TNMC
This site’s design is only visible in a graphical browser that supports web standards, but its content is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
Dancing in Zion
I'm back with a vengeance this week with a killer column issue. I was downright stunned to receive an email from someone who was an extra on The Matrix Reloaded. Apparently the extra was only returning the favor since he learned on TNMC that the movie was looking for extras. Hopefully we'll have more reports from other movie sets in the future.. Our second story for the day is the script review of Reign of Fire by that dragonlover 'Hollyfeld'. Next week get ready for some more script reviews.
The Matrix Reloaded Set Report
"I just came back from a 13 hour shoot on the set of The Matrix II. This set was quite near the artificial highway they built earlier. The set was in a huge warehouse on the Alameda Military Base across the bay from San Francisco, and it was made to look like a gigantic cavern with styrofoam stalactite or stalagmite columns. Candles studded the columns, and little fake candle drips were put on for extra detail. Later the candles dripped for real and burnt some extras. The color scheme of the cave was all neutral colors with hints of blue. The terrain was styrofoam slight hills and valleys, deeper in the center and hills on the sides. The styrofoam was covered with about four inches of brown dirt and sandy gravel. For the dance scene, I'm pretty sure they bulldozed some of the dirt out so the valley would be deeper, so the shot of people dancing would look more dramatic. The wall in which the entrance to the warehouse/set was located was covered entirely in a blue wall. The opposite wall was all styrofoam cave stuff, with tunnels, terraced walls, and a cliff-like thing they referred to repeatedly as 'the pulpit'. This wall is where I saw all of those stars. If you face the pulpit, the right wall had a set up for a band ('Burlyman' or 'Burly Band' dressed in red and black kinda eighties or glam rock). The band was very 'Stomp' looking, with huge metal barrels, etc. There was a huge metal sheet but I didn't see them use it. It looked like a square gong. The crowd scenes had a lot of torches. There were 2 'pools of lava', which were red plexiglass with light shining through and some McDonalds shake mix sprinkled on top. Looked like gravel, but real to me. One pool was near the left/top/middle corner (facing the 'pulpit') and the other was in the middle/right/bottom corner, offset a bit so they didn't look exactly symmetrical. Before each shot, they would roll the sound, which sounded like bubbling lava (or, as the more mature extras pointed out, like gastrointestinal difficulties). There were about 6 main stalactite/stalagmite columns made of styrofoam. They were studded with candleholders, as I mentioned earlier. The left wall had more cave stuff. The ceiling was bare beams and lights and stuff.
There were approximately 950 skimpily dressed extras (all youthful, beautiful, and diverse). All were citizens of 'Zion', and most were 'revelers', a few were 'dancers', a few were 'priestesses', and some were 'warriors'. The revelers and dancers were dressed in beige, tan, cream, or light blue clothing. Silver and beaded jewelry in the same color scheme abounded. The priestesses wore a deep blue, almost indigo, and they carried around big baskets of bread and huge portabello mushrooms. (I guess if you live underground, mushrooms are a popular crop. That doesn't, however, explain the bread because wheat must be grown above ground.) The warriors wore more military dark colors, with maroon wool patchwork vests. Some were equipped with hip looking dark colored fanny packs or satchels. About 10% of the extras were outfitted symmetrically with little metal round things on their arms, legs, torso, or up the spine, or one big one at the back of the head. I suppose they were the 'unplugged' ex-Matrix people. Jada Pinkett was on set, in a deep red/orange velvet (?)dress. She looked bored and ate some stuff. She's tiny! Is she pregnant again? She seemed to rub her tummy in a pregnant kinda way. She wasn't in any shotswith us, except for maybe a 'gazing at the crowd shot.' Later Carrie Anne Moss came out, out of costume. She was in some casual jogging (pants) and a navy tank top. She seemed cheerful and left after a bit, and they didn't shoot with her that day. I think I also saw Ray Anthony Parker.
Laurence Fishburne arrived and he then introduced Anthony Zerbe (whom the crowd of mostly 20 somethings did not recognize) to the extras. He didn't do that many retakes so I don't remember exactly what he said. Zerbe's character was shot 'introducing' Morpheus to the crowd. He said something about introducing 'someone we have all been waiting for, Morpheus.' Morpheus came in after the introduction (cheer) and said that he had to tell us something, that the enemy was drawing closer to our homes (act scared), that he was unafraid. 'Am I unafraid because I know something you do not? No, I am unafraid not because of the path that lies before me/us (I forget which pronoun he used), but because of the path that lies behind me/us.' He said something to the effect of- we have been here for 100 years (Zion has existed that long?) and Zion is still here (cheer again). 'We are Zion, we are still here, and we are unafraid' (fanatic cheering, fists in the air while shouting ZION and some shouting MORPHEUS). Each time we shot it, Fishburne tried a different effect, more angry, more calm, more authoritative, more variations in tone, or consistent throughout. It was neat to see how an actor works. Laurence Fishburne is so sweet; every time we finished a shot, he would clap for us, even if we were being stupid and did something wrong. Never underestimate the power of stupidity in large crowds of 950 extras, most of whom are their for their looks and not their brains. The directors (no Wachowskis to be found anywhere, but there were a few Australian or British accented assistant directors) were infinitely kind and patient with our remarkable ineptness. Before Fishburne left, he graciously thanked us for being there. Then there's a huge dance scene.
