Paul W.S. Anderson on Creating George R.R. Martin’s World

“I love fairytales. I love the Hans Christian Andersen version of ‘The Little Mermaid’ where she dies at the end.”

Even with his adoration though, it’s taken Paul W.S. Anderson more than three decades to make a fantasy feature. The cult filmmaker has ventured into just about every other genre — often juggling a few at once, as with the zombie action and corporate dystopia of the “Resident Evil” series, or the occult horror and space exploration of “Event Horizon.” But a medieval story of knaves and nymphs had eluded him until his new feature “In the Lost Lands,” an adaptation of a George R.R. Martin short story.

A “be careful what you wish for” parable with bleak, bloody consequences, the film stars Dave Bautista as Boyce, a royal-employed hunter that enlists the abilities of wish-granter Gray Alys (Milla Jovovich, perfectly cast as a figure Martin’s story describes as “a slender, small, somehow ageless woman with wide gray eyes.”)

“I was always a kid that loved to read. I excelled in Greek mythology, Egyptian and Norse myths. I feel like I was preparing to play a character like Gray Alys my whole life,” Jovovich says. “She’s compelled to grant people wishes, but she understands that it’s a curse. That made me understand how vulnerable she is, and how isolating that would be.”

The two lone wolves traverse a wasteland of vast canyons, derelict cityscapes and blazing oil fields, digitally rendered on blue screens. While that’s become industry-standard for genre epics, Anderson was intent to avoid technical limitations that he’s seen other modern productions bump against.

“It’s a problem a lot of even very expensive movies fall into. If you shoot the actor against a blue screen and you don’t really know what the background is going to be, how can you light the foreground to match the background? The answer is, you can’t,” Anderson says. “So people do this rather generic blue screen lighting where you can see everything, because you don’t want to lose detail. But what it means is you never really get dramatic lighting on the actor.”

The production developed a unique “star-field tracking” system for its studio space, with about 350 reference points in the ceiling — “like an old-timey sailing ship, where you’d navigate according to the stars,” Anderson describes.

“The guys were literally writing code for it the day before we shot,” Anderson says. “Each live-action camera had another camera mounted on it, looking upward at the star-field. If it could see about 35 stars, it knew exactly where it was in space on our virtual set.”

Using those reference points, the camera could be oriented in the digital world, composited and rendered on set by the Unreal Engine. Prior to principal photography, Anderson spent more than a year working with his VFX supervisor Dennis Berardi to develop the full look and scope of the Lost Lands.

“By the time we came to set, the world was there,” Jovovich says. “In the 20 feet around us, we had practical effects. Everything outside of that was blue screen, but you could watch playback and actually see the world. That made it so much more tangible for me as an actor.”

“All the work that traditionally gets done in post-production, we were doing in pre-production. Those locations had to exist beforehand, in a way that we could walk around them and say, ‘Let’s frame over here,’” Anderson says. “In Unreal Engine, you can alter the position of the sun. Then the DP could alter the position of his light on set. The two images would be instantly married together. That’s how we did the opening action scene with Dave, where he’s in silhouette. We were making real-time, bold lighting decisions because we were able to.”

“It didn’t feel like a big film while we were filming it. It felt very small and intimate,” Bautista says. “I had everything that I needed there in my immediate surroundings.”

“Even though Dave and Milla are very experienced standing in front of a green screen and acting to a tennis ball, it’s not the ideal way to work. Being married to an actor, I know this,” Anderson says. (The director and Jovovich wed in 2009 and have made seven films together.) “The environment evokes an emotional response from actors; to rob them of that environment robs them of that response.”

The technical approach afforded Bautista and Jovovich more freedom in their performances than a visual effects-heavy production usually can. The pair’s intimate, evolving interplay carries “In the Lost Lands” from one set piece to another, and provides the story a disarming, emotional undercurrent.

The kinship was so vibrant that Anderson was inspired to alter the original ending of Martin’s stories. The director is no stranger to tough test screenings. (Paramount’s efforts to spin a summer blockbuster out of the demonic terrors of “Event Horizon” are well-discussed.) But Anderson’s nerves were never higher than showing the film to Martin.

