HEAVEN SENT
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Earthly Endeavors
Richard Edlund, ASC leads a seasoned effects crew on Angels in America.

by Ron Magid
 

Richard Edlund, ASC recalls that when he first received a call about Angels in America, in January 2002, "I wasn't sure if it would interest me. But Mike Nichols was directing it, and he had assembled a great cast, so I read on, and I found it was a great and almost Shakespearean script." Edlund subsequently flew to New York and met with Nichols, director of photography Stephen Goldblatt, ASC, and producer Cary Brokaw to discuss ideas for visual effects. The meeting went well, but the filmmakers eventually opted to go another way, says Edlund.

Several months later, when the production went into hiatus after filming Angels' first part, Millennium Approaches, Edlund received another call from HBO. He recalls, "They said, 'Mike isn't happy with the way things are going. Are you available? There are some things that need to be fixed.'" After meeting with the show's visual-effects producer, Liz Ralston, Edlund and his colleague, visual-effects co-supervisor Ron Simonson, flew to New York to supervise the project's second half, Perestroika. The Santa Monica-based facility Riot was contracted to do the lion's share of the effects work, which Edlund says was largely because Michelle Moen, "my favorite matte artist," was on staff there.

Edlund, who won four Academy Awards for the original Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark, acknowledges that inheriting a project whose visual effects were incorrectly planned was especially difficult.

"We made a lot of silk purses out of sows' ears on Millennium Approaches, which had already been shot and included a lot of mistakes," he notes. "Thank God we had terrific performances that were beautifully photographed by Stephen Goldblatt."

Many of the show's 400-plus effects shots concern the heavenly creature embodied by Thompson. The angel visits the protagonist, Prior (Justin Kirk), who is dying of AIDS, in a series of dramatic visions. As she hovers overhead, giant wings flapping, she reveals to Prior something of the truth about his illness. Ironically, some of the most difficult work Edlund's team confronted was the so-called "simple" wire removal - eliminating rigs from Goldblatt's backlit, smoke-filled shots. Edlund notes that the moving smoke complicated the wire-removal work, "but as difficult as it was, it ultimately looks better - even though we had to animate back in the smoke we removed from in front of the wires.

"The filmmakers wanted to give Emma the freedom to perform, so she wasn't cinched up in the usual - and most uncomfortable - corset and hung by her hips," he continues. "Instead, she was sitting fairly comfortably on a suspended bicycle seat, with a footrest beneath her. This enabled her to rest her feet at certain moments, which saved her stamina for performance, but it created some problems for us: the shape of the bicycle seat became visible when the wind machines blew her sheer costume against it. With wind machines whirring on set all the time, wires would occasionally get wrapped in cloth. We had to delicately fix those kinds of things with animation. And there were lots of wires to remove; in addition to the ones supporting Emma, there were X-shaped wires supporting her wings, and one or two cables coming out from behind that were manipulated to flap her wings."

In fact, it was the cables on the mechanical rig that posed the most problems. "I would have set [that effect] up differently to begin with," says Edlund. "I pined for a wireless-motor system to operate the wings! Worst of all, on the ceiling of the stage was a huge gantry system that was used to move Emma up and down and to and fro, and it was impossible to hide. That was a nightmare. The unsung heroes on the project were a talented but anonymous team doing yeoman's work on hundreds of wire and rig removals. We used every trick in the book."

The visual-effects team was also tasked with creating shots that would increase the scale of the film, which was adapted from a stage play that features many two-character scenes. "It's not a 'macho' effects movie," says Edlund. "We wanted to use effects to enlarge the story's scale, similar to the way our matte shots made The Empire Strikes Back into a vast experience."

Among the many digital paintings Moen created was a vision of heaven that includes billowing clouds and San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge - elements that were added to a plate filmed at Hadrian's 2,000-year-old villa near Rome. Meanwhile, ceilings and walls that had to fall asunder when the angel (Emma Thompson) appears did so courtesy of miniatures built by Greg Jein and destroyed by practical-effects artist Thaine Morris, both long-time Edlund associates. Rounding out the effects team at Riot were lead 2-D artist Lawrence Littleton; compositors Stefano Trivelli, Don Greenberg and Enid Dalkoff, and 3-D artists Dan Sunwoo and Marcus LeVere. Edlund associate Kim Doyle was the visual-effects coordinator.

One of the most remarkable effects shots the team created portrays heaven as an overstaffed and inefficient Victorian-era bureaucracy, complete with an angelic typing pool that stretches off into infinity (reminiscent of Orson Welles' The Trial). The surreal image was filmed at Hadrian's villa outside Rome, and passersby must have been shocked to see Edlund and his colleagues setting up a series of desks viewable from the ruined villa, and winged secretaries hunting-and-pecking on ancient Smith-Coronas and Olivettis. Edlund recalls, "We set up 60 desks peopled with handsome, young, Italian extras, each outfitted with wings, and each with typewriters, in-out baskets, et cetera. We shot several tiles with greenscreen behind, moving the sections of desks each time. In composite we could then clone them beyond the fifth row with different action and repeat them all the way back to infinity. Mike Nichols just loves this shot."

Perestroika's most surreal effects sequence, however, is the "Plasma Orgasmata," a fiery vision in which the angel and Prior have sex. "The way Mike wanted to see it, the angel is floating over Prior, who's lying on a zebra rug, and he levitates up to her as she makes a powerful speech about how 'not physics, but ecstatics ... make the engine of creation run,'" says Edlund. "Then their clothes burn off and they're suddenly wrapped in fire, wildly copulating in mid-air. Her hair is blazing and her wings are flapping as they thrust toward each other, and fire gushes out from their loins, masking the act of penetration. It's surprising and quick - about 10 shots altogether - but it's a wild and memorable sequence."

Edlund and Simonson worked closely with Goldblatt to get the necessary elements. For shots showing the angel in the foreground, everything was filmed separately for a three-element composite. "We shot Emma against greenscreen in the foreground, Justin against greenscreen in the mid-ground, and the plate, which was the floor with the zebra rug," says Edlund. "For the reverse, because we just see smoke behind her, we shot her against the smoke background and Justin against greenscreen. We could then control their size and proximity and choreograph the thrusting effect in post."