2004 Movie Titles
|
 |
movies central
|
2004 Movie Titles
|
|
movies central
|
 |
 Browse More Movies
|
Godsend
Starring: Robert DeNiro, Janet Bailey, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Deborah Odell
Directed by: Nick Hamm
Screenplay by: Mark Bomback
Release Date: April 30th, 2004
Running Time: 100 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence including frightening images, a scene of sexuality and some thematic material.
Box Office: $14,379,751 (US total)
Studio: Lions Gate Films
|
 |
||
Tagline: When a miracle becomes a nightmare, evil is born.
“We’ve already lost everything.”
Paul and Jessie Duncan (Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) have lost their beloved eight year-old son Adam (Cameron Bright) in a tragic accident. As they are arranging for his burial, Dr. Richard Wells, (Robert De Niro) approaches with the incredible offer to clone Adam, essentially bringing back their boy and reuniting their broken family.
Despite the many legal, ethical and moral issues raised by the offer, the grieving couple, after much soul searching, accept Wells’ proposal, placing them in a sort of Faustian pact with the doctor. But to the Duncans, the secrecy Wells demands is insignificant compared to the hope that their son will again have the chance to grow up.
The couple moves to the small town of Riverton, home of Wells’ impressive Godsend Fertility Clinic, where the stem cells carrying Adam’s DNA are implanted in Jessie’s womb and where Adam will be born and raised – for the second time.
Adam’s new life follows a comfortable and, to Paul and Jessie, predictable pattern, until he reaches his eighth birthday – and virtually begins living on borrowed time.
The parents have placed their complete trust in Dr. Wells, but now questions are raised and they start to wonder: just how far did he really go? Did he settle for simply playing God? Once they unravel the horrific truth, Paul and Jessie Duncan will have to come to terms with what they have done, and what has been done to their family.
Genesis
While certain elements of Godsend feel as though they’ve been ripped from recent headlines, the genesis of the project was more intimate, emanating from screenwriter Mark Bomback’s personal experience. “I first came up with the idea about the time my wife was pregnant with our son,” he says, “And I was struck by how much technology is involved today in fertility. We needed a little bit of help — not as much as some others do — and we were amazed by how far science has come in the past 20 years.”
Bomback himself comes from a family of doctors. His father is a pediatrician who, as an undergraduate, conducted some research in genetics. One of his brothers is a doctor and another is in medical school. The concept of cell research and cloning was not foreign to him. Says Bomback, “This whole topic has really exploded in the past few years. There is exponentially more research material that’s become available since I first started the script. Over the past few years major studies and articles about cloning and stem cell research have been appearing with increasing regularity.”
At this time, Godsend is speculative about the use of science to clone a human being, but the science itself is grounded in fact. Dolly the sheep, widely acknowledged to be the world’s first cloned mammal is the theoretical template for Godsend’s Adam. Dr. Ian Wimott, the Scottish research scientist who created Dolly, proposed that his process was a feasible way in which any mammal could be cloned. Director Nick Hamm saw that the characters, their fears, and in turn, their terrifying experience, not the issue of cloning technology was at the heart of the movie. “We don’t treat cloning in a pseudo-scientific way, or supply the film with a futuristic setting which is un-relatable to most people. We set it here and now, right into people’s lives. The point is, if you have the ability to do this, what would you do?”
The dark side of that question gives rise to the issues that haunt Godsend: Ethics, morality, and legality are all taken into consideration by the emotionally devastated Duncans as they frantically debate Dr. Wells’ proposition. Producer Michael Paseornek adds the frightening question: “When you get into cloning human beings, what do you do with the ones that don’t work out?”
This question, and the myriad questions like it that have been precipitated by the rapid advances of science in the last few years and, specifically, sparked by the recent national debate over stem cell research, have created a change in the way our society and our government has come to deal with issues of bio-ethics. Indeed, in August 2001, President Bush created the President’s Council on Bio-ethics, chaired by Dr. Leon Kass. But as Dr. Kass pointed out in his opening remarks to the Council in January 2002, the events of September 11th created “a palpable increase in America’s moral seriousness” and utterly changed the way people thought about issues of life and death.
