The Sky's The Limit

By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

It's not often you get to see so clearly how money is the only difference between genius and insanity. If Paramount hadn't given first-time director Kerry Conran $40 million to make the action movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow (opening Sept. 17), Conran would still be filming his brother acting out scenes in front of a blue screen in his apartment, then staying up all night turning that footage into a giant-robot movie on his Macintosh. He would have been that guy in your IT department you go to only when no one else is around.

From 1996 to 2000, Conran, 37, lived with a weatherman's 14-ft.-tall blue screen clogging up his living room. "It was absurd. You just had to look at it and laugh," he says. It was, to put it kindly, not the kind of thing you want a woman to see when she comes over on a first date. "That assumes you have a date," says Conran. "I was working nonstop on this thing." After four years of monklike devotion to the dream of making a Bruckheimer-size sci-fi flick without leaving his apartment, Conran had completed six minutes.

Lucky for him, a friend of his brother's wife worked for producer Jon Avnet (Risky Business, Fried Green Tomatoes). Avnet liked the six minutes of robots so much he put up his own seed money and persuaded Law, Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Giovanni Ribisi to sign up for a vintage-looking film about a pilot and a tagalong reporter saving the world from an evil genius. "It's a rare chance we get to do something completely original artistically," says Jolie. "People use blue screen to cheat or enhance a little, but he had a film in his head that could only be done with all the newest technology. We made a whole new type of film, mixing old and new styles. It's a piece of art with its own unique texture."

The only arty texture stuff the actors got to do was minimalist theater in front of a blue screen in a Van Nuys, Calif., warehouse, stooping when Conran yelled "Duck!" and pretending they were interacting with everything from dirigibles to a desk to a shaky hologram of a digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier (another actor voiced his new lines). George Lucas and others have created scenes in front of blue screens before, but Conran was the first to try to build absolutely everything nonhuman on the computer. It's the anti--Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Conran leaving holes for the actors, who ran from one piece of tape on the floor to another as cameramen were instructed to tilt and rotate by exact degrees at precise moments. That, it turns out, does not make for happy cameramen, who have creative ideas of their own.

Making a movie without any sets might radically change filmmaking, but Conran didn't set out to do that. He created a new use for animation-rendering software because it was the only way he could make the Raiders of the Lost Ark--style movie he wrote as an ode to 1940s comic books. Going to Nepal, having a zeppelin dock at the Empire State Building, re-creating 1939, even shooting at Radio City Music Hall were all too expensive for a novice director. So he got pictures of those places and that period and turned them into 3-D models on a computer. "A lot of the decision to make this all blue screen was economic. Were that not the issue, I don't know if you'd do it," he says. "Because the one dirty little secret is, it's very labor intensive. It requires a devotion that's not healthy or sustainable." Forget the lack of dates: in the past two years Conran has seen only one movie. And yes, it had Star Wars in the title.

While Conran is undeniably a film geek, he is the anti-Tarantino. Instead of working in a video-rental store and steeping himself in Asian kung-fu and blaxploitation films, Conran became a self-taught computer programmer and developed an encyclopedic knowledge of '30s and '40s movies. Whereas Quentin Tarantino talks at 100 r.p.m., Conran is shy, is ridiculously self-deprecating and shuns publicity. His original plan was to release Sky Captain as a black-and-white indie with unknown actors and pretend it was an unearthed film by a Frank Capra protege.

Almost always wearing a baseball hat, jeans and sneakers, Conran, who grew up in Flint, Mich., before going to film school at Cal Arts, looks like what fellow Flinter Michael Moore can only aspire to. He's football-player stocky, with a smiley, boyish face and bright blue eyes, and an inability to get through a sentence without putting himself down. Every so often in the interview, Avnet has to pep up Conran with Stuart Smalley--like motivational aphorisms like "This isn't like Wayne's World. You are worthy." Conran wasn't even in the room when Avnet showed the six minutes to Paltrow, who agreed to sign on at indie wages without even reading the script. "I don't think you want me there if you want to sell something," the director says. "I would have spent the whole time telling her why she didn't want to do it." As a director, he says his thought on working with actors is that "it's an inevitable, unavoidable obstacle." It took him a while to give the actors any direction whatsoever. "He's painfully shy. He knows exactly what he wants, which is totally at odds with his persona," Paltrow says. "He would still pause between every word, like he wished to God he wasn't saying these things."

Conran's real skill, more than writing or coaching actors on snappy noir patter, is creating the film's look. Even before the effects were added, so that it was just a shot of Paltrow and Law against a blue background jumping like idiots, it was lit beautifully. And Conran's camerawork, if you can call it that, is exciting. "Some of the physics of what a lens will do won't [allow] what Kerry has it do," says Avnet. "Where's the camera? It's on top of a wing. It's anywhere." Each of the 2,031 different shots in the film is touched with Conran's obsessiveness; for example, he reviewed 240 designs for the movie's ray gun. You can start to see how a movie can take 10 years.

And now Conran, in all his shyness, is going to have to leave his computer for the first time in a decade. As he starts promoting the film, Conran is becoming less freaked out by things like interviews and sunlight. But the real shift in his life won't occur until later this month, when he has to go around the world to the various premieres for the film, seeing all the places he meticulously crafted on his computer but never actually visited, like Radio City Music Hall. And you just know, somehow, compared with the world he built, it's going to disappoint him.