“The very ending was something that we changed while shooting,” Anderson says. “Sitting at George’s in Santa Fe is the most stressed I’ve ever been in a cinema. … That moment where he turned around at the end of the movie —  and he’s got very good comic timing —and stares at me. I have no idea what he’s thinking. Then he goes, ‘I love it!’ I went from being the most stressed I’ve ever been to probably the best I’ve ever felt in the cinema.”

The amount of blue screen shots in “In the Lost Lands” is a new technique for you. Why did you choose the approach?

It entirely came out of George’s story, really. Reading it, the Lost Lands were sentient. It was like walking into the Overlook Hotel and going, “Oh, my God, it’s alive.” It was a whole haunted landscape. That’s why I thought it was the correct approach. Although it’s set in the future, society has really fallen back into a feudal state, which suggested to me period paintings. I wanted the movie to have a painterly look to it. It should look like the graphic novel that Hieronymus Bosch never wrote.

There are other established effects technologies, like the 360 degrees of LED screens that comprise The Volume. Why not use those?

For me, the problem with the Volume is that you have to make big decisions beforehand about camera moves. If your actors go, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this scene, and I’d like to go over there,” then all the all the technos go, “No no, you can’t do that. We haven’t built that.” It robs the actors of a lot of their creativity. For me, there’s visual effects magic, but the real magic on set is the actors, when they bring their insight to the scenes.

It’s my understanding that the approach “In the Lost Lands” took was less expensive too.

It’s certainly more cost-effective than shooting against a virtual wall. The problem with those is you’re stuck with what you shoot. If you don’t like it, then you have to turn it into a visual effect. Now you’re paying twice. You’re paying for the very expensive wall — because the studio rental is huge and you’re hoping that’s going to be justified by getting the image in-camera. But if the seam up between the wall and the floor isn’t correct, or if one of those LED cubes goes out and there are black cubes floating in the background, or if the wall is too sharp and you can’t defocus it enough, then it becomes a visual effect anyway. You’re paying for the wall and the visual effect. And you’re limiting, in my opinion, the creativity on set. Maybe that works for some filmmakers. Both Dave and Milla are big presences and I wanted their input into the blocking; most of the time that only happens on the day, so I felt loath to make decisions on their behalf. That’d deny the input they can bring.

Even avoiding those issues, did the production face its own technical problems?

The riggers had to figure out this system where we had a blue screen that would literally move up and down, like a portcullis in a castle. It allowed our DP to position the lights exactly where he wanted. That was a pretty amazing piece of construction, because that stuff just doesn’t exist. You’ve got to build that. It’s the “greatest train set” that Orson Welles talked about.

The visuals you ended up with are unlike anything in your previous films. Do you see yourself shooting another movie this way?

I wouldn’t say I’m married to it. I loved developing the technology and I loved the look that we got. But it’s a very specific look. It’s a great tool for a certain kind of story and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. And it was pretty bulletproof once we started shooting. We shot it in about 43 days, which, for a movie that has such a big look, is pretty amazing.

George R.R. Martin’s original story isn’t very long. What inspired you to add elements like Christian iconography and Western gunfights?

In George’s work, he’s very fascinated with church and state — the animosity between those two. And in bad times, people definitely embrace religion. And graphically, it’s very striking. I liked Deirdre [Mullins] playing the Enforcer because she brings that Spanish Inquisition vibe to it. She had a nice head of hair before she reported to set. George’s story also has a lot of tropes of spaghetti Westerns. It’s about two characters that don’t necessarily trust one another, that betray one another. But they learn to appreciate one another. That’s the model for “A Few Dollars More” and “Two Mules for Sister Sara.”

You’re already moving along on your next feature, an adaptation of Sega’s “House of the Dead” video game franchise.

The script is almost done. We’re aiming to shoot in the fourth quarter of this year. I’m really going to push the envelope on this one. It’s going to be something different for me.

Is this a full-tilt horror film? You haven’t really made one since “Event Horizon” in 1997.

Yes, exactly that. It’s going to be immersive and very, very scary. It’ll all play out in real time, so it reflects the experience of playing the video game. The only time it stops is when you beat the game or you die. That’s going to be the only way out.