Hardly the first film with advance reports of onset complications, bloated budgets, and release delays, World War Z is only the latest victim of the Hollywood press’ eagerness to deem movies dead in the water before they’ve had the chance to set sail.

Yet World War Z is sitting with a very healthy 80% Fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.com, with critics from Variety to The Hollywood Reporter reporting that the film is “surprisingly smart” and an “immersive apocalyptic spectacle.” From a purely filmmaking point of view, the film is already a success.

For every Heaven’s Gate and Cutthroat Island, which bankrupted United Artists and Carolco Pictures respectively, there are a slew of classic films that refused to believe their hype, or lack thereof. We take a look at five of our favorite would-be disasters.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

Grumblings began early on when Truman Capote screeched to anyone who would listen that “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey!” After Capote’s first pick, Marilyn Monroe, declined the part, Hepburn came on board with one condition—a director switch from then unknown John Frankenheimer to Blake Edwards, signaling another potential red flag. (Ultimately it’s Edwards who has been credited with turning the perfectly lovely story into a genre-defining classic.) Fortunately, one seriously considered change was never made: when a Paramount exec insisted on cutting “Moon River” at the last minute, Hepburn—for whose limited range Henry Mancini had written the tune—reportedly fumed, “Over my dead body!”

Cleopatra (1963)

While it was an indisputably difficult set—during the two-year production, Elizabeth Taylor fell ill enough to require a tracheotomy and shut down filming for several months, her very public affair with costar Richard Burton turned the $44 million shoot into even more of a circus, and a swift backlash encircled the set almost before the cameras began rolling—Cleopatra is not the financial or critical disaster it’s historically made out to be. Ranked the 38th-highest grossing movie of all time, with appropriate adjustments for inflation, it’s made more money than any of the Pirates of the Caribbean or Lord of the Rings movies—not to mention four Academy Awards.

Star Wars (1977)

The odyssey that was getting George Lucas’ saga to screen is almost as epic as the series itself, but what’s perhaps most compelling is how its cast and the crew openly psyched themselves out before Star Wars was ever released. Alec Guinness said it was his idea to kill his character off so that he “wouldn’t have to carry on saying these rubbish lines,” the crew repeatedly expressed concerns that the film felt too much like a bad kiddie flick, and Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford were visibly unenthusiastic in promotional interviews. But what was most potentially damaging? Lucas was so worried about what his box office returns might be that he ran off to Hawaii on opening weekend with Steven Spielberg. Instead of attending the premiere, the two sat on the beach and conceived Raiders of the Lost Ark. Probably not a bad call.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Originally conceived as a low budget, six-week project, it turned into a 17-month endeavor, leaving director Francis Ford Coppola with over 200 hours of footage that would take over three years to edit. (Unpredictable typhoons, Martin Sheen’s heart attack, and Marlon Brando’s drunkenness didn’t make matters any easier.) Things weren’t looking entirely sunny for Coppola heading into the Cannes Film Festival, which prompted him to declare, “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It’s crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” It won the festival’s top prize, and Apocalypse now finds itself ranked #30 on AFI’s Top 100 Films of the Past 100 Years list.

Titanic (1997)

James Cameron has never been a media darling, and when the release date of his passion project—declared early on as the most expensive motion picture ever made—was pushed back from July to December, the press tripped over themselves to make similarly sub-par sinking-ship puns. After its release, however, Titanic tied Ben-Hur for most Oscars earned by a single movie. (Oh, and it also made roughly $2.2 billion internationally.)

In North America, Georgia and Ontario are increasingly recognized for their city-doubling abilities and, with the help of competitive and attractive tax incentive programs, are ideal chameleon cities for many film productions. (California, however, is already having a big year thanks to their tax incentive programs.)

“Out jurisdiction has actually been known for sometime for our chameleon-like ability,” says Donna Zuchlinski, the Ontario film commissioner with the Ontario Media Development Corporation. “And it’s not just New York City we double for but, other big U.S. cities like Washington, Chicago, Boston and more.”

A thousand miles south, Georgia offers a similarly flexible palette for directors to chose from. “We have a lot of great looks here,” says Lee Cuthbert, the location specialist in the Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. “We can be almost anything.”

Toronto and Atlanta have never been strangers to film—Marilyn Monroe shot Niagara in Ontario in 1953, and Deliverance filmed in Georgia in 1972—but until relatively recently, the film industry tended to be location-driven. That all changed when tax incentives came into play. In 2008, Georgia began offering a robust incentive program of up to 30 percent for qualified productions, including most feature films, television shows and reality series. Likewise, Ontario offers a 25 percent credit that covers labor and all eligible spending, and the federal government provides an addition 16 percent credit for hiring local labor.

New York, Utah and California are all offering competitive tax incentives now as well.

Since introducing those incentives, both Georgia and Ontario’s film industries have boomed. Last year, film and television contributed $1.28 billion to Ontario’s provincial economy, accounting for nearly 29,000 full-time direct and indirect jobs, representing a 90 percent increase in economic activity since 2008 and earning it the nickname Hollywood North.

In Georgia, each year since 2008, film industry spending has increased 20 to 30 percent as bigger projects with bigger budgets and longer schedules decide to base their productions in the state. “Everything is continuing to show growth here in Georgia,” Cuthbert says.

For local communities, the benefits of having a film crew come to town are tremendous, though difficult to quantify. Crews rent out hotels, eat at local restaurants, use local services and hire local help. They also bring recognition to their set locations. Since Jennifer Aniston filmed Wanderlust in Clarkesville, Georgia, and spoke about how much she enjoyed exploring that part of the state, the town has enjoyed an increase in visitors and attention. Likewise, Cuthbert expects the second Hunger Games installment to generate significant film tourism in the state. To help potential film tourists identify their destinations, the state set up ComeTourGeorgia.com, which provides do-it-yourself trip ideas as well as pointers to organized movie-location tours.

