Background Kerry Conran grew up on films and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s. His parents encouraged him and his brother Kevin to develop their creative sides. He studied at a feeder program for
Disney animators at
CalArts and became interested in 2-D
computer animation. While there, he realized it was possible to apply some of the techniques associated with animation to live-action. Two years later, it seemed apparent to him that
Hollywood would never take a chance on an inexperienced, first-time filmmaker, so he decided to make the movie himself. Geddes also designed an
Airliner Number 4 that was to fly from Chicago to London. Another key influence was
Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the
1939 New York World's Fair who designed bridges and huge housing complexes. commissioned to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the
1916 Zoning Resolution. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book
The Metropolis of Tomorrow (
Dover Publications, 2005, ). Regarding the 1939 New York World's Fair itself and its futuristic theme of the World of Tomorrow, Conran noted: "... obviously the title refers to the World Expo and the spirit of that was looking at the future with a sense of optimism and a sense of the whimsical, you know, something that we've lost a lot in our fantasies. We're more cynical, more practical, ... I think what this film attempts to do is to take that enthusiasm and innocence and celebrate it-to not get mired in the practicality that we're fixated upon today." Conran acknowledged his debt to
German Expressionism, which was particularly evident in the opening scenes in New York City: "Early German cinema was born of just a completely different aesthetic than what we see nowadays. One of the last things I watched before starting this project was the
Dr. Mabuse series that
Lang had doneterribly inspirational, the use of art and propaganda even." Both pay homage to the 1941
Superman animated short
The Mechanical Monsters.
Teaser trailer In 1994, Conran began assembling moviemaking tools, including a
bluescreen in his living room. 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, Kerry and his brother 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-fashioned movie serial on his
Macintosh IIci personal computer. Once 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 movie. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the movie.
Pre-production Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay, which included numerous genre-related references and homages, 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. The producer realized that "the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, which would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio." Avnet convinced
Aurelio De Laurentiis, through his company
Filmauro, to finance the film without a distribution deal (
Paramount Pictures would later acquire worldwide distribution rights to the film). 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 set up a custom digital effects studio with a blue screen soundstage in an abandoned building in
Van Nuys, California. A group of almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live action footage yet to be filmed. The entire movie was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as computer-generated 3D animatics with all of the 2D background photographs digitally painted to resemble the 1939 setting. With the animatics as a guide, grids were created to map camera and actor movements with digital characters standing in for the real actors. The grids were made into actual maps on the blue screen stage floor to help the actors move around invisible scenery. Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins in
Los Angeles 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, such as
Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not (1944) 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. and working on three blue screens, mainly on Stage 2 (George Lucas Stage) at
Elstree Studios in
London, England with one notable exception. Conran wrote a scene that was added later in which Polly talks to her editor in his office that was shot on a physical set because there was no time to shoot it on a blue screen soundstage. Most of the post-production work was done on Mac workstations using
After Effects for compositing and Final Cut Pro for editing (seven workstations were dedicated to visual effects and production editing). The distinctive look of the film was achieved by running footage through a diffusion filter and then tinting it in black and white before color was blended, balanced and added back in.
Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989, posthumously appears as the villain and
mad scientist Dr.
Totenkopf. His likeness was produced using digitally manipulated archival
BBC footage of the actor and thus adding one more film to his repertoire. A similar technique was used two years later in
Superman Returns (2006) with
Marlon Brando. Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the movie by first moving its release date from mid-2004, one week before
Spider-Man 2, to September. He courted the Internet press and finally made an appearance at
San Diego Comic-Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advance buzz. ==Soundtrack==