AC first encountered Navarro and Spawn during a set visit while the production was shooting nights at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. The location was a marble-columned rotunda chamber with an impressively high domed ceiling, dressed for an elegant banquet scene featuring many extras clad in tuxedos and gowns. But from the look of the place, a bizarre battle royale was also shaping up: food, dishes, tables and chairs lay shattered and strewn in all directions.
After the scene's crowd of actors and extras was assembled, filming of the scene began in earnest. The banquet guests gasped and pointed to a balcony some 30 feet above us, where a brutal fight had ensued between a female assassin (clad in futuristic black leather garb) and Spawn (whose misshapen flesh and outré costume of skulls and metal chains were hard to miss). After a brief tussle, Spawn smashed his fist into the assassin's face, sending her crashing into the balcony's polished metal railing. The lopsided bout ended with the sudden cry of "Cut!" by the film's director, Mark A. Z. Dippé, who had been observing the scene on a tiny pair of black-and-white LED-screen Watchman TVs taped to a makeshift stand.
Spawn marks the feature-directing debut of Dippé, a veteran special effects expert whose career at Industrial Light & Magic coincided with the dawning of the digital era. Raised in Alaska, he began his career working on experimental film and video projects. Says Dippé, "I was accidentally introduced to computer animation in the late Seventies when George Lucas brought some of its inventors to the San Francisco Bay Area to create the first digital film facility [which eventually became Pixar]."
Dippé was one of the most experienced CG animators in the field when ILM began work on the 1989 film The Abyss, one of the first features to showcase CG effects. His other ILM credits include work on Ghost, The Hunt for Red October, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (as the assistant visual effects supervisor), Jurassic Park (visual effects co-supervisor), Rising Sun (visual effects supervisor) and The Flintstones (visual effects supervisor).
Despite the opportunities at ILM, Dippé ultimately found the work to be creatively limiting. "ILM is a special place in that we were able to work on these very large movies. Steve Williams, Clint Goldman and I were all attracted to that. That's one of the reasons I was able to stay there; we were creating moving images that people hadn't seen before, and it was exciting. But we were not allowed to originate our own films. ILM cannot produce films. There was some frustration there because a lot of us including Steve and Clint wanted to be filmmakers on our own. Honestly, depending on the project and the director, we were sometimes given a lot of creative freedom, but that didn't always satisfy our own creativity. There's also a certain Lucas oeuvre at ILM, and not everybody wants to do that kind of film. So it's a double-edged sword, but I always had the idea to do something on my own when the right thing came along."
The chance to direct Spawn proved to be an irresistible lure. "It's the story of a man fighting to save his soul," Dippé says. "Spawn faces situations involving the cruelty of life, street crime, corruption in politics, and the fact that the military industrial complex has no purpose anymore. These ideas are embedded in this very large mythological realm that harks back to older ideas about a world of gods that parallels our own. The angels and devils have their own foibles and weaknesses, they make their own mistakes, and they have their own jealousies, angers and violent tendencies. This world is fantastic not only in terms of the characters, spaces and laws of nature, but also in terms of the morality; it's a Dante's Inferno kind of hellishness. The premise of Spawn presented the chance to create some very wild visuals."
The job of taking the phantasmagorical comic to the big screen was not an easy one, however. Dippé observes, "There's always this translation difficulty when you go from one medium to another. A book and a film are not the same thing, and they shouldn't even try to be. Todd and I talked about that quite a bit."
McFarlane submits, "I wasn't concerned with a literal adaptation. I never said, 'Hey, that's not how I draw things!' I was more worried about the attitude. When you look at the Spawn comic or HBO show, they're two different things, but the attitude is the same. It's rock 'n' roll. You have to play to each medium's strengths and find the consistencies. What's consistent about the Spawn character? That he's bitchin'! So we thought, 'Let's make a bitchin' movie.'"
In preparing for his feature directorial debut, Dippé sought to surround himself "with people who had been through this and whose aesthetic point of view matched mine. Guillermo had done some very stylish action work and darker dramatic stuff that I had liked a great deal. I had also enjoyed his older films, some of which were very quirky and surreal. His style of camerawork which had often involved using multiple cameras was very strong, and he had proven that he could handle complex special effects setups."
In creating their overall visual style for Spawn, Dippé and Navarro did a significant amount of homework. "Guillermo and I studied many pictures, including all of the noir-style comic book and dark hero films, as well as films that dealt with fantasies and Hell," says the director. "In terms of fantastic surrealism, the filmmaker who influenced me most was Alejandro Jodorowsky [the Chilean director of El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre]. His movies are very bold visually; when I first became serious about film, Jodorowsky's work really tweaked me. Later, when I was working at ILM, I was able to see and understand the process of making a film like T2, which is a very rich and powerful sci-fi film embedded in reality. Spawn has elements of both of those influences.
"I didn't want Spawn to be a cartoony movie," Dippé adds. "Big-screen translations of comic books often rely on camp and kitsch value. Spawn is an edgy character, so I wanted to go for the kind of harder, more realistic feeling that audiences are probably more accustomed to seeing in a Jim Cameron science-fiction film."
Navarro's approach to the picture's lighting stemmed from the story's fantastic underpinnings. "This film is totally contemporary, but it's also a fantasy world," he says. "For example, Spawn hides on the rooftop of this Gothic church and roams the alleys below, where this sort of underworld exists. I felt very comfortable in creating lighting that would be appropriate to the comic-book genre, and I basically treated Spawn like a period piece, in that the Gothic feel of the story, setting and characters suggested a particular approach.
"I don't have a lot of rules about lighting," he maintains. "Before we shot Spawn, I had discussions with my gaffer, David Lee, and key grip, Rick Stribling; we went through our 'baggage' of what we usually thought was good or bad, and reconsidered those things. We were trying to create our own reality with elements and codes that would relate to this particular story.
"To start with, I try to look at a location and see what it offers," he continues. "Then we block the scene and discover where I can accent the interaction between the characters and the setting. I ask myself, 'What are the pieces that are going to communicate the scene to the audience?' After that, I start building my lighting scenario. Practicals are part of it, so I work closely with the set decorator and look for opportunities to use them while we are scouting things. Sometimes you need to have a light coming in at a certain angle, but the frame shot will end up in a place that will reveal your source. Practicals will solve part of the problem."
As in his previous films, Navarro utilized an overall soft-light effect on Spawn, based on his ideas about naturalism, using that as his starting point and then searching to find the appropriate visual grammer to express the film's baroque story. "The images I see are more often based on soft sources than on straight, direct ones," he says. "In cinematography, lighting is an artificial process used to bring reality to our eyes through film. The more artificial that process becomes, the further I am taken away from the reality of the moment we are trying to capture. When the process is simple, and the result connects to memories of things I have experienced in real life, I can relate to it. But something artificially lit, created with very strong direct lighting, pushes me away from exactly what I am trying to capture.
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