They played 3 kinds of music. For the first, they told us to dance 'the crack' which was 'like the 'pop' from the eighties but set in the future.' The music was techno with a heavy bass, and we were told to jab our arms up and down like we were going into convulsions. The second kind of music they did not introduce to us. They said they would just let it play for a few seconds and then they would start filming. It was slower than the first and more 'tribal', I guess, with drums. They said we should just 'feel the music' while 'keeping what we said earlier in mind'. The only instructions they gave were: some of the men should move their hands around 'like flowers', some should 'punch the air', the ones with dreads or long hair should use their hair when they dance, some of the taller men should bounce up and down like pogo sticks every once in a while, and they spread out about 5 couples (professional dancers I think) to do partner lifts, choreographed to lift the female partner when the camera swung by. The last kind of music was called it 'the conga' and it was tribal also, but much faster than the second. Again they didn't introduce us so as to make our dancing more natural. This dance sequence took forever, and we were all sweating like crazy. It was fun though. We danced so hard that one of the 'hills' cracked.Later on, one of the assistant directors tells us to dance like it's the last time we'll have fun before we have to fight the enemy. Is he implying that the citizens of Zion will be going against the Matrix robots in battle? We did a bunch of crowd shots, made to look like there were 3,000 of us rather than just 950. There was some white dude running through the crowds toward Morpheus. It wasn't clear whether he was running because he had to tell Morpheus something, or he was just excited about hearing Morpheus talk like he's some big groupie, or what.
The crowd scene was shot in 3 parts, so that we looked like a bigger crowd. The first shot was us watching the pulpit and cheering, etc. The second shot they had us turn around and face the blue screen, and pretend to be the crowd 'behind' the crowd from the first shot. The blue screen would be fixed to look like the first shot. The white dude ran through this one. (He ran right past me on my right, so you might see my back in the final cut). The third shot was 'behind' the second shot, and they had us walk towards the blue screen, chatting, and acting like we were going to the meeting. The guy ran through this too. The blue screen in this third shot would be the second shot. That way, they made 950 people look 3 times as large. It's hard to explain chronologically and try to visually locate it in your imagination."
(Set Report sent in by 'BunBun'.)
Reign of Fire Script Review
"Reign of Fire: the latest film from X-Files director Rob Bowman which is set for release sometime next year. I have the priviledge of reviewing the August 29, 2000 draft of the script, which is credited to Gregg Chabot & Kevin Peterka with revisions by Matt Greenberg (The Prophecy II, Halloween: H20). As it reads here, Reign of Fire has the potential to be a truly fantastic action film - and the dragon movie that many of us have been hoping for for a long time.
Present day, England. Architect Karen Abercromby’s crew are building the next in a series of buildings designed to help bring London into the next millenium. Little do they know that by excavating under the ground near Big Ben they awaken The Ashley, a monstrous dragon whose brood will scorch the Earth and make humans an endangered species. In just a few decades only a small number of human outposts remain scattered around the globe, and they must defend themselves from constant attacks from Earth’s dominant species: Dragons. Now only a few heavily-armed soldiers under the command of the dangerous Denton Van Zan find themselves crazy enough to fight back against The Ashley, but only Quinn Abercromby, Karen’s son and the only person to have seen the beast and lived to tell the tale, knows what they are truly up against.
Dragonheart and Dungeons & Dragons are the only two films in recent memory that have attempted to bring dragons to the screen in all their glory, and I must say that Reign of Fire has the potential to leave both of them in the dust. For fantasy aficionados I must note, however, that there are numerous discrepancies between this film and many other dragon films of the past. These dragons cannot talk - they are not the highly intelligent dragons of faery tales. In this film, dragons are monstrous Pre-Cambrian lifeforms that exist only to devour all that they see, far more akin to the xenomorphs in Aliens or the velociraptors in Jurassic Park in both their goals and intelligence. There is no magic in Reign of Fire - the dragons are completely (and satisfactorily) scientifically explained. There are no knights in shining armor penetrating their hides with old-fashioned swords - their phosphorous lightning (read:fire) can melt tanks, and missile launchers barely affect them. No sir, these are not your Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grand-Daddy’s dragons. As depicted in the script they are both menacing and gorgeous, and even so the writers wisely opt not to deluge us with images of them. When shown they are shown in all their glory, but we are kept in suspense as to when they will show up, and when they do it is surprisingly often handled with discretion - especially in the beginning.
