Behind the Scenes of "War of the Worlds" Rick Carter and Doug Chiang on the Aliens, Red Weeds, & Spielberg's Vision The environment of this “War of the Worlds” has been described as hyper-real. Rick Carter - The idea of this version of “War of the Worlds” is that it really takes place in our world. So it's not as though we've created a new world that the aliens come into. It's our world so that starting in New Jersey on the East Coast, in Newark, first of all, that reflects a little bit of the Orson Welles version. But it's really about sort of setting it somewhere that we think we recognize in any of the movies that we've might have seen over the last years, or even just real life. It's actually based upon the main character, played by Tom Cruise as `Ray', being a dock worker. He actually works at a dock you see with Manhattan in the background. You see where he lives. That community that he lives [in], we didn't do anything there. You see all the American flags there, that's actually those people and who they are. The place that the first incident occurs is right in downtown Ironbound, Newark, New Jersey. I think it's designed so that people feel that this could happen, maybe even has happened somewhere in your psyche. An event like this could happen here. `Hyper-real' just means that it's taking what it's real and then putting something into it that makes something happen more than we've seen actually happen on our soil. Imagine it as a big pod and someone from above, who's been watching us, starts throwing stones into it. Now you watch all the fish start to scatter. And then step-by-step it just increases. Doug Chiang - One of the things is, for me, it really gets down to sort of the core essence of what science fiction meant for me. I mean, this is a real story with real events. Whereas in typical science fiction recently there has been a tendency to kind of make it too fantastic and detach itself from reality. And for this story here, what really appealed to me was that it was a real story and it was a very serious take on the whole thing. What would really happen if aliens really came down and how would we address it? And it wasn't being glamorized. It was like this is what would happen. And it was really gritty, and it's really real. I think it really gets down to why I love science fiction. Because it does really appeal to you because it presents a scenario out there in a very believable, convincing way. That's kind of the approach working with Rick. It's like, “Let's take this as if this was real life. If this was not a science fiction film, this is real life, what would we do?” Why are the aliens no longer from Mars? Rick Carter - I don't know if anyone believes that there's anything on Mars now. I think it's just more from `out there.' What was the biggest challenge of creating the world in the film? Doug Chiang - For us, it was really to make it very `everyday' [America], beyond let's say the alien and all that kind of encounter. It's like taking an everyday scenario and what would happen if an alien attacked something? How would we portray that destruction? How would we portray that look and how would we portray those abductions? Not taking the sort of, in my opinion, not taking the sort of Hollywood version of it, but what would it be like if it was a real event? That's sort of the angle and approach that I was kind of going into. A lot of the sets are very much like, as Rick was saying, what we see everyday. But it's how we actually portray the event. What did you pull from when you began working on the designs of the aliens? Rick Carter - I don't know how much we can say (laughing). Of course this is the big 500 lb, 10,000 lb elephant in the room that we're supposed to talk around. What I would say is that it's about how those aliens present themselves in our world, so that what I'm trying to get at is there's a mystery to it. There's a cause and effect so that a lot of what the aliens are about - and they're tripods and I'm allowed to say that - they've been here and that's why the [cells] are already here. There's a way that they're activated. So that, in a sense, it is about something that's already here from our subconscious coming up. But then not revealing it right away. It's not like you see some effect shot where, “Okay, here's the silly tripod standing over an intersection,” and you go, “Oh, okay.” It's all about seeing what Steven's so good at, which is the glimpses of that which is terrifying. And then seeing the magnification of the effect, how people actually respond. Then there's a journey from the initial encounter as we travel with the main characters. Every place that we go, in a way, you could have done it any time in this last century. Even the ferryboat sequence that is actually in the book, all these things actually are resonant all the way back. That's the one thing I would want to say is that this is all based upon the guy who, in a sense, invented everything that's going on out there. Because even though Jules Verne did a lot of fantastic things, things that are based upon fear and then how you overcome those fears - other dimensions - H.G. Wells is really the father of that. So to go back to a source that's over a hundred years old and to now bring it into our world… When you ask, “Is it spectacular?” Hopefully it's spectacular and everybody is like, “Eww, that's really cool. That's great.” And they can make a toy out of it and all that (laughing). But I think far more important is how does it present itself within the film. To give you an example that's entirely different: In “Jurassic Park” when the T-Rex is brought back into the movie in the very end in the Visitors Center. That was an idea that Steven had midway through the production. And I was asking like a very literal art director does, “How does it get in?” We'd shot the scenes both exterior and interior. He said, “Well, Grant and the kids are backing up. The raptors are coming forward. One of them jumps and the T-Rex comes in and grabs him.” I cracked up because he described exactly how it gets in…to his movie. So the reason I bring that up is that's what the movie is about. The movie is how these aliens and tripods present themselves in the movie. One of the things that Doug and I really enjoy collaborating about… We did “Polar Express” together… We go all the way back to “Back to the Future 2,” so really for us it's tapping into those things that allow Steven to shoot that environment, that alien, that tripod, whatever it is, in a way that's evocative for him along the lines of what I was saying. How it presents itself in the movie, even if we're not determining that. 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