In his remarks, Dr. Kass continued, “A fresh breeze of sensible moral judgment…has enabled us to see evil for what it is, and…it has been a long time since the climate and mood of the country was this hospitable for serious moral reflection.” Kass goes on to say that “In the case of terrorism…it is easy to identify evil…but in the realm of bio-ethics, the evils we face, if indeed they are evils, are intertwined with the goods we so keenly seek: cures for disease, relief of suffering, preservation of life. Distinguishing good and bad thus intermixed is often extremely difficult.”
It is precisely this difficulty distinguishing good from evil, and right from wrong, that confront the Duncan family in Godsend. Given only 72 hours in the midst of unspeakable grief to decide whether or not to clone their son, the Duncans can’t contemplate all the serpentine ramifications of their actions. They can’t possibly foresee the dangers and the damages their decision will cause. Most powerfully, they can never get past the notion that they are, essentially, saving their son.
A perverse case of fact eclipsing fiction occurred while Godsend was filming in November and December of 2002. News stories broke out – first about an Italian doctor who alleged he was about to clone a human being. This was followed almost immediately by the outrageous announcements of multiple baby cloning's by the bizarre Raelian cult. The media seized on the sensation and lurid headlines about human cloning screamed from the covers of daily papers while television reports, eccentric news conferences and much speculation became a staple of nightly newscasts and magazine shows. Against the backdrop of this media circus, Godsend continued filming.
Casting Godsend
With the screenplay built around four extremely well crafted characters, Godsend afforded Hamm the opportunity to cast the movie from the top of the talent pool.
Oscar® nominee Greg Kinnear was drawn to the very human story within the structure of a thriller, and to the subject matter itself. “Of course it’s the script,” he says of his initial interest in this role. “A very interesting element of the screenplay is that it feels like an adult drama that starts to get more and more frightening – it really sneaks up on you subtly but very powerfully. It is also a very contemporary topic. As far-fetched as it sounds, the technology of cloning is very plausible. Mark Bomback has taken the scary and harrowing premise of the moral ideology of the issue – just how far the science should be allowed to go -- and captured it in an elegant and human story.”
“Greg is just one of the most intelligent and thoughtful actors I’ve ever worked with,” says Nick Hamm. “He is a joy to work with, he is precise, he understands, he has absolute focus, and brings with him a real analyses of the material.”
In Godsend, Kinnear portrays Paul Duncan, a high-school biology teacher who first must make the decision to illicitly clone his dead son and then search out the truth behind this decision. “Greg has the wonderful ability to make himself available to the audience,” explains Hamm. “It takes great skill to convincingly portray an ‘everyman’ character, letting the audience feel they could be in your shoes. It’s very hard for an actor to really hold the middle ground without ever going too soft or too hard.”
While his character may be described as an ‘everyman’, the emotional arc of the character is extraordinary. “I pretty much had to go to the most horrible place in my own humanity scale to imagine what this couple had gone through and how they’ve suffered,” explains Kinnear. “I had to do that to try to understand what inspired them to accept Wells’ offer and to cross that moral and ethical boundary.” Preparing for the role, Kinnear happily immersed himself in scientific material. “Science interests me,” says Kinnear. “I’m intrigued by the technologies of cloning and what those technologies can do. The huge evolutionary curve that has taken place in the last twenty years is absolutely astounding. Just as we’re shooting this movie we’re getting a barrage of reports of human clones. Nobody knows (at this point), if they are true or not. But, in the not-too-distant future it likely will be true and that’s a remarkable thing to consider. To find a way to touch on that while telling a very human story is an exceptionally compelling notion.”
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos caught the eye of Marc Butan with her evocative work in Brian De Palma’s film noire, Femme Fatale. “I saw an early screening around Cannes, and Rebecca just stuck in my head,” recalls Butan. “That performance showed me that she really had acting chops. There’s also accessibility to her. I thought she’d be an exciting and interesting choice for Jessie.”
