“In the Lost Lands” director Paul W.S. Anderson is used to his movies getting released, being under-appreciated and then finding their audience years — or sometimes decades — later.
“I’m British, we are used to considering ourselves being rubbish,” Anderson said. But he is aware that even movies considered flops do sometimes come back in a big way. “You release the movie and no one likes it and then 10 years later they go, ‘That was a great movie.’ Could you not have told me that 10 years ago?” he added.
Anderson started his career in England. He made the low-budget thriller “Shopping” in 1994 which starred a then-unknown Jude Law. The British press was ruthless. Anderson still remembers that one outlet branded the film “a reckless orgy of destruction.” “That was supposed to be a criticism and I loved it so much that we stuck it on the poster,” Anderson said. It was a source of pride. “Do you know how difficult it is to create a reckless orgy of destruction with no money?”
“Shopping” is now seen as a precursor to the British indie boom of the late 1990s and the emergence of filmmakers like Guy Ritchie and Danny Boyle. “You can draw a line between what that movie was trying to do and what was unappreciated in the U.K.,” Anderson said.
Thankfully, he was “more appreciated in the U.S.,” which is where he went after “Shopping.” He had been recruited to turn “Mortal Kombat,” a video game known for its explosive violence, into a PG-13-rated hit, with a similarly slender budget. (He obliged. It made more than $120 million on a $20 million budget.) “Event Horizon,” his next film after “Mortal Kombat,” was rushed through production when it became clear that Paramount’s big summer movie “Titanic” was falling behind. “Event Horizon” was released, essentially unfinished, and took a critical beating. Anderson remembers a trade review that said, “If you want to see ‘Event Horizon,’ just save the money, put a metal bucket on your head and have a friend beat you over the head with a sledgehammer for an hour-and-a-half and you will have the same effect.”
In the years since its release “Event Horizon” has gained a cult audience and is now rightfully considered a modern classic. He remembers turning on the radio in England a few years ago. “It was the big movie review show in the U.K.,” Anderson said. That day the critic was reviewing James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” pointing out how much ‘Ad Astra’ owed to ‘Event Horizon.” Eventually the show became an ode to “Event Horizon.” “That’s great stuff to hear,” Anderson said.
Anderson has also made six “Resident Evil” movies, based on the video games, which are hits when they come out but fail to gain much traction critically. Now they are seen as dynamic blasts of adrenaline; keyed-up action/horror favorites. (New York Magazine critic Bilge Ebiri, who is constantly championing his work, called him “the king of violent, relentless, go-for-broke thrillers,” which is pretty apt.)
“A lot of them have gone through that kind of reassessment, which obviously, I’m very pleased about,” Anderson said. “As a filmmaker, you learn the important person to please is yourself, because if do not stay true to what you think is good, then you do not really have a vision. I have been fortunate enough that, by hook or by crook, I have continued to make movies.”
His latest movie, “In the Lost Lands,” is an adaptation of a story by George R.R. Martin, the creator of “Game of Thrones.” Anderson credits his wife, actress Milla Jovovich, for suggesting the story. They met on the set of the first “Resident Evil.” They now have three children together and she appears in almost all of his films. She told Anderson that the story “had a great, fairy tale message – be careful what you wish for – but told in the George R.R. Martin style.” She also told him, “I think you are going to love it because it’s dark and in your wheelhouse but it’s something very different than anything you have done before.”
“She was right,” Anderson said now of the project. “I have never really done fantasy. It’s got a werewolf in it. It’s got a witch in it. It’s got these great characters that George had created with this wonderful twist at the end, because George is so good at like, Oh my God, he’s really doing that.”
“In the Lost Lands” stars Jovovich as a witch in a burnt-out, post-apocalyptic world who is tasked by a young queen to retrieve a serum that will allow her to turn into a werewolf. (Jovovich’s character can not turn down anyone’s request.) She teams with a mysterious hunter (Dave Bautista) to travel to a forbidden land and retrieve the serum. But, of course, there are a number of dark forces hot on their heels.
The fantastical nature of the story allowed for Anderson to really push the visuals in this feature. His previous undertaking, “Monster Hunter,” which was also based on a video game and also starred his wife, was shot almost entirely on location. He felt that he had already done that. And plus – this was a twisted fairy tale, after all.
“The story really gave me an opportunity do something that I have never done before. I have done a lot of world building, but I have never done it completely from scratch, where we go, We’re going to just build everything,” said Anderson. “There’s no landscape on earth that feels right for the story.”