Though every production is different, both the Ontario and Georgia offices typically follow a set action plan for identifying and choosing locations. When a producer decides to reach out to Cuthbert or Zuchlinski, they first discuss what they’re looking for in terms of location, and then send over the script. Then Cuthbert or Zuchlinski reads over the script, and then pulls together a look-book of potential filming locations. Georgia maintains a database of over 100,000 images sorted by category, while Ontario’s digital database contains around 11,000 locations. From there, directors or producers chose the images they think may have potential and visit those sites in person to scout out specifics and meet the local personnel.

Filmmakers can see the hidden potential to mold such sites to meet their cinematic vision. For Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Pacific Rim—the largest feature film shot in Toronto to date—filmmakers dressed up a downtown street to look like Tokyo. With the added help of a little computer-generated imagery, Toronto morphed into Edo with little fuss. Ontario even stood in for Antarctica in Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing. Filmmakers spruced up an old gravel quarry just outside of Toronto in the winter, setting much of the movie’s filming at the bottom of the pit. “With the addition of some CGI, they very realistically turned it into the Antarctic,” Zuchlinski says.

From gravel quarry to the Antarctic for ‘The Thing.’ Courtesy Universal Pictures

Georgia, too, has had its fair share of chameleon exploits, standing in for Rio in Fast Five, Memphis in The Blind Side and Florida and Colorado in Identity Thief. “Filmmakers know how to shoot tight and fast, and now with computer special effects they can easily take buildings in and out of the background,” Cuthbert says.

“It’s always great to go to the big screen and see a movie shot here and try to figure it out,” she continues. “Sometimes I honestly cannot tell and sometimes I say, ‘Oh, there’s my bank!’”

But even the chameleon cities do have their limits. Ontario draws the line at mountains and beaches. “We have some nice big hills,” Zuchlinski says, “but when it comes to films that need mountains or beaches, we unfortunately cannot provide that.

Rugged desert, on the other hand, is Georgia’s kryptonite. Cuthbert has had to turn down a few projects looking for Afghanistan or Iraq stand-ins.

That, and fjords.

“I received a funny email recently, a guy said ‘Send me a picture of your fjords,’” Cuthbert laughs. “The port of Savannah is beautiful, but it’s not very fjordish.”

Zimmer’s scored a slew of classics. Driving Miss Daisy, Rain Man and The Lion King are a few of his famous past films, as well as more recent blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean, Madagascar, The Da Vinci Code, Sherlock Holmes, The Thin Red Line and Dark Knight. Today’s release of Man of Steel continues this living legend’s legacy of creating the mood and musical identity of some of our biggest films.

There may not be a single filmgoer who has not been touched by his music.  The Credits spoke to him about his craft, his passions, and his hopes for Man of Steel.

Hans Zimmer

The Credits: Can you talk about your approach to composing for Man of Steel?  How did your sense of the script guide you?

Zimmer: Not one bit. I never read it. I told David Goyer [Man of Steel scriptwriter] forgive me for not reading it. For me there are two types of directors. There’s the writer/director and the director that works from somebody else’s script—and what’s important for me is figuring out what the director has in his head. So I said to Zack [Snyder, Man of Steel director] let’s sit down. Tell me the story. And while the telling is going on I find out what’s really in his heart—what the emphasis is for him. The weird part of the process is that as someone tells you the story you start to come up with sounds and music. So in my head I’m scoring Zack telling me a story. That helps with starting. But also I was somewhat overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. Because I was working on Dark Knight Rises at the same time and I didn’t think I was quite up for it. The master, John Williams, had done rather well by it, and it was part of my growing up and DNA loving John Williams’ score. The inevitable comparisons are out there, but I couldn’t care less about what anybody says. Find me a composer who isn’t driven by paranoia and neurosis.

I don’t ever remember seeing a film that had a musical score throughout most every scene. It must have been quite a task to create such an enormous score.  What was the reasoning behind that decision?

It’s because the score is fairly new. It goes from me playing a little upright piano to these rather grand gestures that you’d expect. In an odd way, though it’s a Superman movie, there’s an absolute inherent reality in this film, because America really is America, and America is real. So it felt like it would be nice to create this “through line” from the word go to the end. When we get to the second half it gets pretty intense, but we tried to use music to create beautiful silences as well. For example, when Krypton blows up, and I don’t think I’m giving anything away here, the tendency would be to go hugely bombastic and throw everything at it–but it’s just one single solo violin.

Can you talk about the musical transitions in the film when you segue from battles to farm scenes? Do you look at the film and it comes to you or is it a separate process?

Transitions are tricky because we change tones so dramatically, and you just hope that you’re replacing very kinetic energy with emotional energy, because I did try to make the farm scenes tiny and emotionally poignant. Part of the disadvantage I have in this interview is I haven’t seen the movie with an audience. All I know is that I spent many months loving the process and that’s truly the whole thing.  I love writing music and sitting with my friends and colleagues and the musicians and the director and we’re building something and hoping people will love it as much as we love the process.  But by the end of it you have no idea if you’ve succeeded or not.  You just try your best.

How hard was it to make this music different when everyone already knows the music from the Christopher Reeves’ movies and John Williams’ score?