“Rebecca is a find,” agrees Hamm. “I’m so proud of what she’s done in the movie. She’s instinctive, intuitive with her choices. Her capacity to feel shows in her creation of this mother figure and then demonstrated further as she takes this figure through that tragedy. I think what she does is remarkable.”
“Godsend is the antithesis of everything I’ve done until now,” explains Romijn-Stamos. “I’ve gone from X-Men to Femme Fatale playing highly stylized characters – very glamorous or just outrageous characters. This gives me the chance to play someone naturalistic, someone a little more subtle and,” she laughs, “to get a ‘mommy’ haircut.” She adds, “It’s topical material, and I appreciate that it has a brain. I was also excited by the way Nick was going to make this, in that we wouldn’t be relying on heavy special effects. Because it’s all in the way we play it, it becomes organic.”
Expanding on her character, Romijn-Stamos adds: “When we meet Jessie at the beginning of the film, she’s the happiest we’ll ever see her – she’s just basking in motherhood and family. All she ever wanted in life was a family. When she loses Adam she feels that she’s lost everything. She’s completely destroyed and she really is pathological about getting her child back.”
Mark Bomback was impressed by what Romijn-Stamos brought to the challenging role. “Unlike Paul,” he says, “Jessie is much more reluctant to accept that something could be wrong with her child. Rebecca was really great about reminding me that this is a woman who’s lost her child and, even though she gets that child back through Well’s cloning, she’s a woman who has suffered a unique and awful sort of trauma. I think she carries that certain undercurrent of grief throughout her whole performance.”
For the Mephistopheles-like Dr. Richard Wells, Bomback enticed Robert De Niro to Godsend. Acclaimed as one of the finest actors of a generation, the double Oscar® winner explores the deep recesses of a man guided by his own moral compass.
“Bob is just the most fascinating actor to work with,” says Hamm of De Niro. “He applies total attention to detail and to the accuracy of his work. There’s no softness in his work, no fat. There’s not any superfluous decision making and nothing happens by chance. Working with Bob is working with thirty years of movie making. I was not just working with him; I was also learning from him. In creating his character, Dr. Richard Wells, I was fascinated by every decision he made.”
For freshman screenwriter Bomback, De Niro’s involvement was, “a dream come true. It’s remarkable to see how he approaches the character and tries to inhabit what it means to be a fertility doctor. He was interested in the text and in the character as a whole – he asked me for tons of research material and I sent him dozens and dozens of pieces. I sent him technical journals and photographs. I sent him material on people who do for a living what Richard does – namely being a fertility doctor. I sent articles about several different doctors, legitimate obstetricians and some who operate underground in much more surreptitious experiments.”
At the very heart, in so many ways, of Godsend, is Adam, the young boy who dies almost immediately at the start of the film only to be brought back in a most disturbing way. Playing the role is nine year-old Cameron Bright in his first major starring role.
“I was looking for someone with very specific qualities for this role,” explains Hamm. “I needed a young boy who had the duality needed to endear himself to an audience at one moment and frighten them the next. I was very lucky to find that rare quality in Cameron.”
It took more than luck to find the young actor. Indeed, the filmmakers launched an extensive search that took months. Casting sessions were held in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Toronto. Hundreds of aspiring stars were seen in those sessions and thousands more on videotapes submitted from around the globe. Cameron Bright, a native of Nanaimo, British Columbia, not far from Vancouver, was on one of those tapes.
Producer Butan says, “We saw Cameron early and he was the kid to beat from the get-go. It’s very hard to judge a child actor’s skill or range because they just don’t have the body of work yet. The most experienced kids out there may have only done a handful of roles – and that’s impressive when you’re under 10, but there are very few films or TV shows that a child that young has to carry. We have some huge stars in this movie but, ultimately, the kid had to carry it.”
