Movie Galleries Movie Galleries
 Best Sellers
Erotic Posters
|
Saved! Picture 11
|
 More Movies
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|||
|
|
|
|
|
|||
Saved! Full Production Notes "Heaven Help Us."
|
|||
 Chapter 10: On LocationSaved! was filmed quickly over a 28-day period during the fall of 2002 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
An old friend of producers Stipe and Stern, cinematographer Bobby Bukowski says, "As a cinematographer you are sent dozens of scripts, but from the second page of Saved! I started laughing out loud and thought, `Whatever the budget of this film, I want to be part of it.' Having joy involved with your work is a rare and wonderful opportunity, and this movie signaled that from the very beginning."
Bukowski goes on to point out that the humor in the story has been greatly infused with compassion. "What's beautiful about the script was you were sitting there laughing but you weren't really laughing at anybody," he says. "Brian was very careful not to place judgment on his characters. There is a great humanity behind the movie, and by the end it is so beautiful."
Filmed entirely on location without any studio shooting, the production was dependent on finding the right sets, and was also at the mercy of the unpredictable weather.
Production designer Tony Devenyi explains the significance of the very modern suburban homes and school that were chosen as the background for the story: "We wanted to create a kind of world unto itself, the Christian world that was the basis for the film. Our research showed that there were a lot of new communities being built that were very similar and extremely spotless. We also realized the overriding colors were very neutral and monochromatic ` cream or beige right down to the artwork."
Further explaining the strategy of filming against these modern, tidy neighborhoods, cinematographer Bukowski says, "Sometimes when you're watching a film, a cacophony of design and color can be distracting and make it hard to put your characters in the foreground. From the beginning we were going for a very neutral palette against which to showcase these very colorful characters. Dramatically, Brian was also trying to keep this neutrality by not saying, `This is the bad guy and this is the good guy.'"
Production designer Devenyi explains how color was used to introduce some of the story's standout characters. "We introduced color during some of the flashbacks of Mary's earlier life," he says. "We also introduced color by means of Eva Amurri's character, Cassandra, the girl who drives a wild purple car and overturns the apple cart of the Christian structure in which she's trapped. The color red is also kept out of the picture until Mary shows up wearing a red dress at the prom."
The modern high school, which provides the focal point for much of the film's action, was chosen for its unusual design as well as its proliferation of windows and skylights. The filmmakers found the Clayton Heights Secondary School in the suburb of South Surrey to have exactly the look needed for the film's American Eagle Christian High.
"We wanted a school that was very atypical, that had never been seen on film before," adds Devenyi. "The design for this school was very cubist, almost like a German Expressionist film set, with a lot of angles, strange lines, and broken up imagery. It gave us many great angles to shoot from inherent in the architecture. Ultimately, it also gave us a nice representation of the fractured look we wanted as the Christian world breaks down for the characters."
One of the most notable creations made for the film is the giant 25-foot tall billboard of Jesus wearing running shoes looming over the parking lot outside the school ` it's a billboard being painted in the film's opening by "Christian Jewels" Jena Malone and Mandy Moore. Following Dannelly's idea of using contemporary artwork influenced by Nike ads, Devenyi says they decided to go for something "cool that kids could identify with. We made a Jesus wearing running shoes, drawn in a fashion familiar to anyone who picks up a teen magazine today."
The challenge of working within a twenty-eight day shooting schedule called for the production crew to work quickly and efficiently, a synchronized unit. To a great extent, this process was speeded up by the fact that cinematographer Bukowski also operated the camera. "I had been with the script for 8 months," he says. "We worked hard at storyboarding the film in Florida and Brian imparted a great understanding of the story to me. As an operator director of photography, you have a great collaboration with the director in that you can tell the story as it's happening. You don't have time to rehearse shots and the actors don't have time to rehearse scenes, so everything happening in front of the camera is happening for the first time. It adds a freshness and electricity to everything."
Next Page: Saved! Full Production Notes |
|||
Sitemaps, RSS Feeds & Social Networks
|
|||||||
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||
Destination London 