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Although he didnt have
a reputation as a comedy guy, director Brad Silberling loved the idea
of mixing tones with big CG effects for Land
of the Lost.
{sidebar id=1}Based on the classic series created by television icons Sid & Marty Krofft, Land of the Lost showcases a mythical world, filled with dinosaurs, a hairy ape-boy named Chaka and the Sleestak. Feeling it was important to respect the original property while writing a new chapter for the world of Dr. Rick Marshall, Silberling applied his effects experience, from such projects as Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events and Casper, to creating this faraway land that Marshall, Holly (Anna Friel) and Will (Danny McBride) get whisked away to.
At the films press day, Brad Silberling spoke about blending big effects with raunchy humor, and his desire to make a Lemony Snicket animated feature.
Q: How fun and daunting was it to direct a film with lots of CG, action and quick wit?
Brad: Thats what made it exciting. Honestly, the most daunting part of it was dealing with the Sleestak, and thats not even a joke, because theyre so damn slow. Im known to be relatively patient. I am a pretty cool customer. But, those guys drove me to the point of almost losing my mind. I brought it on myself. I really wanted them to be suit performers. I didnt want to just have them be CG beings. They were like Nascar cars. They had to pull in for pit stops. They were effectively blind, poor guys. They were on platform shoes, wearing a wet suit indoors. They had to be hydrated. So, there were two people for every Sleestak. Imagine youve got a big set and youre trying to keep a camera set-up going and then, suddenly, between takes, this army of people came in so that you could pull the eyes out and feed it. I had great sympathy, to a point, and then I was just like, Oh, my God! That was the only daunting part, honestly. The rest of it, oddly enough, was really what got me excited. The idea of really committing to this adventure, with this absurd behavior in the middle of, was really fun to do, and maybe more my sense of humor.
Q: What was the tone you were trying to strike, with the naughty and raunchy humor?
Brad: Just honest and unexpected behavior, coming from emotional memory. I said to (producers) Sid and Marty Krofft, when I met them early on, that Chaka kind of creeped me out. He really did. Will had also been a little creeped out by Chaka. So, when he seemed either a little sketchy or untrustworthy or a little bit repulsive, we thought, Well, why not have them actually act that way because thats what we remember and its not going to be what you expect. I think that was it. It was just to not get too earnest, and have the characters keep surprising each other and the audiences expectations.
Q: Obviously, kids are going to want to see this because of the creatures and Will Ferrell. What age are you aiming for, in an audience?
Brad: Parents have to decide. Innuendo seems to fly over kids heads. One of the things we were excited about was really committing to the photo-realism of these dinosaurs and the action. My daughter is eight, and shes certainly not going to come see the movie. And, my little guy is four, and he would come to the effects house with me and be fascinated by Grumpy, but also would just hit the deck anytime he really came on camera. We set out to make a PG-13 movie, and it was decidedly PG-13. That was there in the script, and it was certainly there at the end. One of the things that we started talking about with everyone at the studio, early on, was just the marketing of that. Theyve been very shrewd about not suddenly going on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon, and suddenly trying to have your cake and eat it too, which is disingenuous.
Q: Why did you always see the character of Holly as being British?
Brad: I remember pitching it to Will, and I explained it pretty simply. I said, Americans have such an inferiority complex that, if we hear a British accent, we think that person must be intelligent. I was half-kidding, but its quite truthful. I said, For this universe of characters to work, Hollys going to be the Girl Friday, but beyond that, for the audience, she has to be the one voice that actually does believe in Rick Marshall. If shes a character that you can just dismiss, then you have nothing to hang onto. So, lets go the other way and have her be British. Shell seem even more bright, grounded and intelligent. It should be Anna Friel. And, they were like, Oh, yeah, absolutely. Im down with that. I had met Anna back in 2000 or 2001, when she was making a trip through town. She had done a very small Irish film, that Barry Levinson directed, and I was always just very knocked out by her spirit.
Q: With the special effects, you obviously updated it quite a bit. Did you ever think about doing anything not quite as advanced?
Brad: You can see that in some of the choices with the Sleestaks. Immediately, we ran through the possibilities. I thought about either doing it Harryhausen style, or doing a crazy version of what the Kroffts did with stop-motion animation and puppetry, but my worry was that, within about 5-10 minutes, it would play itself out. It would feel like a sketch. To me, a lot of the humor in the movie comes from the fact that youve got these characters who make ridiculous choices in the face of actual danger. If youre going to have these bad composite lines or stop-motion, then I thought I wouldnt know how to hang on to the stakes of the movie for 90 minutes. So, it was something we talked about and very quickly moved through. And then, in terms of big animatronic dinosaurs, we would have honestly only been shooting them to try to make them look photo-real, and then we would have still been doing the same thing.
Q: Was there anything you had to cut out because it went a little too far?
