Hey folks. Capone in San Diego here with a little preview of the upcoming live-action debut from director Gil Kenan, who made what I consider to be the most entertaining animated film of 2006, MONSTER HOUSE. His follow-up the bold adaptation of the wildly popular book for young adults CITY OF EMBER by author Jeanne Duprau. I'll admit the trailer had me scratching my head as far as what exactly the film was about, but anyone bold enough to cast Bill Murray as an evil politician of a hidden, dying city gets my vote. I'm guessing you'll be hearing a great deal about CITY OF EMBER between now and its October 10 opening, particularly on this site. I know Mr. Beaks took an interesting train ride down to Comic-Con, and will be able to report more on extended scenes of the film that he saw, but until then, here's Gil Kenan. Capone: I have not read this book, but I have a friend who's a teacher who told me that all of her kids have read that book and love it. Gil Kenan: That's so cool. Capone: She told me that a lot of the kids really love and fixate on the problem-solving elements of the story. It seems like it's a great book to get kids to engage their problem-solving minds. GK: Teachers are always looking for outside things to help them create their lesson plans; that's great. Capone: She told me that in the book the problem solving is more of a mental process, so how do you transfer that to a visual medium? GK: That was really my first job on this movie, because it is a word-based puzzle solving. I had to wrap my head around how I was going to create a cinematic puzzle. So it's part of my design process; I literally wove the clues and the massive-scale puzzle solving that has to happen to have our heroes find their way out of the city and into the fabric of the world. I guess there's a tradition for a while in movies where characters would sit down and read stuff for a while on screen, and I guess the only time I can remember that working was THE NEVERENDING STORY, but that's because of the structure of the story itself. That worked. I think every time since then I've seen it on screen, it falls flat. You want to bash your head in because there's nothing more passive as an audience than watching your hero put glasses on or stick a monocle in their eye and read stuff out loud. I knew I had to take it and make it a part of the world. Capone: I can think of a few time when a character opens a book, if it doesn't have creepy, EVIL DEAD-style pictures in it, things can get kind of boring. GK: Right, right. If it's not an illuminated manuscript… [laughs]. We should set a new rule in filmdom now. Capone: The idea of this dying city can be and has been interpreted by some as a comment on society. Are you a city kid? GK: Yeah, and I'm also a place kid. I love the idea of setting being an emotional component of the story. I think it's a really underused dramatic tool in storytelling. Obviously in MONSTER HOUSE… Capone: Sure, you'll gone from a single house to an entire city. Neighborhoods aren't good enough for you! GK: I know, I better pace myself or I'll run out of places to go. But that was an exercise in how to take one building and extract the emotional human relationship that took place there and personify it. Here [with CITY OF EMBER], it's an entire place. One of the things that I did push from the novel is that I really pushed the idea of this as a living, breathing city. There's a generator beneath the streets of the city that's a massive, 10-story structure that's a beating heart. Everywhere throughout the city, there are visual motifs that push the idea that the place is alive and it' dying. Capone: Can you give me some examples of some of the motifs? GK: Yeah, it'll be more interesting when you see it. Simple things like red electrical conduit that vein throughout the city. There is a heartbeat in almost every scene, and the heartbeat falters like it has a cardiovascular disease, and it's loosing beats; there are heart attacks. The city, as far as I'm concerned, is a character in the story. Capone: I know you built these huge sets for this film. Did you actually consult city planners or anybody who might tell you what a city like that might look like and how it would function. GK: As it turns out, I didn't do this purely as research, but I married and architect. [laughs] And I think I did that because I have a real love for buildings; it's something I'm interested in, in general. So my wife was amazing at helping me kind of learn about the history of civic planning. There are so many great examples in this world of cities that were master planned from the ground up. And lived for a few years in Israel, and I always grew up with the idea of kibbutz as a sort of miniature Utopia. That concept is always really fresh in my mind. So taking that Utopia, putting a lid on it, and letting it sort of devolve over 200 years was a really interesting storytelling experiment. Capone: MONSTER