The question, of course, is no longer how well the dragons will be handled (answer according to this draft: Very well, thank you), but how well the humans fare in comparison. One of the great problems in action filmmaking is the creation of interesting and (just as importantly) believable characters to place in extraordinary situations. Usually, if we’re lucky, there are one or two characters that match this description.. In Reign of Fire, these characters are Quinn (Christian Bale, Newsies, American Psycho) and Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, Amistad), two very different individuals who nonetheless convince the audience that they are the type who would survive an apocalypse. Van Zan is a dangerous dragon-slayer - the kind of Vietnam War hero who was both dedicated to his cause and willing to sacrifice himself and his men for the greater good. Quinn, on the other hand, is far more complex - a daringly brave man in a struggle but strikingly conservative when it comes down to hunting down The Ashley, Mother of All Dragons. What takes perhaps too long to sink in is that Quinn is a survivalist, willing to do whatever he feels is most likely to insure the safety of his people. Sometimes this involves taking a stand, but often this means avoiding a fight. For this reason many of his people begin to follow Van Zan instead, leading to conflict between the two. These characters provide a counterpoint to one another but are not polar opposites - although Van Zan is not as well developed as Quinn in this draft it is clear that the two merely have different strengths and weaknesses from each other, which leads them into conflict.
From this draft, I’m not sure McConaughey is effectively cast in his role - Van Zan reads as an older, battle-weary individual, better suited to someone like Kurt Russell or Arnold Schwarzenegger (the latter of which was once rumoured to have a cameo, although it seems unlikely now). However, the character could have changed some in the final draft, or - who knows - maybe McConaughey can pull it off. He can be a very good actor with the right material.
Most of the rest of the characters in Reign of Fire are not as interesting, and are seemingly derived either from cliché or from a single character trait that is inserted in the place of development. There are worse sins than this - most action films do it - and this draft at least has a balance between effective and ineffective handlings of said characters. 'The Pope', for example, is a surprisingly good character as a hard-assed boy with no legs. Also strong is Creedy (whose character name has apparently changed in the final draft), a cook who longs to fight if for no other reason than to be able to prepare food in a civilized kitchen once again. Not quite as effective are Gideon, a character whose only trait seems to be the fact that he is Jamaican, and Colleen (Izabella Scorupco, Vertical Limit) who suffers from 'Only Female In The Film-itis.' You know how it is - the only female in an action film, when she isn’t a lead, tends to cover stereotypical ground. In this case, it’s 'My How Masculine She Is.' This may not be as badly done as other films in recent memory, but the change of her name to 'Alex' in the final film will probably (though hopefully not) indicate the obligatory introduction joke. For example:
VAN ZAN You should meet Alex, our helicopter pilot. Personally killed so-and-so many dragons. QUINN He sounds great. ALEX (Off-Screen) She. (Quinn turns around - there is Alex, a WOMAN, standing behind him with one arm leaning on a wall.) ALEX You men are all alike. Always assuming that a great so-and-so has to be a man...Blah, blah, blah. It’s one of those writing devices that makes critics and fellow writers want to puke. I’m not saying it’ll be in the final draft, only that I’m worried that it might as a result of the name change.
Reign of Fire is very strong dramatically, as well, beginning with a surprisingly suspenseful awakening of The Ashley, who makes quite an astounding entrance (which had better not be fouled up by the director - it’s a potentially magical moment, here). From there we cut to 2024, years after the dragons gained dominance, and people are attempting to live their lives in some form of peace. One amusing moment comes when Quinn tells a group of children stories he has 'written', like the one about the giant Shark, or those ones with 'The Indiana Man.' (Apparently movies didn’t survive the apocalypse.) After a dragon attack in which a character tragically dies (that is, it’s supposed to be tragic - the character was not built up at all so the death fails to carry whatever resonance it was supposed to attain), Van Zan and his small army show up and the battles begin. These battles are very creatively handled - the first of which reads like a sequence unlike any we have ever seen before. Let us hope it is handled well. And the climactic battle with the Ashley is built up very suspensefully - Quinn’s fear of the beast is so strong that we begin to wonder just how bad this monster can BE, and perhaps most surprisingly of all the answer turns out to be 'even worse.'
For a post-apocalyptic, special effects-laden film, Reign of Fire is curious in the way it attempts to find a balance between epic storytelling and a smaller-scale, more action-based feel. While the film is very much about a last stand against a seemingly all-powerful evil, there aren’t any scenes of hundreds of humans uniting against the beast, and similarly no shots of hundreds of dragons attacking a city. There is very much a middle-ground in Reign of Fire, which is comparable in some ways to director Rob Bowman’s The X-Files movie - a film which teetered between grand-scale filmmaking with its themes and closing shots, and also smaller-scale noirish storytelling, with much of the film involving Mulder and Scully running around the country asking a lot of questions. This draft of Reign of Fire finds a far superior balance between the two styles of filmmaking (a balance probably struck for budget reasons), while also leaving the potential for even larger themes and struggles to be covered in a sequel.
Though occasionally similar to other blockbusters, Reign of Fire is written with a significant enough amount of flare and originality to put it near the top of the list of films to anticipate in 2002. Although this is not the final draft of the script I have reviewed today (there has been at least one more revision by Zak Penn, PCU, Behind Enemy Lines), there is certainly enough quality work already done to insure that this film should be a blockbuster. I have long been awaiting a truly great dragon movie, and I can say with absolute conviction that I think Reign of Fire is it."
(Review submitted by 'Hollyfeld.')
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org
Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.