Brad: The interesting thing was that, before the film was finished, we took it to the ratings board and we got our PG-13. There were just a couple things that we thought we dont need to go there with, and yet, if we had, it still would have been PG-13. At the movies most extreme, we got a PG-13. Down the line, just for sheer enjoyment, I may try to put together more of an extended directors cut, just because the movie goes so many places and we tried to strike the balance that we did, and there are certainly things that I left behind that I did love.
Q: Whats going to be on the standard DVD or Blu-Ray?
Brad: It will be the picture proper with a good, significant amount of deleted material, along with commentary and then even some of what was part of a couple of deleted scenes, which was a running series of food diaries that Rick Marshall was secretly keeping. When everyone else was sleeping, he would slink off and go and try to narrate this diet that he was trying to sustain, but failing miserably at. I think those will be included, and we might play a little bit with the Easter egg technology, showing a little bit of an extended improv run within a scene, so you can actually toggle on it and see the continuation of a take, in a couple of appropriate moments. Plus, David Pryor, who I work with at DVD Producers, is great. Hes doing a very comprehensive documentary because they were with us, every day.
Q: What stage did you come into this film? Was the script pretty final, and was Will attached already?
Brad: Yeah, Will brought me in. Basically, the Kroffts had been trying, for a number of years, to develop the property as very much a faithful, straight-forward adaptation of their series, and a couple other studios never quite connected. They became clients over at Mosaic Media, which is where Wills managed and, somehow, them bringing their property under that roof got Will excited because Will was like me. He was an original watcher of the show. So, he went to work with a friend of his, Chris Henchey, who is a writer and runs his company, and Dennis McNicholas, who once was running the writers room at SNL. They were all old friends.
They set about writing an initial draft, and that draft had just come in at the time that Will and I sat down to have lunch, to talk about something totally different. We had been friendly for years, but had never worked together, and he asked me if Id be interested in doing Land of the Lost. I read the script and there were great things in it, some of which survived the first draft, but there were also a lot of areas that didnt quite work successfully. So, I said, I think if I were to make the movie, heres what it would need to be and heres what it can be, and they all said, Lets go.
Q: Because your reputation is not as a comedy guy, did you have to prove yourself to get this job?
Brad: No. And yet, the thing that Will and I talked about, at the beginning, was that I love tonal mixes. This is an odd tonal mix. I did a very small, intimate film that was a comedic drama, called 10 Items or Less. With the films Ive done in the past, comedy is always built in somewhere, but its never usually just an overt, broad comedy. I would say, for the most part, domestic broad comedies have just not been of interest to me. Theyre not cinematic enough. Thats why this is probably the closest youll see me get to that. But, Will and I had known each other. Wills manager also works with Jim Carrey, so we all knew each other from Lemony Snicket. So, there was no real proving ground. It just seemed like a good meeting place for what we all do.
Q: When youre doing a film thats this big and costs this much money with this many extras, how much ad-libbing can you really allow to happen?
Brad: If you plan properly, the best spent money is giving the actors the room. The trap is when it gets incredibly formal with the special effects. I have enough experience with effects that I know the tricks, which actually allowed me to give them greater freedom. Its also why we built sets the scope that we did. I didnt want those guys to be afraid to bounce off of something. I look at actors doing 100% green screen work, and they always look constipated because theyre afraid to embarrass themselves. They dont know where to look and they dont really know whats going to be there, so theyre safer not really reacting. If you think back, over the last five or six years, to some major effects-driven movies, where you see performers, who would otherwise think are wildly alive, just be sort of dead. So, thats all part of my job. Improvisation doesnt take long, unless youre aimless and you dont have a goal. The great thing with Will is that he comes from such a good improv background with The Groundlings that theres always an intention. And, Danny McBride is a screenwriter, so theres always a path and a stated goal to the improvs. Its not just wanking around. So, that protects that time.
Q: How did you get Matt Lauer involved in this film? Didnt you originally want Stephen Hawking?
Brad: Yeah. Honestly, there was a possibility that he might have been. In its original conception, it was going to basically be a little round table interview on The Today Show, including maybe Stephen Hawking, and his daughter was quite helpful. Hawking loves comedy and loves a lot of great comedians, and hes a fan of Wills. It was very apparent that, for his schedule and health, it was going to be very tricky to pull off. We kicked around a few other possibilities, but then we thought the greatest, simple, truthful thing would be to let him just be a guest of Matt Lauers. Of course, we were channeling some other troublesome guests hes had, in the last couple years. We let him just deal with it, and it was really funny. Lauer was incredible. A lot of what youre seeing in the scene was completely improv-ed, on his part.
Q: Casper was pretty trailblazing for the amount of effects that it had at the time. Is the technology getting easier to work with?