It really comes from the filmmakers having a very different take on how we can tell the story.  I remember when we were doing Gladiator with Ridley Scott and he was speaking about when he first saw Spartacus and how it resonated with him and how those movies should sound. And I kept saying to him but that’s my job, that the next bunch of fourteen-year olds should have their own music.

And that’s what Chris [Producer, Christopher Nolan] wanted me to do…to find my own language. If Zack had sat down with John Williams and told him the story the way he told it to me, John would have written a very different score from the one he wrote [for the earlier film], because it’s a very different movie. Ultimately I write from a very personal perspective. I have to find my own personal bits. Being a stranger in a strange land, being a foreigner in a culture that is not necessarily your own culture, and forever being torn between the two cultures, I think is interesting. And so for me as a foreigner I think there’s a chance to hold up a mirror to America and to let it see the things it’s become a little bored with. The things it takes for granted.

What do you mean by ‘the things America takes for granted’?

I remember when we were in the Grand Canyon shooting Thelma and Louise and we were saying, “Wow! It’s the Grand Canyon!” and there were these kids standing there saying, “Dad, Can we go home? It’s just the Grand Canyon.” So as a foreigner that used to look at America with wonderment, I just want to give that back to America. To say, “Look at your towns. Look at your people.  See what’s good and decent and noble.”  I have no idea if I’ve succeeded. At the end of the day it comes down to two questions; were you entertained or did it make you feel something?  That’s all you can hope for. That somewhere in one little corner of this vast movie you got to feel something and you were in this world.

It’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to use the old Superman theme. Because suddenly you would have recognized it and thought, this is the old Superman, and then you would have been aware you were watching a movie. I was terrified of parody in any sense, even unwitting parody. Part of my very simple plan was to exorcise anything out of my orchestra, like the main instruments that I remember John Williams using, like the trumpet fanfare. I didn’t use any of that. By narrowing my palate I felt I was doing something different.

Do you compose electronically, on a piano or on another conventional instrument?

Nothing conventional!  I had two weeks of piano lessons. That’s my formal education. I write the stuff in my head and then I use a computer with a music word processor. After all, I am a child of the twentieth century and whatever works is how I get there.

Have you ever had your music pirated?

Yes, of course my music gets pirated all the time!  The thing that worries me the most, from a film composer’s point of view, is that the more things get pirated, the less value they have. And the flip side of this is there are all kinds of horrible and nasty things you can say about Hollywood. But you should always remember that Hollywood is the last place on earth that commissions orchestral music on a daily, if not hourly, basis. It gives children a reason to have a passion to learn an instrument and actually make a living at it.  So every time one of those very expensive film scores gets pirated what you are doing is directly affecting if we’re going to have, or not have, orchestras left in this world.  If we lose orchestras, it’s going to rob us of more than just a bit of culture. There’s a lot of heart that’s going to go missing.

In Mozart’s time he had to make sure he could get his score published the following day because during the premiere there would be people in the audience scribbling along and pirating it the next day.  Pirating has been going on forever.

Featured image: Henry Cavill and Amy Adams in Man of Steel. Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Katia Sanchez-Aldana, a senior, was the student speaker for the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. Sanchez-Aldana is originally from Tijuana, Mexico. “ When I knew I wanted to go into the film and television industry, the best school was luckily nearby, the UCLA film school. So I decided to apply. The application process was pretty harsh, they only accept 15 transfers from outside and 15 petitioners, as they call them. They’ve already done their freshman and sophomore years at UCLA and they petition to go into the program,” she said.

Sanchez-Aldana was thrilled to get into the program at UCLA, and especially loved the diversity of the campus. “Here it’s a world of people. You forget that you’re in the U.S. because you have people from every country. You walk across the campus and you hear every single language, so it’s really interesting. Especially in the film program. They make a effort to have people from different backgrounds, so it’s rich in culture.”

Sanchez-Aldana hopes to one day become a unit production manager. During the summer she’ll be working on her graduate thesis project, a film that she’s going to shoot in Costa Rica. Her project’s a comedy about college students that are studying monkeys and comparing the behavior of the monkeys to that of their fellow humans (it sounds a bit like the Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry collaboration Human Nature, not a bad association for a budding filmmaker.)

During her speech,  Sanchez-Aldana discussed the importance of getting her foot in the door and building relationships, which is one film students begin doing the day they arrive on campus. A major asset of a top notch film program like UCLA is the student body–many of whom become collaborators after graduation.

The student award recipients are determined by faculty and donors. “It’s very difficult, because you have 30 juniors and 30 seniors that are really very good. So you’re trying to figure out who to give awards to. It’s a challenging process because they’re all certainly deserving of receiving an award,” said William McDonald, Chair of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media. “In some instances, it’s simply trying to match the right award with the right student.”

McDonald says faculty committees are formed for each area. To apply for the awards students must submit applications which have basic information pertaining to their course of study. They also may submit supplemental material of their work. Once applications are turned in and the committees are formed a recorded faculty vote takes place and the winners of the awards are selected. “Our admission selection of those entered into the program relates to award selection,” said McDonald.

UCLA is one of eight institutions that receives funds from the MPAA Gift of Laughter payments. The funding is made possible by the royalties and earnings received from the made for TV special called Hollywood Gift of Laughter. This commitment was started in the 1980’s by Jack Valenti and the MPAA. The MPAA helped with the clearances and fee waivers so that the actors, film clips, music and  credits could be merged into this television special. The movie was a gift from MPAA’s member studios to the city of Los Angeles for its 200th birthday.

Funding has been used for scholarships, department expenses and student housing, with the first payment received in 1984. UCLA uses the interest and income they receive and gives it to their students. A total of 25 Motion Picture Association of America Awards was given out this year.

