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MillimeterRon's Empire
May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
Ron Howard builds his own Vatican.
“There was a really great moment where we all looked at each other and realized how cinematically complicated, and more ambitious, this movie would be on a visual level.”—Ron Howard
Photo: Zade Rosenthal. © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
The schedule and the technical complexity of Angels & Demons were among the most challenging of Ron Howard's directorial career. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Howard calls the time he spent making the movie "a particularly fascinating creative period in my life."
Howard is referring to transitioning out of the acclaimed Frost/Nixon and into Angels & Demons—a big-budget thriller taking place in revered, exotic locations throughout the Vatican and based on the hit novel from Dan Brown. The Angels & Demons production schedule was originally changed as a result of the Hollywood writers' strike, and that change gave Howard and his team a better chance to strategically plan visuals for the film while Frost/Nixon was still in production. That planning time was necessary since this was a film on a much grander scale than Frost/Nixon or The Da Vinci Code.
"[Frost/Nixon and Angels & Demons] are movies with totally different tones and scales that are largely diametrically opposed," Howard says. "And yet, in an odd way, they ended up influencing each other in positive ways. I was intrigued to see how the aesthetic of one was influencing the other during the process. It was stimulating for me. The link is that both stories are essentially un¬orthodox suspense stories, and I'm trying to extract as much attention out of them as possible, to draw the audience into the event. I developed Frost/Nixon to work visually in opposition to its origin as a stage play, and that idea applied to what I wanted to do with Angels & Demons, because it is a contemporary story that unfolds with urgency and immediacy in an ancient place. The camera work feels urgent and real and becomes sort of a character, which is something we did in both films."
If Frost/Nixon was this project's fraternal twin, then The Da Vinci Code was its biological parent—not only because of the similarity of themes and because both stories were authored by Dan Brown, but also because The Da Vinci Code informed the filmmakers' mindset regarding the central technical challenge of the project. That challenge: how to realistically visualize locations they had no hope of ever filming in, such as the Sistine Chapel. On a smaller scale, The Da Vinci Code posed some of those similar challenges, and Howard's team ported over and expanded solutions from that film and applied them to Angels & Demons.
"The Da Vinci Code approach emboldened us," Howard says. "We knew early on that there would be a degree of creating locations and that if we couldn't get into a church, we could build sets and digitally create pieces of it. We did that a couple of times in The Da Vinci Code, and it worked really well. We had here the same visual-effects supervisor, Angus Bickerton, and the same visual-effects producer [Barry Mendel], and they had a very good idea, going back to before the script was finished, about how we could do this. There was a really great moment where we all looked at each other and realized how cinematically complicated, and more ambitious, this movie would be on a visual level."
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.