Back when the teaser trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow reached theatres in 2004, audiences weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Yes, the images of 90-foot-tall robots stomping through the streets of New York were very cool, as were the shots of World War II flyers battling bizarre flying aircraft. It was also impressive that Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and “Academy Award Winner” Angelina Jolie were starring in it, but at the same time, there was something odd (albeit appealing) in a look that was fairly distinctive from other films of the time, not quite black and white and also far from full color.
As it turns out, that look in Sky Captain comes from the fact that everything but the cast is completely computer-generated. It’s a point that was exciting while simultaneously rife with skepticism, simply because at that time most live-action movies that depended almost entirely on computer-generated backgrounds and elements had a mixed history at best, with story and characters often being overwhelmed by the efforts of computer technicians.
“If I were an audience sitting there watching the trailer, knowing how certain films played out in the past, I’d be skeptical, too,” offers writer/director Kerry Conran in an exclusive interview conducted at the time of release, who made his big-screen debut with Sky Captain – certainly an impressive, if not intimidating, beginning for someone’s career. “People are understandably suspicious of the overuse of CG and that sort of thing, and the apparent limitations of shooting on blue screen. This has all the warning signs of that. But we approached it a lot differently. The story and the characters were very key. This was not something that was approached just for the sake of technology. The style certainly was something that was a very conscious thing and an important part of the overall experience, but we all know that if you don’t like the characters and the story doesn’t engage you, it’s really a pointless and fruitless affair.
“One thing we can point to,” he adds, “is the fact that Jude and Gwyneth are not prone to get involved with projects that don’t have something for them to do. They approached the acting more like theater, because if you went into this film expecting the traditional conventions of filmmaking, you’d be disappointed or lost. They knew what we were doing when they were getting into this, so they were never searching or trying to make sense of this or struggling with it. Jude has said he found the experience kind of liberating. He had to make you believe that you were seeing what he was seeing. You’ll never not believe he’s where he is at any given time. We were sensitive of this going in and wanted to make this the best film we could and have you quickly forget about how it was being made.”
There wasn’t a lot to go on in terms of the film’s storyline, and Conran himself wasn’t exactly forthcoming. Not that he was trying to be difficult, but it’s simply something he had a difficult time boiling down to its basic essence. As he admits, he’s probably not the best person in the world to ask to describe the plotline of Sky Captain.
“I’m so involved with the thing that I’ve never had to distill it down to one sentence,” he explains. “Tonally and just in terms of the characters, the films I was most trying to emulate were actually films like The Thin Man, which is probably one of my favorites. It stays away from what might be falsely interpreted as camp and that sort of thing. The film owes more to the classic film noir and in that regard the story in the film itself is really sort of a mystery. Essentially it begins with this event – in this case, it happens to be 90-foot tall robots that find their way into New York City, and that’s when we first meet Polly Perkins, the reporter played by Gwyneth Paltrow. She follows the story back to the Flying Legion. Jude Law plays a guy named Joe Sullivan, sometimes referred to as Sky Captain.
“Essentially, it’s the two of them trying to unravel the mystery of what happened – who sent the robots, why are they here, what are they doing here? There are subsequent events that take place that lead them on their way. The story itself is basically them in search of the man who is responsible for this whole thing and it follows their adventure, the people they meet and the various places they travel in search of this. In that regard it’s not unlike The Wizard of Oz or Apocalypse Now in the sense that it’s a story about the two of them locked in a mystery, trying to find this man. We learn of course that they have a past together and they’ve not seen or spoken to each other in three years. We also learn that they basically had these sorts of adventures in the past. The film itself hints at things in the past and why they had their falling out and that sort of thing. It ultimately converges with Angelina Jolie’s character, who played a role in the past with them. Without giving very much in the way of specifics, that’s basically the sense of the movie.”
As has been the case with virtually every filmmaker who has ever lived, Conran’s interests and influences in film were formed throughout his life as he was exposed to different film stories over the course of his life. In explaining the initial inspiration for this particular project, he noted, “I had kind of grown up watching movies from the 1930s and ‘40s. I think it was the local stations in town where I grew up, which broadcast those films. So I was watching films as diverse as Howard Hawks films to The Philadelphia Story to Only Angels Have Wings, and then all the science fiction B movies that were made in that era, including things like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Plus, there were the weekly movie serials, because the serials were probably the first attempt to take comic books and adapt them to film. They managed to make people fly, they still managed to do all sorts of things that, for the time, was also equally quite ambitious with no money. They were only limited by technology of the time, but that didn’t really stop them.