Geena Davis has worked in the movie business for more than 30 years, with a career that includes an Academy Award^® for Best Supporting Actress for 1988’s The Accidental Tourist and another nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role for 1991’s Thelma & Louise. Now, Davis is working full-time to help improve the industry she’s made a career in.

“What we see on screen is so important because it makes it normal,” Davis said last Wednesday at an event hosted by the MPAA in Washington, D.C.

Davis is hoping to reverse a trend in recent films. In the five years between 2006 to 2011, women depicted just 3.4 percent of chief executive officers, zero district attorneys, and 16.3 percent of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) professionals in a sample of 129 top-performing G, PG, or PG-13 rated “family films” surveyed by the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Many studios have diversity departments specifically to ensure a fair representation of a variety of races in movies, with a process in place to scrutinize scripts for characters that could easily be cast as Asian or Hispanic, for example. Davis would put a similar system in place to ensure gender equality, so that more movies like 2010’s Salt, which put Angelina Jolie in a title role originally written to be male, can happen.

Although Davis still occasionally acts–over the past few years, she’s appeared mainly in TV projects—advocating the research done by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, a nonprofit she founded in 2004, is now her full time job. She is able to use her relationships with many studios and entertainment executives to talk to them about the survey numbers, such as one in four: in family films, there is only one female character for every three male characters, a ratio the Institute says is unchanged since 1946.

“When we go to the studios, invariably they’re horrified,” she said. “Sixty three percent of people said what they learned changed two or more of their projects, where they added more female characters, or changed the dialogue, or put more clothes on them.” The response Davis has received from studio executives is that they’re open, and ready, to make changes.

She also has the full support of Senator Chris Dodd, the MPAA’s Chairman and CEO. “I don’t think it’s maliciousness. I just don’t think people think about it,” he said, when asked after the event.

Davis (who is, among other things, a member of Mensa) explained during the Q&A event with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) that she became “a data head” when she became a mom and started watching films that target kids. Troubled by the hypersexualization of characters in G-rated movies and their lack of female characters, she quickly realized that her anecdotal observations meant nothing without hard numbers to back them up.

She commissioned research that found, among other things, the number of women in crowd scenes in the average family movie is 17 percent.

Similarly, Davis is looking to increase the role of women behind the scenes. She wants to help make the number of female writers, directors, and producers rise by sharing her data. She rejects the idea of regulating diversity. “It really is a creative industry and it’s toxic to talk about numbers and quotas.”

Davis said she hopes the response to her research will prompt a measurable change within the next few years. But she also said she’s watched “over and over” as female-driven movies achieve box office success but fail to launch a trend, including her own Thelma & Louise in 1991, or A League of Their Own the following year, neither of which prompted a rash of similarly themed movies despite the buzz of expectation.

Senator Dodd is optimistic, pointing to recent female-led successes such as The Hunger Games, Bridesmaids, and Snow White and the Huntsman, which have prompted similar expectations for studios to greenlight projects targeting female moviegoers.

“Historically, it’s been sort of a male-dominated business,” he agreed, but “it’s getting better.”

As far as her acting is concerned, thanks to her many choice roles, she’s very choosy when it comes to parts, but that’s because she can afford it. “If you ever read at some point that I’ve signed on to play Sean Connery’s comatose wife — because that’s about the right Hollywood age — you’ll know I’m broke,” she joked.

A veteran of the last three Fast & Furious films, Padelford’s job sounds simple: drive alongside (or behind, or in front) of the action and catch it on film as actors hang from cars and tanks crush highway dividers. But the execution is another story. He and his team of cars must drive in synchronized formation like ground-level Blue Angels, capturing all of the complicated, costly effects without getting into a fiery wreck.

Padelford, who has helped Ryan Gosling pull of playing a motorcycle-riding badass in Drive and been a key cog of every Quentin Tarantino movie since Deathproof, called from the set of the 2014 blockbuster Captain America: The Winter Soldier to walk us through the cameras and equipment of Fast 6.

Courtesy Allan Padelford

Cadillac Escalade with Edge Crane System

“That’s the main storytelling piece of equipment,” says Padelford of his Escalade, which has been custom designed with racecar suspension and front, rear and roof camera mounts. When Fast 6 stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos needed to capture a tank as it crushed the center divider of a highway and ran over two cars, this ride—with an arm that can extend to 26 feet—got the call.

Inside, five men work as one choreographed unit. “It’s a four-man team effort with the director in there giving us last-minute information on what to get,” Padelford explains. “I’m steering the vehicle so the crane can get into position, the crane operator swings the crane to where it needs to be, the camera operator points the camera and then the focus puller focuses the camera to get the shot. And that can all be happening at 70 or 80 miles an hour with things flying through the air.”

For those times when a scene isn’t shot at such reckless speeds—a rarity in the Fast & Furious franchise—the team will use side angles to create the illusion of more speed. Says Padelford: “If we can’t go as fast as we want to go, we use the motion of the arm to give it more action.”

Courtesy Allan Padelford

Porsche Camera Car with Tracker Remote System

As the Crane Car films the over-arching story of a chase scene, the Camera Car (a Porsche Cayenne Turbo) shoots simultaneously to fill what Padelford calls the “action-y beats” that come in between. “That’s for the shots that are more down and dirty,” he explains. “I might be behind the action and, but the Tracker is on the side, shooting in tight on faces and the action that’s happening. The elevator rig can go from ground level to over the hood in about two seconds, so it gives it a lot of energy.”

