Cinefex Weekly Update | Issue 12

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Article by Jody Duncan & Joe Fordham

In director Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman plumbs a consciousness-bending story about a man, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who attempts to ease the pain of a breakup by undergoing a procedure that will erase all memories of the relationship from his mind. Joel's attempts to interrupt the erasure mid-procedure -- all from within his subconscious -- set the story in a world that is part reality, part waking dream.

That surreal world was the stuff of visual effects, more than 100 realized by Custom Film Effects. Buzz Image Group took on only 16 shots, but each was a critical depiction of Joel's altered mind as, one by one, his memories of Clementine (Kate Winslet) are deconstructed, abstracted and, finally, erased.

The memory abstractions are sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle. In a sequence early in the film, Joel -- in his car -- follows Clementine as she walks angrily down a sidewalk. "This was a hand-held, non-effects shot," said Buzz visual effects supervisor Louis Morin, "but in the scene, Jim Carrey says a line about everything falling apart -- and Michel wanted to emphasize that feeling." To visually support the idea of a world falling apart, Gondry suggested removing one of Clementine's legs in the scene. "I said: 'Okay, it's possible -- but this is a swish-pan, and it is going to be so fast, nobody will see it.' But he wanted to try it; so we replaced Clem's real legs with CGI legs, did 3D tracking and remodeled the sidewalk she was walking on."

The first attempt at the shot bore out Morin's initial concerns. "Nobody could see it," said Morin, "because it was so fast. I asked if they had a longer take of Clem walking, and they did -- but in that one, she wasn't turning her head properly. So we combined takes in the swish-pan, tracked the head from the first take onto Clem in the longer take, and put in a whole CGI background." In that background, a car crashes behind a fence, unnoticed by Clem. "That was a CGI car and a CGI fence. It was a shocking event to keep the audience on their toes, to say, 'Look -- some pretty unusual things will be shown to you in this movie.'"

Joel jumps out of his car and runs up and down the block -- his car, magically, situated at both ends. The shot required two months of Inferno time at Buzz. "We had to track all the shots," Morin commented, "four takes, going from one side of the street to the other. Everything was shot hand-held, so we had to use 3D tracking, and then create transitions. There's a lamppost and a mailbox there, and we switched from one take to the other, flipping the image so it was a mirror effect as he was running back and forth. It was partly a morph, switching speed, retracking shots into one another. It's not 100% seamless, but pretty close, considering that everything was shot hand-held and the perspective was off. We had to freeze-frame the shot, track it manually and reposition camera projections. We also erased signs and interiors of the stores along the street using matte-painted projections."

The street scene ends with Joel falling down, only to bounce up, rewind-style, onto a sofa in his apartment where he eats takeout Chinese food with Clem. Buzz took reverse footage of Carrey falling from a sofa, filmed on the street, and combined it with an element of Carrey seated on the same sofa in the apartment set. "We used an Elastic Reality morph for that," said Morin. "We also had to add CG chopsticks in his hand. He had actually held real chopsticks in the plate with Clem; but for this shot, we had to remove them and put in CGI ones that would match the chopsticks in his hand when he initially falls."

In another scene, Joel and Clem sit in a car, watching a drive-in movie from outside the establishment's fence, inventing their own dialogue for the characters on the screen. As the memory is erased, Clem and the car flicker in and out. The fence then disappears, slat by slat, chasing after Joel and Clem in the animation style of Norman McLaren's National Film Board of Canada. Carrey and Winslet were shot in a real car -- once with Winslet inside and once without, to capture elements for the flicker effect. Buzz then replaced the car with a CGI car as the characters run out of the vehicle. "We modeled different parts of the car," said Morin, "then sliced away the 3D objects, like an MRI brain slice." Buzz also created the fence animation by removing the fence in the live-action plates and replacing it with matte paintings rendered in Photoshop and projected onto 3D geometry.

Buzz's biggest shot is near the end of the film, when a house on the beach in Long Island -- the setting of a pivotal moment in the couple's relationship -- crumbles, a visual metaphor for Joel's losing grasp of Clementine. Buzz began work on the shot based on Gondry's first directive to create a stop-motion look; then revised the approach to include more real-time elements such as animated bricks falling from the chimney, tracked into a CGI house. "Michel thought that was going in the right direction -- but he wanted more," said Morin. "So we found some reference footage of real houses collapsing, and then animated the whole house with hard-body dynamics. What you see is a house collapsing in four seconds -- all CG."

The surreal images in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- digital effects sprinkled with in-camera and forced perspective gags, all achieved without the use of bluescreen or motion control -- sprang from a filmmaker who approaches visual effects more as a magician than a technician. "A magician makes you look at one place while the trick is happening somewhere else," said Morin. "Michel does that with effects. You expect an effect at one point in a shot, but the effect is already done by the time you get there. He fools you -- and that's part of his cleverness. Everything is possible in his mind."

