Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Conran was influenced by the designs of Norman Bel Geddes, an industrial designer who did work for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and designed exhibits for the 1939 New York World's Fair.[9] Geddes also designed an Airliner Number 4 that was to fly from Chicago to London.[10]

Another key influence was Hugh Ferriss, one of the designers for the 1939 New York World's Fair who designed bridges and huge housing complexes.[9] He was an American delineator (one who creates perspective drawings of buildings) and architect. In 1922, skyscraper architect Harvey Wiley Corbett[11] commissioned Ferriss to draw a series of four step-by-step perspectives demonstrating the architectural consequences of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. These four drawings would later be used in his 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow (Dover Publications, 2005, ISBN 0-486-43727-2).

Regarding the 1939 New York World's Fair itself and its futuristic theme of the World of Tomorrow, Conran noted: "... obviously the title refers to the World Expo and the spirit of that was looking at the future with a sense of optimism and a sense of the whimsical, you know, something that we've lost a lot in our fantasies. We're more cynical, more practical, ... I think what this film attempts to do is to take that enthusiasm and innocence and celebrate it-to not get mired in the practicality that we're fixated upon today."[12]

Conran acknowledged his debt to German Expressionism, which was particularly evident in the opening scenes in New York City: "Early German cinema was born of just a completely different aesthetic than what we see nowadays. One of the last things I watched before starting this project was the Dr. Mabuse series that Lang had done - terribly inspirational, the use of art and propaganda even."[12]

Conran summed up what influenced him in making Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: "We tried to approach it almost as though we lived in that era and were just another group of artists trying to make a work out of those pieces and inspirations. We wanted the film to feel like a lost film of that era. If we're a footnote in the history of pulp art and Golden Age comics, that'd be enough, that'd be great. If we even just inspire some people to go back and investigate some of that stuff, we'd have done enough."[12]

Sky Captain has a number of commonalities with Hayao Miyazaki's anime movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986). The sky pirates' focus on primitive mechanics, large airships, and military cultures is similar. Both stories center on an evil madman controlling an island of high technology, and the search for that island. Laputa has the evil madman searching for the island, while Sky Captain has the island as the base of the madman from the beginning. Sky Captain is also different in its message, which is largely about the film genre, while Laputa has strong anti-war and anti-technology themes, found in most of Miyazaki's work.[13] Additionally, both the Miyazaki film and Sky Captain pay homage to the 1941 Superman animated short The Mechanical Monsters.

In 1994, Conran set up a bluescreen in his living room and began assembling the tools he would need to create his movie. He was not interested in working his way through the system and instead wanted to follow the route of independent filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh. Initially, Kerry and his brother had nothing more than "just a vague idea of this guy who flew a plane. We would talk about all the obvious things like Indiana Jones and all the stuff we liked."[14] Conran spent four years making a black and white teaser trailer in the style of an old-fashioned movie serial on his Macintosh IIci personal computer. Once he was finished, Conran showed it to producer Marsha Oglesby, who was a friend of his brother's wife and she recommended that he let producer Jon Avnet see it. Conran met Avnet and showed him the trailer. Conran told him that he wanted to make it into a movie. They spent two or three days just talking about the tone of the movie.[15]

Avnet and Conran spent two years working on the screenplay, which included numerous genre-related references and homages, and developing a working relationship. Then, the producer took the script and the trailer and began approaching actors. In order to protect Conran's vision, Avnet decided to shoot the movie independently with a lot of his own money. The producer realized that "the very thing that made this film potentially so exciting for me, and I think for an audience, was the personal nature of it and the singularity of the vision, which would never succeed and never survive the development process within a studio."[4]

Avnet went to Aurelio De Laurentiis and convinced him to finance the film without a distribution deal. Nine months before filming, Avnet had Conran meet the actors and begin rehearsals in an attempt to get the shy filmmaker out of his shell. Avnet set up a custom digital effects studio with a blue screen soundstage in an abandoned building in Van Nuys, California. A group of almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators and compositors created multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live action footage yet to be filmed.

The entire movie was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then re-created as computer-generated 3D animatics with all of the 2D background photographs digitally painted to resemble the 1939 setting. With the animatics as a guide, grids were created to map camera and actor movements with digital characters standing in for the real actors. The grids were made into actual maps on the blue screen stage floor to help the actors move around invisible scenery.[16]

Ten months before Conran made the movie with his actors, he shot it entirely with stand-ins in Los Angeles and then created the whole movie in animatics so that the actors had an idea of what the film would look like and where to move on the soundstage. To prepare for the film, Conran had his cast watch old movies, such as Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) for Paltrow's performance and The Thin Man (1934) for the relationship between Nick and Nora that was to be echoed in the one between Joe and Polly.[6] Avnet constantly pushed for room in this meticulously designed movie for the kind of freedom the actors needed, like being able to move around on the soundstage.

