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Ron's Empire

May 15, 2009 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman

Ron Howard builds his own Vatican.

           

Artists from CIS Vancouver had to create the famous Santa Maria della Vittoria church digitally, since filmmakers weren’t allowed to shoot there, and then set it aflame for a ritualistic murder.
Photo: Zade Rosenthal. © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Reconnais-sance missions

Howard's ambition for Angels & Demons was so great that long before it was officially greenlit, certain members of his team were making plans for creating Rome locations in the event the film got made. Eventually, a rapid-fire shoot in and around Rome would occur to capture many of the film's exteriors and some interiors. But the need to collect reference material for Saint Peter's Square, the Sistine Chapel, and two other famous churches—Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria—required filmmakers to begin an ongoing "speculative photo reconnaissance of locations in Rome," in the words of Bickerton, as far back as 2006, when Howard was still polishing The Da Vinci Code.

"[Executive Producer/Second Unit Director] Todd Hallowell was very prescient when we wound up The Da Vinci Code," Bickerton says. "He and a photographer went to Rome and photographed a lot of key locations back then, since he knew there might be a sequel. We knew shooting in Rome would be even more problematic than shooting in Paris for [The Da Vinci Code]. The speculative photo reconnaissance of Rome allowed us to use some of those images and textures, but it also helped in script writing—it gave [the writers] a photo library to refer to, and let us know which key environments we would have to extend."

Photo: CIS Vancouver © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Those photo missions to Rome continued over the next couple of years—with various artists from CIS Vancouver, in particular, making several trips, since their team would be responsible for digitally building the three key churches where much of the action takes place. These were "almost spy missions," as CIS Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Breakspear puts it, in the sense that film¬makers were free to take photos only as tourists.

Howard admits that he empowered such teams to collect reference in Rome, although he coyly declines to get too specific about what some of the reconnaissance techniques were.

"We knew the Vatican wouldn't be cooperative, but my job was to take people in as authentic a way as possible into [these locations]," he says. "So, we used techniques old and new. I don't want to get into details about [the research trips], but we had a lot of different units going at various times, and we were trying, by hook or by crook, to gather all the visual material we needed to make it exciting and realistic. But as to how the research was gathered—did we steal shots, get permits, sneak in through back doors? I'm not going to say, but I will say it was a very long process."

Howard also greenlit an extensive digital previsualization effort, spearheaded by animatic artist Christopher Glass, while still in production on Frost/Nixon. This process helped the visual-effects team and editors Daniel P. Hanley and Mike Hill launch their efforts before principal photography began.

"When we were still on the mixing stage for Frost/Nixon, Ron had the visual-effects guys send over early previz of the first couple of sequences, including the [film's climactic antimatter] explosion sequence," Hanley says. "Ron wanted me to start getting the feel of those scenes right away. He wanted me to start visualizing how those final sequences might look, and to start tightening some of those initial previz sequences, and so, I went in and made some trims here and there. The explosion sequence was the most concept-oriented sequence in the film, since many of those shots couldn't be filmed practically, so it made sense to get started on the early construction of that sequence."

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