Anderson said that necessitating those landscapes led him “to a completely different way of moviemaking.” He built all of the locations beforehand, in an intensive nine-month period, before they had even shot anything. Then, after principal photography was complete, he spent a year “refining the visual effects on the movie.” It took forever.
“It’s the longest I have ever worked on a movie,” Anderson said, not just because the script, by German writer Constantin Werner, would have to get approved by Jovovich, who along with starring in the movie was also its producer. “Every time I handed in a draft of the screenplay, she would go, ‘The action is great but you have lost focus on the characters and that is what the movie is really about,’” Anderson said. They would focus on the relationship between Jovovich and Bautista’s characters “and then represent the script to the point Milla was happy with it,” and then they would show the script to Martin. “Then Martin would have his input,” Anderson said. “The process was quite long and then choosing to build all of the landscapes from scratch added a lot more time.”
The resulting movie is incredibly graphic; it looks unlike anything Anderson has ever done, while maintaining his lightning-fast action sequences and emphasis on character. “It’s got to have all the kinetic action that people associate with me, but then it’s got to have the dark characters and surprising reverses that people associate with George,” Anderson said. “And it’s got to look really distinct. I pushed very hard for that.” The visual style Anderson refers to as “the graphic novel that Hieronymus Bosch never wrote.” And it’s true – the movie does have a painterly feel, mixed with the kind of heavy metal fantasy that you would see spray painted on the side of a van (or on the box art of a VHS tape that you had to bring home from your local video store). Anderson was driven to cram as much into each frame as possible, which mimicked Bosch’s approach. “I wanted to give the movie that kind of really fine textural detail in the imagery that I think, when you pause the images, hopefully that that would pay off,” Anderson said. Again, like a killer VHS tape.
To achieve these visuals, Anderson relied on a number of key collaborators, like Herne Hill Media principal Dennis Berardi. “There’s only two filmmakers that he will go on set for to actually be the supervisor on a hands-on, day-to-day basis,” Anderson said. Who are those filmmakers? Himself and Guillermo del Toro. (Berardi did the enhancements on the creature from “The Shape of Water.”) “You can see the influence of Del Toro in Dennis’ work,” Anderson said. “There is that love of textural detail that Guillermo has, that I think Dennis and I both share as well.”
Then there was the actual photography, which Anderson insists is a “completely different way of shooting that no one had ever done before.” The foreground of the sets were completely real, so that the actors had things that they could interact with and the backgrounds were built in a computer months earlier. “We could have real-time playback and rendering, which meant that the actors could see the environments they were in, in real time,” Anderson said. How they stitched the environments together involved what Anderson referred to as a “star-tracking system” on the ceiling of the studio. A field of stars. A small camera mounted to the film cameras was pointing upwards and “it could figure out where it was, in space, in studio and that would slave the real camera to the virtual camera and give us live-action compositing and playback.” It’s because of this system that the production did not need one of those LED walls like Industrial Light & Magic’s highly-touted Volume stage, first used on Lucasfilm’s “The Mandalorian.”
Anderson described the system that they had rigged as “bulletproof,” since they were always against the bluescreen. The LED wall, he said, was glitchier. “Sometimes they go down. Cubes go black. Sometimes the joint between the floor and the live-action set piece does not line up properly,” Anderson said. With their way, “tracking and compositing is done immediately.” He estimates that 75% of the work had already been done, before the shots were imported into “a traditional visual effects pipeline to refine them and improve them.” This approach was also helpful for the actors who, Anderson admits, have plenty of experience when it comes to visual effects-heavy movies.
“There is a scene where Milla and Dave are at the edge of this oil field with all of these burning oil wells that are putting out these pillars of fire 100 feet into the air. Now, I can tell an actor that, and they can go, ‘Okay, got it, I know what I’m looking at.’ But that is very different to then being in front of that oil well and seeing it,” Anderson said. “I remember Dave going, ‘Oh, now, now I know what I’m looking at. Now I know what I’m going to say, how I’m going to say it.’ You know, it really helped with performance. So it was a great way of working.”
In its first weekend, “In the Lost Hands” made just enough to crack the domestic top 10. (Not bad for his latest reckless orgy of destruction.) The reviews, as often greet Anderson’s films, have been savage. (Indiewire’s David Ehrlich, for example, said, “The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.”) But there is so much to marvel at in the movie, so many nooks and crannies to discovery and behold. When we told the director that we hope that everybody goes to see it, Anderson demurred.
“Thank you so much,” he said. “If not now, in 20 years’ time.”
Exactly. That is the Paul W.S. Anderson way.