Conran and Avnet were able to cut costs considerably by shooting the entire movie in 26 days (not the usual three to four months that this kind of movie normally takes) on high-definition video using a Sony HDW-F900 and working entirely on three separate bluescreens, mainly on Stage 2 (George Lucas Stage) at Elstree Studios in London, England[17] with one notable exception. Conran wrote a scene that was added later in which Polly talks to her editor in his office that was shot on a physical set because there was no time to shoot it on a blue screen soundstage.[6] The footage from the HD camera was run through a switcher and then through a Macintosh computer running Final Cut Pro that allowed the filmmakers to line up the animatics with the live onstage footage. Conran said, "I don't know how we would have made this movie. It's really what allowed us to line up everything, given there was nothing there."[16] After each day of shooting, footage was edited and sent overnight to editors in Los Angeles who added CG and sent it back.

After filming ended, they put together a 24-minute presentation and took it to every studio in June 2003. There was a lot of interest and Avnet selected the studio that gave Conran the most creative control. They needed studio backing to finish the film's ambitious visuals. At one point, the producer remembers that Conran was "working 18 to 20 hours a day for a long period of time. It's 2,000 some odd CG shots done in one year, and we literally had to write code to figure out how to do this stuff!"[18] Most of the post-production work was done on Mac workstations using After Effects for compositing and Final Cut Pro for editing (seven workstations were dedicated to visual effects and production editing). The distinctive look of the film was achieved by running footage through a diffusion filter and then tinting it in black and white before color was blended, balanced and added back in.

Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989, posthumously appears as the villain and mad scientist Dr. Totenkopf. His likeness was produced using digitally manipulated archival BBC footage of the actor and thus adding one more film to his repertoire. A similar move was made two years later in Superman Returns (2006) with Marlon Brando.

Avnet cultivated a calculated release for the movie by first moving its release date from the summer (it was supposed to open a week before Spider-Man 2 (2004)) to September, then courting the Internet press and finally making an appearance at the San Diego Comic Con with key cast members in an attempt to generate some advance buzz.[18]

1. "The World of Tomorrow" – 1:07
2. "The Zeppelin Arrives" – 1:53
3. "The Robot Army" – 3:01
4. "Calling Sky Captain" – 3:26
5. "Back at the Base" – 2:49
6. "The Flying Wings Attack" – 6:31
7. "An Aquatic Escape" – 2:29
8. "Flight to Nepal" – 4:38
9. "Treacherous Journey" – 2:22
10. "Dynamite" – 2:26
11. "Three in a Bed" – 0:57
12. "Finding Frankie" – 5:02
13. "Manta Squadron" – 6:33
14. "h-770-d" – 1:14
15. "Flying Lizard" – 1:06
16. "Totenkopf's Ark" – 5:01
17. "Back to Earth" – 3:14
18. "Over the Rainbow" – 3:54

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had high box office expectations, opening in first place on its September 17, 2004 release date and grossing US$15.5 million on its opening weekend. However, the film only grossed $37.7 million in North America, below its estimated $70 million budget. It managed to gross $20.1 million in the rest of the world, making its final worldwide tally $57.9 million. The film is considered a box office flop.[21]

Kevin Conran disputed this budget figure in a 2015 interview. "I take great issue with that [budget figure] personally and I’d like someone to show me where all that money went," says Kevin. "I don’t support those numbers and I never have. We walked into Jon Avnet’s office that first day and he said, 'What do you want for the production?' and we said $3 million. We could have done a version of this film for $3 million. It would have been black-and-white and sans name actors ...

"But even still, this whole thing was going to be under $20 million. How it went from 20 to 70, you tell me."[22]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 70% based on 221 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The site's critical consensus states: "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is slim on plot and characterization, but the visuals more than make up for it".[23] On Metacritic the film has a score of 64 out of 100 based on reviews from 36 critics, indicating "Generally favorable reviews".[24] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B- on scale of A to F.[25]

The Canadian network Space awarded it the 2005 Spacey Award for Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Film.[26] Roger Ebert was among those who strongly supported the film, giving it a 4 out of a possible 4 stars and praising it for "its heedless energy and joy, it reminded me of how I felt the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way".[27] The film is also one of few to be awarded five out of five stars by IGN FilmForce.[28] In his review for the Chicago Reader, J.R. Jones wrote, "This debut feature by Kerry Conran is a triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste".[29] Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "A−" rating, saying, "The investment is optimistic and wise; Sky Captain is a gorgeous, funny, and welcome novelty".[30]

Other critics' enthusiasm was somewhat tempered. For instance, Stephen Holden of The New York Times lauded its visuals and its evocation of a bygone era but felt that "the monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance ... At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi clichés".[31] USA Today said that the film was "all style over substance, a clever parlor trick but a dull movie".[32] Stephen Hunter, of The Washington Post, called it "a $70 million novelty item".[33]

The Flying Legion is a homage to pulp magazine and comic book heroes such as G-8 and his Battle Aces, Captain Midnight, and the Blackhawk squadron. Also, production designer Kevin Conran, the brother of director Kerry Conran, based the design of the flying humanoid robots, in part, on the helmet worn by the DC Comics superhero Adam Strange and the flight controls for Commando Cody's rocket-pack.[39]