Take, for instance, a scene in Fast 6 when a female character is hanging onto the side of a Jeep trying to attack the driver. Padelford’s Crane Car shoots the action from a high angle to capture the other cars zooming by, while the Porsche, driving next to it, zooms in on the struggle between the two characters. “We call it a two-fer,” says Padelford. “Basically, we’re shooting a wide shot of the action and the Tracker is shooting a tight shot.” If one car accidentally gets the other in its shot, it can be taken out in post.

C-2 Chasecar

Subaru C-2 Chase Car

Designed by Padelford specifically for Fast 5, this lightweight, high performance car catches images just inches off the ground to provide the ultimate road rush. No wonder it’s his favorite to drive. “Spiro will yell, ‘OK, Padelford, it’s Subie time!’” he laughs. “That means we’re going to have a really close encounter.”

Surrounded by protective tubing that inevitably needs to be replaced by the end of every shoot, the Subaru allows Padelford to get “really, really close, sometimes even making contact with the bars protecting the camera. The car’s so light that it just bounces right off.”

Padelford’s Chase Car proved particularly useful in Fast 6 when said tank blows up a bridge and the pieces start to rain down on Vin Diesel in his Dodge Charger. “The bridge actually fell on the Subie,” remembers Padelford. “It’s all made out of foam, but it actually did some damage to the camera and broke our windshield.” Sure, it was a hassle, but that’s a small price to pay for the perfect shot.

Padelford has come a long way from the speed freak who mounted some cameras onto a supercharged El Camino to make his debut in 1988’s Days of Thunder and got by filming car commercials until the decidedly one-horsepower film Seabiscuit elevated him to the top of his craft. But as long as Fast & Furious films are being made—a pretty good bet considering the latest installment’s $97 million opening weekend—he’ll be there trading paint with the big boys, the unsung hero in one of Hollywood’s most enduring franchises.

Featured image: Roman (TYRESE GIBSON) makes a death-defying leap in “Fast & Furious 6″. Courtesy Universal Pictures

Örvarsson’s credits include The Pirates of the Caribbean series, the recent Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, and the current NBC hit Chicago Fire. He’s the composer on Sony Pictures’ upcoming thriller The Mortal Instruments, and he lent a hand (and his musical ear) to his mentor Hans Zimmer for the upcoming Man of Steel, helping compose additional music.

We spoke to Örvarsson about his streak of composing music for dark, twisted films, using John Cage inspired techniques to get the creepy sound for a film, and the alchemy between film and music.

The Credits: Let’s talk about your upcoming film, The Mortal Instruments. What kind of musical imprint did you want to create for this dark film?

Örvarsson: It’s a modern day setting, but with a sort of an ancient background. It’s about this group of people who are shadow hunters. They fight demons and evil elements of the underworld, and the idea is that they’ve been around for centuries. So it’s an interesting juxtaposition of modernity and something ancient. We even use some earlier instruments, like the viol, which is the predecessor to the violin and the cello.

What kind of sound does a viol produces?

It’s a string instrument, which is bowed, and it’s actually played without any vibrato, so it’s a very kind of metallic sound to it. And it has that sort of ancient feel to it. It was very prominent during the Renaissance, during the 1400 and 1500s, that was the string instrument. It’s got this really piercing, clean ancient sound to it. It’s gives a real nice subtle color of ancient times.

Mortal Instruments is not the first dark, spooky film you’ve worked on. You’ve scored Angels & Demons, The Fourth Kind, Hansel & Gretel…do you prefer films that have a dark side?

It is happenstance, because I’m really sort of a melodic composer. The danger is obviously being typecast. What I have found really interesting is that in many ways there’s more to explore and finding ways of doing things with a new twist in darkness than in the light. There’s not so much new you can bring to a romantic comedy, and yet there seems to be an endless well of new ideas to come up with for darker things.

Of these darker films, was there one in particular that stood out? I remember seeing the trailer for The Fourth Kind in the theater and thinking, whoa, that’s one alien movie that is not about cuddly extraterrestrials.

You hit the nail on the head, that’s the one that came to my mind. What’s interesting, too, was the budget on that was really low, so I had to be really creative to come up with sounds because it really didn’t have a whole lot of money to pay for the production of the music, there’s no live string orchestra. I remember spending one night in my studio, doing experimental things with my piano, and then processing that electronically and just trying to find new, crazy and weird sounds. I think that exploration got me quite comfortable with my dark side….maybe too much so [laughs].

What kind of new sounds did you find on your piano? Was it just a new way of playing, or were you doing something really weird that made it scarier? 

A little bit of both. I actually played the string directly rather than the key. So the key is an interface with the hammers to hit the string, but if you bypass that mechanism, and bring out your pencils and eraser and anything around you, and starting hitting the strings directly. All kinds of weird things start happening.

So the top of the piano is off?

Yeah, you just open it up and get in there. Usually I use something to hold the sustain pedal down, and then, for example, I take a coin or a pencil to scrape the low strings really fast, while the sustain pedal is being held down, and that makes a very scary sound.

So you’re just standing over the open piano, taking pencils and coins to the strings…

It’s an incredibly ungraceful thing to look at it. John Cage came up with the idea of something called the prepared piano. He would put tacks and superballs in the piano, so when you’d play it, the things would move around inside the piano and change the sound of it. So it’s an idea that’s been around for a while, and I see more people getting right in there and even bowing the piano strings, which is tricky, but usually people use a wire, because you can’t really fit a violin bow in there.

How did you get involved in the film industry? Did you start out wanting to be a composer?

