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Life on Mars
A Conversation with Red Planet's Antony Hoffman
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| Red Planet's Antony Hoffman |
Born in Capetown, South Africa, Antony Hoffman learned the art of moviemaking as a documentarian, shooting guerilla footage of his country's notorious mid-1980s riots. After a fruitful stint at AFI shortly thereafter, Hoffman went to Europe, where he immersed himself in directing commercials, music videos and short films. He returned to the United States in 1991 to work as a commercial director and has been here ever since. All along, Hoffman's ultimate goal has been to work in film. This winter, he got his chance. As a first feature, Hoffman was given the opportunity to direct the recently released Mars adventure, Red Planet. Here, Antony talks about how it feels to make a big budget movie as your first feature, and the difficulties of bringing the fourth planet to life on screen.
Scott Essman (MM): How did your involvement in Red Planet come about? Your previous work was certainly not situated in features, and it wasn't in the sci-fi genre.
Antony Hoffman (AH): I read a script called Alone about three years ago by Chuck Pfarrar. It was about a man who gets stranded on a planet and the woman who must save him. There was something at the root of it that just intrigued me-the idea that we are alone as mankind. The idea I pitched to the studios was a human drama with a six-to-eight-person crew, based on all of the facts I could find. I wanted to go to NASA to get it right. I didn't want to make a science fiction movie-I wanted to make it science fact.
MM: How did you go about selecting locations for the film? It must have been difficult finding the right look to stand in for Mars.
AH: I wanted to shoot in Iceland. I actually scouted it by myself in five helicopters. I was obsessed with it because that is where NASA astronauts did their training. Eventually, though, the decision was made not to shoot in Iceland, so we chose the Australian outback and Jordan for our primary locations. We shot first for 12 days in Jordan and about 75 days in Australia, with 60 days in the outback and 15 nights in a huge quarry outside of Sydney. It was like a big sandbox with six huge Musco lights all around the ridge. The problem was the rain, so a lot of shots were under these huge tarps. Our locations were not as spectacular as I wanted, but it ended up okay.
MM: How did the actors react to the harsh conditions on location? Was it hard for them?
AH: Very hard. Just to be in a space suit in 125-degree weather was hard. If you look in their eyes in some of the shots, they look ragged. That's not something that you can direct! Australia was hardcore-major dust storms and giant flies that would dive right into your head. We had to put these huge fans up and put chemicals on the ground so that we could shoot. You would just get a great take and a fly would come into the shot. There was extra money in the budget for fly removal so that we could take them out digitally! It was also a logistically extremely hard shoot. Because of the rain, we'd constantly go back to cover sets from locations and back again.
MM: How crucial was CGI to telling this story effectively?
AH: CG is unbelievable now. In terms of the way you want things as they appear in your mind and when you storyboard a shot, you have much more control over a CG element than I'd have ever thought. Year after year, it keeps getting better. Cinesite did a remarkable job with the robot in the movie, AMEE. She really looks scuffed up, and she has weight to her, which is the hardest thing to create. On set, we had a little broomstick with a handle on it. We had a stand-in model for one or two shots, but we didn't have AMEE worked out yet when we were shooting.
MM: It must be extremely difficult to set up a shot and shoot set pieces knowing that the visual effects that were crucial to the scene won't be added until much later.
AH: There were so many effects that our Visual Effects Supervisor, Jeff Okun, wasn't given the go ahead until July, even though we had been editing since January. It was a case of the studio not knowing how good the movie was, so they didn't want to spend the money on the effects until then. So in the meantime, we did pre-visualizations and cut them into the footage. My director's cut-which took 12 weeks-was purely a dramatic piece of what I had shot. The movie was originally budgeted with 150 effects shots, but we ended up with 962!
MM: Do you think that it's difficult to shoot an effective sci-fi movie at a time when audiences seem much more sophisticated?
AH: I think you have to have the instinct of who the audience is. To me, the movie is about man playing God. Changing another planet is radical thinking. I loved that theme. Also, these characters are combat soldiers-they don't know why they're there, though they are fighting the battles. This is the premise that I worked on. When they are in the foxhole, they debate these moralistic issues like 'why are we here?' It was a Vietnam Platoon analogy. When the whole billion dollar mission is stripped down, no matter how advanced we get scientifically, we are back to where we started, and repeat ourselves. If you're stranded on Mars, the whole principle of faith amongst each other and trust amongst people is explored. That is the movie that I wanted to make.
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Posted 09.5.08 | No comments yet...
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