"So that was the first time you got to see certain things – even Superman and Captain Marvel were early serials. Those filmmakers really embraced them. The other thing about serials was that when I set out to do this film on my own, I found the idea of trying to make a hundred-minute movie myself daunting and nearly impossible. But given that serials are made in chapters, I found it somehow psychologically easier that I could pull off five short films. Each one would have been a success. Getting through chapter one would have been a milestone for me. That’s essentially what I created in the short f ilm, about half of chapter one. Sky Captain was an opportunity to take all of those things that I loved growing up, which also inspired and gave birth to films like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I equally love, and kind of do my own version of them. I wanted to do something a little bit different by taking advantage of where we had progressed in terms of the available technology.”
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, in the words of its creator, began with “baby steps.” His original intention when he came up with the story idea and developed new computer software that would more seamlessly combine people with computer generated environments, was considerably less ambitious than they are now. In fact, he originally conceived Sky Captain as a low-budget independent movie rather than a summer blockbuster.
“My goals early on was much less ambitious on one hand when compared to a studio film,” he says. “They were very ambitious in terms of independent films. I was simply trying to use some of the tools that were available on the high end of filmmaking that were just starting to trickle down into the low end of things where the prices were starting to become affordable. So I saw the opportunity to kind of do something that in the independent world would be quite different and a lot more ambitious, usually reserved for the domain of what only a studio could have accomplished. That’s where we started and we really kind of went for a more stylized approach and embraced certain limitations. We would approach it like a traditional independent film, but as time went on it just became bigger and bigger because of the results we were getting. I don’t know if it would have turned out any different if we stayed on the path we were on, but the mindset sort of changed a little bit. It’s hard to characterize, but it happened over the course of six years. It just sort of evolved and became what it became and, consequently, it started to cost more than I hoped or intended, but still only a fraction of what a studio film normally would cost. Again, my goal was to simply do something very modest and have results that were sort of unseen at that level before. That’s vaguely how we went from a fairly small independent film to a little bit bigger film that captured the attention of a studio.
“I was simply trying to use some of the tools that were available on the high end of filmmaking while staying in an independent film frame of mind,” Conran notes. “This whole thing dates back about 10 years, the first four of which I used to basically create a short film. I kind of hid myself away, did experiments and started working on the thing, developing the look and feel of it on the blue screen. I created all of the environments from scratch. I had gotten about six minutes of it finished, but four years had gone by and I realized this was near going to be impossible for me to pull off by myself.”
He began trying to secure financing for the project, at which point he was brought to the attention of producer Jon Avnet, who in turn was able to interest Paramount Pictures in financing Sky Captain for a rumored $50+ million. In truth, that’s an amazingly low budget in an era of films that seem to cost between $150 and $200 million. Anyone who has seen footage from the film will be able to see the sheer scope that has been achieved, which makes its budget even more impressive. “If we were to do another film like this, knowing what was learned, I don’t think you’d have to spend more than $40 million on the film. And I actually think you could be quite a bit more ambitious than we are.”
That being said, the film nonetheless looks as though, as was the case with Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, it harkens back to a kind of lost innocence of filmmaking in Hollywood. “It’s certainly very evocative of classic Hollywood films,” closes Conran. “Different than Raiders was, and at the same time probably even darker than that film. But it’s of the same ilk and the same world. If we’re a tenth as successful as Raiders was, I would be very thrilled. But no matter what happens, I am so beyond lucky to have this chance. Obviously, it’s a very difficult thing to make a film like this, or any film, frankly. I can’t even begin to thank people for taking the risk that they did. All I can do now is try not to fail and forsake that trust in me.”
Unfortunately, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow failed to connect with audiences at the time of its release, though there was plenty of critical love. Considered a financial failure, it nonetheless continues to appeal to the audience that subsequently discovered it. Conran, for his part, has not made a film since.
Ed Gross is the author of Voices from Krypton, the complete oral history of Superman, which covers the Man of Steel's 85-year history through the words of 250 people, with a foreword by Brandon Routh and an afterword by Mark Waid, which can be ordered HERE.