My main instrument as a child and teenager was the trumpet. I grew up in a small town in Iceland, and there was a lot of music going on there. It was a great place to grow up as a musician. One of the good things is that there aren’t too many people, so if you show some promise as a musician, you get to try a lot of different kinds of music. If they need a trumpet player in the brass band in the symphony orchestra, in the theater band, or the big bands that play jazz, you get asked. I got exposed to a lot of different kinds of music.

That sounds like the perfect education for a future film composer.

I sort of fell into film music, I’d always loved it, from Star Wars when I was a kid, spaghetti westerns when I was a teenager, and was really taken by [Ennio] Morricone’s stuff from then on. When I got to Berkelee College of Music, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and I just happened to try out an introductory course to film music, and I really just fell in love with it. I love the alchemy that happens between music and film, and I felt like that was a pair of shoes that just fit.

Can you speak a bit about the alchemy between music and film? 

I think people would be pretty astonished to watch a film without the score. It’s the music you tend to not really notice, at least about 90% of it, but you really notice it when it’s not there. So it can be a daunting task to start with nothing and try to come up with something that will enhance the film, enhance the emotion. In many ways on an emotional level, music is the third dimension in a movie. It adds that extra layer of feeling and atmosphere and emotion that isn’t there without it. There’s a reason why music keeps getting used in film. There’s no logical reason for it, there’s actually an emotional reason.

What’s your method for scoring a film, how do you begin?

I watch the film a few times and step away from it. I start writing music inspired by the emotion the film gave me. I think that’s really important, to start with proper music, with melodies and themes and something that has integrity on its own, and then you start adapting it to the film. Because if you don’t have strong musical ideas when you’re starting to write what we call the cues, the dangerous is you’ll just end up with wallpaper.

Do you employ any different methods between working on film and working on TV, like you do for Chicago Fire? 

Essentially it’s the same. It’s about storytelling, and blending the picture with that added dimension of emotion. The biggest difference is time. Oftentimes I get an episode on Wednesday and it airs two days later. Maybe 30 minutes of music needs to be done in a few days. I still try to write one or two original pieces of music each week. TV is a different discipline. With film you hope you have time to develop things and think them through, and really try to come up with a proper, decent piece of music for every cue. You do that in television, but you use different methods, it’s in some ways simpler, you use simpler composition methods because time-wise, there’s no way you could do 30 minutes of film music every week.

It seems like you’ve stepped into a bunch of films to offer your talents to another composer, from the upcoming Man of Steel to Frost/Nixon to The Simpsons Movie.  You have a lot of credits on films that you helped out with additional music.

It’s really fun. It’s very freeing, because when I’m not the lead composer on a movie, you don’t have the whole pressure of delivering the project, interfacing with the production, and budget and all these things. You just get to come in and have fun with music, and so it’s usually a blast.

Shot in black-and-white in just 12 days, and featuring a group of friends (including Castle’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker and The Avengers’ Clark Gregg), Joss Whedon’s wonderful, modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s classic comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, just might be the biggest surprise of the summer.

We talked to Kai Cole, Whedon’s whip-smart wife, about shooting the film at home, what being an architect taught her about making movies, and bucking the Hollywood system.

The Credits: I heard Joss talking about how you guys do Sunday Shakespeare readings at home with your friends. Out of all the Shakespeare plays, how did you settle on Much Ado?

Cole: When Joss went to do The Avengers, I started looking for a movie to produce myself to get my feet wet. I was in New York visiting him on the set, and we were talking about how when he got home, he wanted to get the gang together to do Shakespeare readings. And when I heard that, a lightbulb went off in my head. Amy (Ackers) and Alexis (Denisof) had done this in our yard. And I thought, this is a great opportunity to make a movie. We have a short amount of time, and we could just do it. We could just get it done before anybody knows what hit ‘em.

What did Joss think?

Joss was actually the first person to convince, because he’d been working on The Avengers for so long, and he was burnt out. Plus it’s a crazy idea (laughs).

How did being an architect lend itself to producing?

I’m not a producer normally, but I just thought, What’s the difference? Produce a house, produce a movie. It’s all the same—making a product. It’s about bringing great people together who are wonderful at their jobs. You have a budget, you have your artisans and you have your vision, and you do everything you can to make sure your vision becomes a reality.

You shot this in 12 days at the house you built, which is stunning, by the way.

Thanks. I designed the house, and we always thought it would be a great place to film something.

Fran Kranz

Were you able to bring a fresh take to moviemaking?

Yeah. Considering that from conception to finishing it was in about five or six weeks, I’d say that was a fresh approach. It was, “Let’s just get it done. Let’s not listen to anybody. Let’s not hear the naysayers and not doubt ourselves. Let’s do it and not go through the whole Hollywood process. We didn’t want to hear, “You can’t cast that person,” or “You can’t do it in black and white.” I can’t tell you how many times with construction I’ve heard, “Well that’s a nice idea, Kai, but this is how we usually do it.” I think the most powerful thing I brought to this was my lack of Hollywood-ness. I don’t know the system. I mean, I do know it of course, because I’ve been around it forever and ever, but I just don’t understand why people have to do things the way they always say they have to do them. It makes me crazy.

I appreciate your moxie.

I was like, “Why can’t we do it this way? I’m sure we can. There’s got to be a way.” That kind of questioning and searching and pushing is what I brought to the party.

How did the casting process happen?

