego Comic Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advanced buzz.

The film was surprisingly well-received by most major critics. Roger Ebert gave it a four star rating and praised it for “its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden liked its visuals and its evocation of a bygone era but felt that "the monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance... At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi clichés." Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A-" rating, saying, "The investment is optimistic and wise; Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty." However, USA Today said that the film was "all style over substance, a clever parlor trick but a dull movie,” and Stephen Hunter, of the Washington Post, called it "a $70 million novelty item."

Sky Captain is an absolutely gorgeous looking film filled with eye-popping visuals and drenched in atmosphere. Everything is bathed in a warm sepia filter and captured in a soft focus lens clearly meant to evoke the glamour of classic Hollywood cinema. Sky Captain is a marvel of set design and visual effects. The film’s elaborate backgrounds were created through a series of photographic plates and 3D animation. By creating an entire world through CGI, Conran raised the bar on these kinds of films. Now, filmmakers are only limited by their imagination... and their budgets.

The problem with most films of these kinds is that the actors are often overwhelmed by the striking visuals. Fortunately, Conran has assembled a strong cast. Jude Law does an excellent job as the wisecracking, square-jawed matinée hero while Gwyneth Paltrow is his ideal foil, criticizing him at every opportunity but you know that it is done out of love. Law remembers that he “tried doing it like an American using 1930’s speak, but it felt like we were sending it up and what we wanted to do was to play it for real, so people didn’t think that we were making a modern version of a 1930’s movie.” Everyone is clearly enjoying breathing life into these archetypal characters. High caliber actors like Law, Paltrow and Angelina Jolie take these intentionally cliché characters and make them interesting to watch.

Sky Captain has all the markings of a debut by a first-time filmmaker. There is a go-for-broke, let’s-cram-everything-in-this-one attitude that a first-timer has a tendency to adopt because they do not know if there are going to get another chance. Conran has said that his intention was to create something “almost innocent and fun, the things that inspired me in wanting to make movies, the qualities of why I wanted to go to the movies. You lose yourself and escape into a world that didn’t exist anywhere else but in the movies.” Sadly, Sky Captain failed at the box office thus insuring the unlikely prospects of a sequel. It is too bad because the movie presents a richly textured and detailed world with fun and exciting characters.

As a little postscript to this article, after Sky Captain, Conran was set to direct an adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, John Carter of Mars, which would have been right up his alley but sadly, Sky Captain's abysmal box office performance nixed that and he hasn't done anything since. I've searched and Googled all over the Internet for any word on what he's working on next but he seems to have dropped off the radar, which is a damn shame in my opinion.

SOURCES

Axmaker, Sean. "At the cusp of a renaissance": Kerry Conran.". GreenCine Daily. September 16, 2004.

Cellini, Joe. "Sky Captain Flies to Big Screen." Apple Pro/Video. September 2004.

Claw, Walter. "Sky’s Not the Limit: Kerry Conran on being a pioneer of Tomorrow." FilmFreaks.net. October 3, 2004.

Douglas, Edward. "The Making of Sky Captain - Part 1!" ComingSoon.net. September 7, 2004.

Douglas, Edward. "The Making of Sky Captain - Part 2!" ComingSoon.net. September 10, 2004.

Douglas, Edward. "The Making of Sky Captain - Part 3!" ComingSoon.net. September 14, 2004.

Knowles, Harry. "More on Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." Ain't It Cool News. February 2, 2004.

Murray, Rebecca. "Jude Law, Giovanni Ribisi, Kerry Conran, and Jon Avnet Interview". About Entertainment.

Murray, Rebecca. "Sky Captain Himself Discusses Sky Captain." About Entertainment.