Brad: Whats interesting about Casper was already we were a little more untethered. We only had a couple of motion control shots. When Steven Spielberg came by, on the second week of filming, he laughed and said, If you knew what you were getting yourself into, you would have never said yes to the job. He had just done Jurassic Park two years before that, and there were about 56 dinosaur shots, creating photo-realistic animation. He said, My dinosaurs didnt have to do 60-second monologues, and thats what was going on with Casper. We were creating fully CG characters, who had to perform and have dialogue sync, and all that. When I signed up for that task, nobody had quite yet done that, so I learned with the best of them. We all discovered it together. Its a little bit of a fallacy to say that the tools have gotten that much more nimble. What has improved vastly is the number of talented CG animators there are. The dirty little secret, back when we were doing Casper, was that there were not enough CG animators to fill the room. They were hiring kids out of school, quietly behind the door, and then presenting them to me. So, the speed with which we got to early, very assured takes with the animation, on Land of the Lost, was what impressed me. Normally, the iterations youd have to get to, to hone in on a performance, we got to exponentially quicker. That, to me, is the leap from 1995. There is a vast new generation of kids who have trained to do just this job.
Q: You mentioned that 10 Items or Less was a film that you found a different way for getting out there. Did that inspire you on future projects to say, Okay, it doesnt just need to go into 2,000 theaters?
Brad: Yes and no. The outcome on the 10 Items experiment had to do with my own expectations. It was two weekends out in cinemas, and then available for download on the third weekend. The hard part, which we knew going in, but I think everyone underestimated, was the true fear of exhibitors. We were locked out. The Landmark chain, for understandable reasons, because of its owner, Mark Cuban, was supportive, and there was another chain that was supportive. The rest were like, At all costs, do not support the movie, because they dont want to see the demise of their window, which theres a certain degree of inevitability for. But, the selfish filmmaker in me, that loves a communal experience for my movies, isnt so quick to want to see that go away. Thats not to say I wouldnt do another film of that budget or size, but I would still be thinking hard about what the window is, based on when Im bringing the movie out. If two years from now, suddenly its all switched up and changed, fabulous. The only thing I regretted was that, other than at our festivals, I missed some of the theatrical experience.
Q: What is Lost Boys of Sudan?
Brad: Lost Boys of Sudan is a film that we hope to someday get made. Its been something thats been with me for about six or seven years. Its very tricky. Lost Boys of Sudan is a narrative drama, based on the actual story of the lost boys of Sudan, who are a group of Sudanese refugees. The Darfur genocide is really replicating a similar story that happened back in the late 80's, in that country, where kids caught in the middle of what amounted to Civil War, were orphaned between ages 5 and 11, and kids older than that were executed with their fathers. These kids just had to survive on their own, for an extraordinary journey. Many of them have come to the United States through a program that the U.N. sponsored, and they had to begin to create lives as American citizens, which is surreal. So, its a great story. In this economy and in the world of cinema today, its a very challenging thing to get done well and to get done right, so well see how it happens.
Q: Is it true that you want to animate Lemony Snicket? How would that work?
Brad: It would work in the simple acknowledgement that we really had a hope of trying to go off and make another movie. And then, even before this divorce of Paramount and DreamWorks, there had been a big stall, in terms of trying to put a sequel together, for any number of reasons, and I remember getting so frustrated and bored by it that I thought by the time we can actually make another live action movie, these kids are going to have so outgrown themselves that it would just be odd and icky. Its not a case like with the Harry Potter films, where theyve been banging them out so that, even though Daniel Radcliffe is probably ready to get beyond graduate school, he can still pull it off. In this case, its ridiculous. It would never happen with our original two actors. And so, that made me think that the only way that series would work is if the reveal was that the first film was just a dramatization using actors, and now hes going to show you the real thing, and that real thing would end up actually being a stop-motion world.
Q: Would Jim Carrey still have any involvement?
Brad: It would depend on when were doing it. Jim was the first to be so disappointed by how long everything was taking. So, one would hope, but in that case, it would probably in voice more than anything else.
Q: Would you want to direct an animated Lemony Snicket, or would that go to someone else?
Brad: God, no. Id selfishly hang onto that, absolutely. I love the spirit of that series, and the idea of doing something stop-motion thats got great, odd texture to it, and could even allow for briefer storytelling, would be exciting.
Q: Obviously it depends on how this film does, but do you envision a sequel to this? Has there been any talk yet about it?
Brad: I think what everybody has learned, on any of the larger movies, is that you have to wait and see how it does. I do know that, without a doubt, this was the most pleasurable experience Ive had on a film of this size. It was heading a small troupe that, even though the scale of the film was large. Every day, it was the same group of three or four of us, and everybody enjoyed each other and the work felt as effortless as it can be, given what is going on. I would certainly entertain it again, with the right story and the right way to do it. It was a real pleasure.
LAND OF THE LOST opens in theaters June 5th.
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