We had a party when Joss back to L.A., and we just asked people, “What are you doing next week?” It was kind of beautiful in its simplicity. Joss already had these relationships with the actors that he’d cultivated over the years, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been wanting to do our own stuff. It’s such a unique position that he has from his Buffy days. Dr. Horrible and Cabin in the Woods both come out of the same kind of thinking: My frustration of watching Hollywood work. I’ve watched Joss write multiple scripts and wait around for executives, [sometimes] for years. It’s like, Why does Hollywood have to be so inefficient? I really don’t understand, as you can tell from my tone. But the wonderful thing about the Internet and Do-It-Yourself and cameras being more affordable now is that you don’t have to wait around.

Was there ever any fear that you’d piss off Hollywood for bucking the system?

Not for me. That’s not my day job. (laughs). It doesn’t really matter to me. But I think there’s room for everything in the world. I don’t think the studios or huge film companies are really gonna be scared that a little black-and-white Shakespeare movie got made.

Joss Whedon (left) and Amy Acker (right). Courtesy Roadside Attractions

How did you and Joss work together on set?

It was very individual. My whole job was to make it so Joss could do his job. And we worked beautifully together. I was behind the scenes: If there was a yapping dog, or a policeman at the door or somebody sanding their floors, I would make that go away. I got to move almost ghostlike through this every day while continuing to live my own life. I saw the movie being made — this thing I’ve been dying to do for so long, then I also saw the house that I worked on for so many years being used in ways that I never expected. It was a beautiful, magical experience. Everybody should make movies in their house. It was heaven for a designer.

Were you living there during filming?

Oh, yeah. Our everyday life was going on. I’d take the kids to school in the morning and they’d have snacks when they got home. It was nice, I didn’t have to think about making their lunches for a while — I just grabbed stuff from craft services.

Spoken like a true mom.

I know! It was beautiful. I loved it. I don’t even think the kids thought it was that big of a deal.

What did your neighbors think?

Our neighbors were wonderful, but most of them didn’t know what was going on. We did go around and tell people, “We’re doing this movie, hopefully it’s not going to bother you. Let us know. Don’t call the police!”

Featured image: Amy Acker in Joss Whedon’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ Courtesy Roadside Attractions.

1) Private Benjamin (1980), dir. Howard Zieff

The poor little rich girl-turned Army recruit comedy was co-written by Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated) specifically for Goldie Hawn, and it marks the first film the actress produced a film, earning both Oscar nominations and a $70 million box office gross.

2) Tootsie (1982), dir. Sydney Pollack

The on-set mood of this midlife crisis–cum–cross-dressing comedy was anything but light, owing largely to tension between Dustin Hoffman and director Sydney Pollack, who later said, “No one ever laughed during the shooting of any scenes of the film. It’s only funny because of its story structure.” To prepare his female voice, Hoffman reportedly practiced reading lines from A Streetcar Named Desire with his Kramer vs. Kramer costar Meryl Streep.

3) Trading Places (1983), dir. John Landis

It’s hard to imagine anyone but Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy playing Louis and Valentine, but the film was originally conceived as a vehicle for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. When producers cast Murphy as the literal rags-to-riches lead, the actor—hot off his big-screen debut in 48 Hours—suggested Aykroyd, his fellow Saturday Night Live alum.

4) Back to School (1986), dir. Alan Metter

What can possibly outshine the cameos from Oingo Boingo, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Bolton in this tale of one man’s quest to get the college diploma that eluded him some forty years earlier? That the classroom Rodney Dangerfield takes his final oral exam in is the same one in which Jennifer Beals’ nailed her final audition in three years earlier in Flashdance.

5) My Blue Heaven (1990), dir. Herbert Ross

It’s no coincidence that this Steve Martin–Rick Moranis witness protection sendup bears a striking if not entirely bizarro resemblance to Goodfellas, Nick Pileggi’ biopic released the same year. Heaven was written by his wife, the late Nora Ephron.

6) Groundhog Day (1993), dir. Harold Ramis

Ironically, it took many people multiple viewings to recognize Groundhog Day’s genius—even Roger Ebert revisited his review ten years after it’s release, upgrading it from three to four stars and saying, “Groundhog Day is a film that finds its note and purpose so precisely that its genius may not be immediately noticeable. It unfolds so inevitably, is so entertaining, so apparently effortless, that you have to stand back and slap yourself before you see how good it really is.”

7) Babe (1995), dir. Chris Noonan

Thanks to piglets’ rapid rate of growth, for the sake of continuity, producers had to use 48 different Yorkshire pigs and one animatronic double to portray the titular hero who improbably finds his second act in life as a sheepdog stand-in.

8) Rushmore (1998), dir. Wes Anderson

Though an expulsion from his private school forces Max Fischer to start over at a public high school clear across town and a world away, in reality, the film was shot at two different schools that occupy the same city block in Houston.

9) The House Bunny (2008), dir. Fred Wolf

Are Anna Faris’ comedic chops still considered unsung (her Cameron Diaz spoof is arguably the best part of Lost in Translation)? If so, let us be the ones to belt out more kudos for the actress, who pitched her own concept about what happens to Playboy bunnies when they age out of the famous mansion. Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions eventually brought it to life.

10) The Artist (2011), dir. Michel Haznavicius

Can a man build a career in the talkies after a successful silent film run? After starring in the first silent film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture since they were created in 1929, Artist star Jean DuJardin seems to be. The Best Actor-winner, previously unknown to American audiences, recently wrapped Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, and he’s currently filming George Clooney’s The Monuments Men with Matt Damon and Cate Blanchett.

BONUS! Our top five favorite “starting over” dramas:

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), dir. Martin Scorsese

The Deer Hunter (1978), dir. Michael Cimino

Ordinary People (1980), dir. Robert Redford

Quicksilver (1986), dir. Thomas Michael Donnelly

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), dir. Michel Gondry

Silver Linings Playbook (2012), dir. David O. Russell

Featured image: Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson star in ‘The Internship.’ Photo by Phil Bray. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox and Regency Enterprises.

