Sky Captain and the Attack of the Anoraks

During the Second World War, the delicately petite blonde Veronica Lake was burning at her absolute brightest. Having sparkled and pouted her way through movies like Sullivan’s Travels and I Married A Witch, all those G.I. boys loved her, and all their gals loved her hair – a slinky uber-femme ‘do with a kinky peek-a-boo curl cascading mysteriously over her face. Beauty parlours throughout America hosted women for marathon seven hour stretches so they could be crimped, bleached, baked, pruned and attacked by blowtorches (probably) in order to emulate Ms. Lake’s glorious golden tresses. This peroxide mania became so widespread that the White House intervened with a request that the star get a trim. She duly obliged, and the little ladies went back to their kitchens, far away from potentially conspiratorial gaggles in the hairdressers.

After six decades the iconic high-maintenance ‘do is making a comeback courtesy of director Kerry Conran’s CGI fantasia, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. This time around, Gwyneth Paltrow is sporting the luscious look, and the angelic sheen from every strand makes those sickening healthy swishes of hair in Pantene commercials look like particularly ill-used Brillo pads. So were the hair and make-up people working overtime? Not quite, apparently.

"Er, Gwyneth’s ‘do wasn’t all her own" says Kerry Conran, confirming my dark suspicions, "we had to do a bit of CGI on it to smooth it down and make it glow." Well, that figures. After all, everything in Sky Captain is brought to you through the miraculous powers of blue-screen technology. A retro riot of long-forgotten matinee references, art-deco curvature and classic comic books, the film stars Jude Law as the titular ace-pilot. With the earth in jeopardy, he battles giant killer robots and the doomsday plans of the twisted Dr. Totenkopf. Also lining up for the good guys are intrepid reporter and the hero’s ex-flame Polly (Paltrow), Angelina Jolie’s eye-patched Ilsa-in-boots Commander and Giovanni Ribisi’s Q-alike boffin.

The enterprise represents ten years of labour on a Mac computer down in a basement for the debutant director, who meticulously crafted all but the actors. Indeed, even some of the thespians are virtually generated, for Lord Lawrence Olivier turns up for a cameo following his post-death eighteen-year career hiatus.

"That was really Jude’s idea", explains Kerry, "Like all actors – especially English ones – given the choice of who he’d love to appear on screen with, he picked Olivier. So we cleared it with the estate and went through some old BBC footage. Once we found the right shot, we created a three dimensional image, and basically animated it." Thankfully, Lord Olivier’s cameo from beyond the grave – a flickering Wizard Of Oz style shadow on the wall appearance – is both impressive and surprisingly tasteful. We all remember (and Lord, how we’ve tried to forget) the chilling spectacle of a resurrected Fred Astaire dancing with a vacuum cleaner in that commercial a few years back, so did Kerry worry that Larry might look like a little spooky, or worse, tacky?

"I didn’t really think about the ethical issues, if I’m honest", laughs the director, "I thought of it like working with a professional look-alike or something. But on another level, it is great being able to say ‘I directed Olivier’ on my resume."

Re-animating the long-deceased was but a small feat compared to the vast canvas designed by the budding auteur. With no sets and minimal props, Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow is, quite literally, as close as any filmmaker has come to beaming the images directly from their own movie-crazed brain. Utilizing ideas from Lost Horizon’s Shangri-la, Max Fleishman’s original Superman sketchings and Indiana Jones, Sky Captain is film-geek heaven, loaded with sly references (check out Denham’s ship from King Kong). Unsurprisingly, Mr. Conran claims he lived like a ‘shut-in’ while he toiled on his opus. Consequently, he’s the shyest director I’ve ever met, although he’s terribly good company and not at all the sun-starved lardass one might expect given all those subterranean years holed up with a computer. He is, however, fiercely proud of being of an anorak.
"I can’t wait to do the DVD commentary", he says, "In the final scenes in the gallery, there’s lots of stuff. There’s moth larvae and Excalibur. It’s like a sci-fi version of a Planet Hollywood wall, so I think I’d like to give people a tour." I wonder if having crafted such an expansive world, he worried that the actors would fuck up all his beautiful art. They are, admittedly, considerably less easy to manipulate than special effects. Was Kerry sitting like Hitchcock shouting to bring on the cattle?

"Er, almost", he smiles, "The actors were the unknown quantity, though I knew I’d have to use them eventually! It was incredibly fortunate that I ended up working with such an astonishing cast. That took the risk out of it. I mean Angelina and Gwyneth are Oscar winners, and Jude’s incredible. He was so passionate about the film he signed up as both actor and producer. But I don’t think lesser actors could have done so much opposite a blue-screen. We were quite sure we wanted people with a theatrical background because they know how to project into nothingness. So even in the smaller parts, you’ll see actors like Michael Gambon, and acting is effortless for someone like that."

Besides inspirational actors and an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, Kerry was fired-up by the romantic underpinnings of mid- 20th century Science Fiction. This wide-eyed wondrous period saw an unprecedented flowering of scientific possibilities, and a rash of movies dreamily envisaged robots doing the washing-up, folks taking holidays in Mars and hyper-intelligent computers fitting compactly into a warehouse. Suddenly boffins like Einstein and Von Brown were attaining celebrity status in the USA, and technocracy reigned supreme.

"I love that period", gushes Kerry, "I don’t think anything like it could happen again. Inventors and scientists were lone guys working away on their eccentric ideas. Nowadays, professionals always work within a corporation, and it’s much less about the art of the possible. One of the things I included in the movie was the zeppelin docking bay they built on the Empire State Building. They genuinely imagined that someday everyone would be flying around. Unfortunately, no zeppelin ever landed there because of the height, so we designed a Hindenberg III to put the dock to good use at last!" I express amazement at this point. I can’t actually believe they made a Hindenberg II after what happened to the first one.
"I know, it’s crazy. But there was a sister ship. They generally never referred to it as the Hindenberg II, but that’s what it was."

As I leave Mr. Conran, a terrifying thought emerges. If he can give us the Hindenberg III, what if someone uses his SFX wizardry to bring us Titanic II- The Movie? Let’s just pray the technology doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Sky Captain and the World Of Tomorrow is on general release