At a final stage in the casting process, Butan gathered Kinnear and Romijn-Stamos in Toronto where he had them spend a day with Cameron. “They went to a park, had a good time and we shot some casual footage with the three of them,” explains Butan. “We wanted to see them together, to see if there’s a natural believability that they are a family. They had a real chemistry together. You could see on that day how well it was going to work.”
At barely nine years old, Bright found himself on location, starring in a major motion picture. His more experienced co-stars appreciated the demands on the boy. “It’s a really tricky part,” comments Greg Kinnear. “In a sense he plays multiple characters and that’s always a real challenge. For a kid who’s nine, it’s enormous. He’s really wonderful in the role. He’s also a great kid, funny and charming. He lights up the set.”
His on-screen mom agrees: “Cameron has a huge responsibly in this film. A lot relies on Cameron and he’s done a phenomenal job. He plays this normal, sweet little kid and then he’s got to play this complicated kind of demon-child. Cameron has really gotten into this; he’s really good, and so subtle. I am so impressed with him.”
Three of the stars of Godsend came to the production with a tremendous wealth of experience and training while the fourth, Cameron Bright, had been acting and studying the craft for only a few years – not unimpressive when you are nine. Nick Hamm, who had previously directed the British school-set thriller, The Hole, came to Godsend with a genuine understanding of child actors. “With children it’s always very interesting because the process is different for them,” explains the director. “Often they’re instinctive, so what you will do is set up a situation in which they can behave a certain way. With many young child actors it’s really about capturing behavior. However, this role is too demanding for that. Thankfully Cameron is quite skilled and is able to act and to hold his own alongside Greg, Rebecca, and Bob. Of course I worked differently with him. I give him more direction and frequently, I don’t cut camera, we just keep rolling as I talk him through a moment or a scene.”
The on-screen family were close off the set as well. The three went to the movies together and played games together during their downtime. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos smiles as she thinks back. “We had our little songs that we’d sing when we were freezing in the street together and hugging each other to try to warm up. He’s really become our young friend.”
Bearing
Hamm presents Godsend in a way that involves the audience in the emotional horror of the Duncans’ dilemma rather than using computers and optical effects to create artificial elements or creatures. “In terms of the vision of the movie, it is domestic, naturalistic, but at the same time quite twisted. We’re working in a situation where we’re not only relying on shocks to make people scared. Instead, we created an atmosphere, a story, and a situation in which anything at all could happen. That to me is frighteningly intense.”
For the cast of Godsend, working CGI-free was a hugely satisfying approach. These are top actors at the peak of their craft, and they are working with, and off of, eachother – not reacting to green screens and creatures that would be created later on in a remote computer environment. Hamm put his trust in the screenplay and in the cast rather than relying on effects to move an audience. The horror of this film comes from a sense of relationship to the characters, not from a series of effects and noise jumping out at the audience. Kinnear comments wryly, “This is not an ooga-booga movie.”
Unusual for the horror genre, much of Godsend plays out in the daytime, with most scenes brightly yet moodily lit. Hamm explains his visual approach to the film: “I think true psychological terror comes in daylight, in everyday surroundings, not buried in shadow,” says Hamm. “Certainly not all of Godsend could be considered ordinary but the root of it certainly is. In essence, it is the familiar made disturbing.” Director of Photography Kramer Morgenthau worked closely with Hamm and Production Designer Doug Kraner to create a visual language that could freely suit the movie from its periods of relative normality to the most moody and terrifying moments. “We felt the story was so fantastic that we needed to take a realistic approach to the overall photography in order to keep it believable,” says Morgenthau.
“Both Nick and I tend towards a more expressive, somewhat stylized approach, but, for the most part, we kept things grounded with a visual reality. For our palette, we referenced some of the works of landscape painter Andrew Wyeth, and also took from that a little of the sense of a slightly dark, expressionistic normality. We’re taking the audience emotionally into this placid yet eventually scary universe of the countryside where the Duncans have moved, mindful that the visuals should not telegraph just what is to come.”
