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MillimeterDirector Vincent Ward
Aug 1, 1998 12:00 PM, Matt Cheplic
"The beauty of a love story is that it allows you to explore completely different materials at the same time," says Vincent Ward, who reached a wide audience in 1993 with Map of the Human Heart. This time, the love story is What Dreams May Come, which sees Robin Williams adrift in the afterlife desperately trying to see his wife again. "With Map, you had people who didn't fit into one culture or another; at the same time; you were exploring their relationship. In this film, that other material is a journey into what the afterlife can be."
Ward knows something about cultural disparity. He was born in tiny Wairarapa, New Zealand. His father was an Irish Catholic, and his mother was a German Jew. When still in his twenties, Ward lived with an isolated Maori community for two years-where he made the documentary In Spring One Plants Alone. Although he probably doesn't know much about the afterlife, he has some thoughts on how it is portrayed. "Very few filmmakers have tried to picture what the afterlife is. You have several thousand years of painting, but for most people, ninth-century visions of paradise or hell seem kind of outdated. So, the challenge was to draw on those traditions yet find something more psychologically driven and relevant to someone in the late 20th century."
An eye toward art actually preceded his film interest. He originally trained as a painter at the Ilan School or Art in Christchurch, England. It is an experience he draws on often. "Ron Bass wrote a fantastic, character-driven script, but while the script talks about a subjective paradise, it doesn't explain how to picture that. So I thought: 'What if I made the wife a painter?' Then his afterlife could resemble those paintings as part of his affection for her."
And so began the maturation of a rare cinema beast-a love story with 270 effects shots. Pacific Ocean Post executed about a third of the shots (mainly matte painting and compositing). Digital Domain completed several CGI shots, and Mass Illusion created the oil painting afterlife. "There was fantastic potential for effects, but there were still a lot of tracking issues that were unresolved. How do you make it look like oil paint? How do you get spectral surfaces so that light bounces off them in a way oil paint does? How do you make it feel viscous?" While Ward lived with the script for three years and led four months of presvisualization, he confides, "We only really worked out how to do it effectively in the last eight weeks. It's like this roaring train that you haven't quite worked out how to steer."
While some directors find such an engineering job tedious, Ward revels in the chance to watch effects shots take shape. "Visual effects give me a chance to do design work, which I really enjoy. I love the problem solving. And more importantly, I had the pleasure of designing after the shoot was finished."
He continues, "The most important thing is to be clear about what you want to see. I'm not a visual effects person at all, I'm not a technical person, but if I'm clear about lighting, colors, design, it's up to an effects supervisor to realize that."
Ward is proud that the effects do not run along the same lines as those in disaster flicks and sci-fi skirmishes. "It's not explosions and so on. It's about creating a unified world. The journey of going beyond the perimeter we talk about but never see-that's what's most intriguing."
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.