Compiled by Joe Fordham

3000 Degrees: The Hollywood Reporter announced that Ed Harris and Woody Harrelson have signed on to star in this Imagine Entertainment production for Warner Brothers, directed by Danny Boyle. The film, adapted from a nonfiction book by Sean Flynn, is about a tragic Massachusetts fire that claimed the lives of six firefighters in 1999. Billy Crudup is also in negotiations to join the project.
Spider-Man 2: Sony Pictures has announced that it will debut its new 2-1/2-minute Spider-Man 2 trailer during NBC's The Apprentice, on Thursday, April 8. The trailer will air about 40 minutes into the program. The trailer will also begin its run in movie theaters on Friday, April 9. Spider-Man 2 reunites cast and filmmakers from the first film, including stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, and director Sam Raimi. The screenplay for the sequel is by two-time Academy Award winner Alvin Sargent.
Napoleon: Variety reports two period epics are in development concerning the life of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Al Pacino -- who was long rumored to be one of filmmaker Stanley Kubrick's choices to play the diminutive despot in his unrealized 1969 production -- is slated to star as Bonaparte in The Monster of Longwood, an adaptation of Staton Rabin's novel about Napoleon's final years in exile, adapted by Michael Tolkin and Paul Auster, directed by Patrice Chéreau and produced by Howard Rosenman. Shooting is scheduled to begin this fall in the Isle of Man and Fiji, for a 2005 Miramax release. Lions Gate Films is meanwhile developing Napoleon and Betsy, written by Rebecca Kennedy and Melanie Johansson, to star Scarlett Johansson, produced by Alexandra Milchan and Gilles Arondeau. Variety states Rosenman is attempting to halt Betsy, due to alleged copyright conflicts, one of which is that Kennedy wrote the first draft of Longwood.
A Scanner Darkly: Variety has confirmed that Stephen Soderbergh's and George Clooney's Section Eight Productions will be bringing Philip K. Dick's novel to the screen as an animated film, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Keanu Reeves. Linklater has adapted Dick's futuristic novel, published in 1977, which concerns the attempts of a strung-out undercover narcotics agent to infiltrate an even more strung-out community of junkies. The film will be rotoscoped from high-definition video of live-action performances and animated to surreal, impressionistic and often stream-of-consciousness effect, in the style of Linklater's Waking Life, by animators Bob Sabiston and Tommy Pallotta. The Warner Independent Pictures release will start production in May.
King Kong: The Hollywood Reporter states that comedian Jack Black has joined the cast of Peter Jackson's upcoming King Kong remake. Black will play Carl Denham, the filmmaker and showman who travels to Skull Island accompanied by Broadway actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts), attempting to capture the Eighth Wonder of the World. Jackson stated: "I've been wanting to work with Jack Black ever since I saw him in High Fidelity... He's a smart and versatile actor blessed with an abundance of energy and charm, and I'm absolutely thrilled that he is joining us on Kong. I look forward to seeing Carl Denham come to life in this new version of the story, and I have no doubt Jack will make him a truly memorable character." Variety also reports that Adrien Brody is in negotiations to play Jack Driscoll, former World War I pilot and love interest of Ann Darrow, the last major role for the film -- not including the hirsute title star, of course.
Hellboy: Click here for more red devil fun, with makeup artists Chad Waters, Bart Mixon, Matt Rose, Jake Garber and foam latex friends displaying Hellboy effects at a recent press junket, described in detail at CHUD.com.
Batman Begins: Batman-on-Film.com reports Warner Brothers fifth Batman feature, now in production in England, will use Tilbury Fort in Essex as a location for the Dark Knight's Bat Cave and an airship hangar at Cardington in Bedfordshire for Gotham City filming. The airship hangars formerly housed R100 and the R101 dirigibles in the 1930s. Elsewhere in Gotham, Aintitcoolnews.com had this to say about the new Batmobile, on display here at a Warner Brothers teaser site for the film: "This is the vehicle that's described in the [David] Goyer script. This is The Tumbler, built as a bridging vehicle for the military, then never used. Goyer describes it the first time we see it as 'a cross between a Lamborghini Countach and a Humvee. Sandy camouflage, stealth-angled paneling and variable-angle flaps across the back.' It can do a rampless jump at 100 mph…"
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. and John Goldwyn are producing this remake for Paramount, based on the 1947 Danny Kaye picture about a daydreaming accountant with an overbearing mother, who imagines himself as a great adventurer in a fantasy world. DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg are no longer involved, although Jim Carrey is still possibly slated to star.
The Return of the King: Dark Horizons reports that composer Howard Shore has completed music scoring for the extended edition of the final chapter in Peter Jackson's The Lord of The Rings, and the running time is -- drum roll please -- 4 hours and 10 minutes.
The Day After Tomorrow: Click here for a handful of new images at RopeofSilicon.com featuring huddled masses in spectacularly inclement weather conditions from Roland Emmerich's upcoming disaster movie.
The Science of Sleep: Click here for a shagadelic Nerve.com interview with French director Michel Gondry discussing carnal aspects of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and his next feature, The Science of Sleep, which explores a similar, intriguingly warped vein. To quote Gondry: "The main character develops a technique to control his dreams. He's in love with a girl, and he tries to use the dream to be with her in a way. But even in the dream, it doesn't work. He gets so involved in his dream that he gets stuck between the dream and real life. And the people in the dream don't want him to wake up, because they're afraid he won't come back to the dream and they won't exist anymore... It's very personal, and I wrote the screenplay."

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