They lovingly refer to themselves as “animals,” but the staffers at Animal Logic, based at Fox Studios in Sydney, Australia, are really masters in special effects and animation. The company, which derives its name from the two sides of the business (the physical/creative and cerebral/technical), was co-founded in 1991 by Zareh Nalbandian, now CEO and Producer. It has since grown significantly and evolved to become one of the world’s leading design, high-end visual effects and animation studios.

Animal Logic’s core work began and remains in part with commercials and television programs, with ads for Visa, Nike, Coca-Cola and Chanel No. 5 (the above video featuring Nicole Kidman in a Baz Lurhmann-directed spot) and projects for the Cartoon Network, the Discovery Channel and Australia’s Network Ten. Within the last decade or so, however, the studio has segued successfully into feature films. Movies including The Matrix, Moulin Rouge!, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 300, Happy Feet and now The Great Gatsby illustrate the deft touch of Animal Logic.

Indeed, its capabilities, creativity and technical expertise have not gone unnoticed. Thanks to a dedicated workforce of more than 500 between its Sydney headquarters and creative front-end/production studio in Los Angeles— and partnership with Fuel VFX in Newtown, Sydney, which joined Animal Logic’s group of companies in 2012—the studio has been recognized with Clio, BAFTA and Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts awards. And Happy Feet, the first digitally computer-animated feature to come out of both the studio and Australia, took home Oscar gold for Best Animated Feature Film in 2007.

The Credits reached out to Animal Logic’s Ingrid Johnston, VFX Producer, and Andy Brown, VFX Supervisor, about working on The Great Gatsby, future projects, and how the studio is advancing animation and special effects down under.

The Credits: How did Animal Logic become involved with The Great Gatsby?

Johnston: We previously worked with both director Baz Lurhmann and VFX Supervisor Chris Godfrey on projects such as Australia, Moulin Rouge! and the Chanel commercials, so The Great Gatsby was an obvious continuation of this relationship. Also, shooting in Sydney, including a signification portion on sound stages and only partial locations, meant the VFX component of the film was extensive and required a studio with experience in large-scale projects and full-environment creation.

How long did you work on the film and how many people were on the team?

Johnston: From the shoot to final delivery was just over a year and a half—roughly four months of principal photography, followed by 15 months of shot production. We had 175 people working directly on the film, from the art department to final compositing. Of course, there also were numerous others supporting the project, including people from R&D, IT and HR. The team overall was a mix of Australian and international artists from New Zealand, the U.S., UK, Italy, France, Canada, Germany, India, Korea, Singapore, Columbia, Mexico and Hong Kong.

What specifically did Animal Logic contribute to the film??

Brown: We contributed to many of the sequences, creating environments that were used across multiple scenes in some cases. Specifically, we created Times Square, the Queensboro Bridge and surrounding areas, the High Line, wide aerial vistas of 1920s Manhattan for the opening and end of the film, and the streets and life surrounding Myrtle’s party in Manhattan. We also established the Valley of the Ashes on Long Island, Buchanan’s mansions with surrounding polo fields and manicured gardens, and Gatsby’s fantastical mansion, extensive gardens and exteriors, along with interior ballroom detail for both the party sequences and the scenes revolving around Gatsby and Daisy’s bourgeoning affair.

How were these effects technically produced?

Brown: We used a lot of different techniques on Gatsby. To name a few, the opening establishing shots of New York used aerial plates shot above Manhattan as a base for a projected matte painting. We modeled projection geometry of the city using period aerial photographs as reference, and then re-projected textures taken from a three-week stills shoot of period buildings in Manhattan. The contemporary buildings were replaced with the skyline from the 1920s and we added finger wharfs and ships into the Hudson River below.

The High Line and Times Square employed full CG sets populated with digital extras and vehicles integrated with live-action foregrounds shot against green screen. And the majority of our Long Island environments was a combination of full CG and projected matte paintings.

We used Maya integrated with Animal Logic’s proprietary toolsets for modeling, layout, animation, surfacing and lighting; Renderman for the CG components; and our new physically based lighting and shading pipeline called PHX, which enabled our lighting team to produce outstanding photoreal images in a single beauty pass.

What were the greatest VFX challenges?

Brown: The biggest challenge of course was to create the 1920s environments of Long Island and New York and then incorporate all the various sets and locations that were shot into those large CG sets. The Long Island set proved to be complex to stitch together, because it needed to incorporate multiple locations and sets that were shot for Gatsby’s mansion, Nick’s cottage and Buchanan’s estate. Each set was lidar-scanned and then stitched together so that the alignment of the various locations fit perfectly with Baz’s layout and design.

Can you talk about future Animal Logic projects?

Johnston: Other upcoming projects include Warner Bros’ The LEGO Movie and Fox’s Walking With Dinosaurs 3D. Many of the artists who worked on Gatsby are now in shot production on Lego or other film or commercial projects at Animal Logic Fuel. We’re also in the early stages on a couple of other feature films moving into production next year.

Happy Feet was the first animated/VFX film to come out of Australia. What role has Animal Logic played in the industry since then?

Johnston: We’ve continued to develop and produce animated feature films, including Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, and advance the industry and set new standards for what can be achieved. We also work with the government to ensure that incentives keep Australia a competitive location for international productions, and offer training and internship programs to find up-and-coming Australian VFX and animation artists.

Featured image: The final rendering of Times Square, courtesy of Animal Logic and Warner Bros. Pictures