HOUSE was one of my favorite animated films in the last 10 years. In fact, that was the film we showed for the very first Ain't It Cool screening in Chicago. GK: I totally remember that. I remember reading the comments from people who were in the theater, and it made me so happy. Capone: So with that film, you've got your motion-capture controlled environment. You're in complete control of what it looks like and how things move. Is it a rough transition to into an live-action environment that's a little less controlled? GK: Yeah, it sucks. I kept wanting the camera to take 90-degree turns around corners, and they were like "The rig can't do that." So we would have to cut holes in walls and someone would have to pull the wall out as the camera passed it. It's stuff that I took for granted. You get spoiled when you can control the frame 100 percent. But I didn't let it stop me; I just had to work harder to get my shots. And it teaches you a discipline that you don't necessarily need to have when you're making a virtual film. I shot MONSTER HOUSE basically in post. I created the performances during the "production," but had months of tweaking to get everything right. But with this film, I had to commit to every shot everyday. It was a long shoot, but I never felt like I had enough time, so I had to really be disciplined and organized. Capone: Are you done with the animated world, or do you see yourself going back and forth? GK: I guess I have two answers to that. One is that that distinction is becoming obliterated. I think that live-action movies, the bigger they are, the more reliant they are on effects and animation, they are essentially glorified animated films. And I also think that we're seeing is that animated film directed, people working in that medium, are really embracing the idea of a camera being a player in the story, rather than the old layout concept, where you would have a setting and then some interesting hijinks would ensue in the frame. Now, the idea of using the camera to tell the story is really being embraced. The stuff we saw in RATATOUILLE and WALL-E and BEOWULF is really pushing the idea of what a camera can do in these stories. Capone: Do you find with non-animated films that the audiences seem to be more impressed when a filmmaker can do something practically? GK: Like IRON MAN, yeah. I made it a real point on EMBER to build. Part of the reason we were halfway across the world in Belfast is because I wanted to build a city. I didn't want this to be a stage extension, green screen shoot. After spending so much of my energy convincing actors that there's a big house chasing them, I wanted to be able to put my energy in other places. And I had Kit West do my on-set visual effects. Kit, who has done RAIDERS and the original STAR WARS films. So he comes from the real, amazing, old-school way of making magic happen on screen. I showed Harry a little bit of footage of a sequence that's completely practical, completely mechanical and that I still can't believe was engineered. It's the reason we do this stuff; it's movie magic. Capone: As someone who has occasionally run into Bill Murray at Cubs games, tell me about working with him. You hear all of these stories about what people have to go through to get him a script. I almost don't believe half of what I hear, but at the same time, I want to believe it. GK: They make it sound really complicated. You want me to tell you the truth or the fantasy? [laughs] Capone: Whatever works. GK: At the end of the day, Bill was a big fan of Caroline's writing [as in screenwriter Caroline Thompson, who also wrote EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, THE ADDAMS FAMILY; THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, and CORPSE BRIDE]. He has been for years. So getting the script to him was my best first move. He really reacted to the story and the character that she wrote. We had a few conversations on the golf course where we realized we were on the same page of this thing. From then it, it was a piece of cake. He was a pro, showed up on time, and got the job done and really created a character. Capone: He's your villain, correct? GK: Oh yeah. He's amazing. Think about it, thought, he's not just a villain. He's a politician villain. So you think about what makes Bill tick and what makes audiences love him. It's his charisma. Even when he's lying to you, you want to eat it up, you want to consume it. Every great politician has that exact trait. That's why I knew he was the only man for the job. Capone: Alright, Gil. Thanks. I can't wait to see this. GK: I'm really hoping we can make it out to Chicago, and if we do, we should try to do a screening out there. I'll talk to the guys. Capone: You know I'm ready for it. GK: We'll figure it out. But it was really good to finally meet you; I've been reading you for years. Capone: Thanks. Take care. -Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