A strong portion of the movie takes place within the visions that afflict Adam. For those sequences, Morgenthau made exceptions to the realistic style of the movie. Technical expertise bolstered his creativity as he employed a series of techniques to texture the movie’s look. He used more than a dozen different film stocks, selecting each for their specific qualities of color intensity; contrast, graininess, and resolution. Exaggerating these visual elements, he severely altered the way many of the sequences were processed by the lab, sometimes changing the chemistry altogether. For one visual theme he even altered the motor in the motion picture camera to throw the film slightly out of phase with the shutter. This caused a dramatic shrieking of the highlights on screen.
The most dramatic and innovative visual effect in Godsend occurs as Adams nightmare world starts to feel that it could overtake him. “Nick wanted the audience to see Adam’s conflicting points of views,” says Morgenthau. In keeping with the film’s philosophy of avoiding digital or optical visual effects wherever possible, a unique lens was invented for this sequence. Russell Bowie, Morgenthau’s first assistant cameraman created this by extensively modifying a stereoscopic still camera lens. The effect is an unsettling parallax that effectively represents Adam’s altered state.
Delivery
Nick Hamm built his career in the theater where, among his many successes, he had been resident of the Royal Shakespeare Company and British Artistic Director of the highly acclaimed Sadler’s Wells Theatre Company. With this background it should surprise no one to learn that Nick Hamm had a healthy regard for rehearsal.
Hamm gathered the cast, producers and screenwriter together for an intensive rehearsal process in the period before Godsend went to camera. Bomback also participated and reflects: “Each of the actors had great ideas for the characters and this time together took the work to that next level.”
“We’re very lucky to have rehearsal time, all of us together, even our movie son,” comments Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. “Just playing everything out and seeing how it feels, what feels right and natural, and really getting to know each other. I really love the rehearsal process. Once you get to the day of shooting everything gets chaotic and crazy so it’s really nice to have this calm time to work through the character and find the heart of the movie.”
“We explored a lot of different scenes and ideas,” comments Greg Kinnear. “In the rehearsal process Nick really wanted to find what the emotional core was for this couple and what it was they were going through and struggling with.”
The energy of the rehearsals was heightened by the participation of Robert De Niro. Each person in the room shared a great admiration for his iconic performances in some of the greatest movies of their generation. “At the end of the day, it’s true that good actors are good actors,” says Kinnear. “But Bob is an amazingly gifted and talented actor. He’s a remarkable professional and an incredibly kind man. To have the opportunity to work with him, to play off of his skill and to learn from him, I rank as one of my exceptional experiences.”
Romijn-Stamos readily agrees: “He’s phenomenal. It’s just so amazing watching his process while you’re working. Watching and seeing why he does certain things - I’m constantly learning from him and it’s always amazing.”
Rehearsals continued right through the production. In any free moment on the set - as lights were adjusted, as cameras were repositioned, Hamm and the cast took the opportunity to further explore the scenes and characters.
While the extraordinary cast individually and collectively shaped their characters and brought great input to the film, it was Hamm at the helm once the cameras rolled. “Nick knows exactly what he wants,” says Kinnear. “He comes from an enormous theatre background and is very gifted in working with actors. Nick always knows what buttons to push. He has great clarity about each scene and the underlying themes – a clarity that for an actor is incredibly encouraging. He’s also a very strong presence in terms of driving the show. Because this movie was not shot in a lot of days, it needed a ringleader. We got one in Nick.”
In the midst of his tasks as ringleader, Hamm never lost focus of the story and the strengths of each of his stars. Collaboration was as common during those furtive moments shooting on location as they were during early rehearsal time. Each of these strong actors had contributed greatly to the foundation of their characters and felt a vested interest in the sustained integrity of the production.
|
|||||
Sitemaps, RSS Feeds & Social Networks
|
|||||||
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||
Add this page to social networks
BlinkList
| del.icio.us
| Digg it
| Furl
| ma.gnolia
| Netvouz
| Simpy
| Spurl
| Netscape
| StumbleUpon
|
|||||||
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Greg Kinnear and Cameron Bright in Godsend.
