Tagline: There are heroes. There are superheroes. And then there’s…
“Hancock” centers on a tortured superhero (Will Smith) who crash-lands in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and tries to transform himself by romancing an alluring housewife, causing chaos in the city.
There are heroes… there are superheroes… and then there’s Hancock (Will Smith). With great power comes great responsibility – everyone knows that – everyone, that is, but Hancock. Edgy, conflicted, sarcastic, and misunderstood, Hancock’s well-intentioned heroics might get the job done and save countless lives, but always seem to leave jaw-dropping damage in their wake. The public has finally had enough – as grateful as they are to have their local hero, the good citizens of Los Angeles are wondering what they ever did to deserve this guy.
Hancock isn’t the kind of man who cares what other people think – until the day that he saves the life of PR executive Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), and the sardonic superhero begins to realize that he may have a vulnerable side after all. Facing that will be Hancock’s greatest challenge yet – and a task that may prove impossible as Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), insists that he’s a lost cause. The film stars Will Smith, Charlize Theron, Jason Bateman, and Eddie Marsan. Directed by Peter Berg, the film is produced by Akiva Goldsman, Michael Mann, Will Smith, and James Lassiter.
Holding Out For A Hero
“Hancock is not your average superhero,” says Will Smith, the star of Columbia Pictures’ new action-comedy, Hancock. Smith says that he was attracted to the film by the chance to bring an original, unique story to the screen — Hancock, a superhero movie that expands the boundaries of the genre by stressing human emotion. “There’s this idea that ‘summer’ movies are about action and that ‘fall’ movies are about character,” he says. “Well, what happens if you take a powerful, dramatic story with rich character arcs and set it in a world with all the bells and whistles of a July 4th movie? Why can’t you marry those and get the best of both worlds?”
The way that Smith and his fellow filmmakers — producers Akiva Goldsman, Michael Mann, and James Lassiter, and director Peter Berg — would do that was to introduce the character to audiences in an unusual way. The movie would not focus on how Hancock got his powers or chose to use them; instead, Hancock would cut a universal figure as a man in the middle of his career who hates his job and wants out. His superpowers, far from a blessing, have given him an attitude that cuts him off from the public that should be his biggest fans.
“There’s only one person who could pull that off,” says Goldsman. “I can’t even conceive of Hancock without Will Smith playing him.”
“Will was excited to play a superhero,” says producer James Lassiter. “When we saw this script, we thought it was the perfect way to do this kind of movie — an irreverent superhero you haven’t seen before. Hancock is an exceptional, interesting character that breaks the mold.”
With Smith on board, it was an easy task to convince Peter Berg, acclaimed for his work as director of Friday Night Lights and The Kingdom, to direct the film. “Will is one of the few movie stars who have a real confluence of skills,” Berg continues. “He’s talented, he’s fearless and he’s extremely honest. When those three elements come together, the person can play almost anything, and Will is certainly willing to try anything.”
According to Michael Mann, the result is the perfect match between star and material — a film that delivers what audiences expect from Will while also engaging them in surprising ways. “We set out to make a movie that moved between being profoundly funny and irreverent to sexy and romantic, to thrilling and then wonderfully heartbreaking. Will Smith’s power as an actor is in his ability to inhabit the states of mind of this complex character in such profound ways. He is the center of gravity…” says Mann.
“Hancock is complicated,” says Smith. “Every day, he wakes up mad at the world. He doesn’t remember what happened to him and there’s no one to help him find the answers. He has good intentions, but has trouble connecting to the world around him.'”
Smith says that the film is rooted in a profound human emotion. “Hancock is like the high school quarterback with all the talent in the world who can’t get his attitude right,” Smith continues. “He doesn’t realize that the reason his team isn’t winning is because his love and comprehension of the game is out — he doesn’t understand the beauty of teamwork. Being part of a group, interacting with other people, is the central, human idea. For Hancock, he finds himself in a totally isolated place until he meets Ray Embrey, who brings him back into the fold of society.”
Jason Bateman takes on the role of Ray, the bleeding-heart PR exec. “When Hancock saves his life, Ray wants to pay him back by teaching Hancock how to conduct himself more appropriately and clean up his image. But for Ray, it’s not just about image control — he actually wants to teach Hancock how to be a better superhero.”
“I had a lot of room to explore Ray because he is such a trusting soul,” adds Bateman. “He wears rose-colored glasses, he is naïve, and he thinks he can see beyond Hancock’s hard, crusty shell to his soft and chewy insides up until their relationship becomes a bit more complicated. All that made Ray a rewarding character to play.”
“Charlize Theron is the musical note that fits perfectly with Will and Jason Bateman,” says Goldsman. “We needed three people, all of whom the audience would want to see win; it was a real balancing act.”
For her part, Theron was attracted to her role for a multitude of reasons. First, of course, was the chance to re-team with Smith, whom she’d worked with on The Legend of Bagger Vance. “Will plays the part so beautifully,” she says.
Theron was also impressed by the script, which she found had rich and compelling characters. Where her husband, Ray, sees only the superhero that Hancock could be someday, Mary comes from the perspective of the average Angeleno. “She is fed up with Hancock’s bad behavior which, on the surface, appears to be totally irresponsible and destructive,” she says. “She is adamant that he not disrupt the idyllic life she’s created with Ray and their son. But when Hancock starts to show some signs that there is light at the end of the tunnel and that he might turn his behavior around, and she still doesn’t accept him, then you start to question why.”
The filmmakers also raise the emotional stakes by adding Jae Head to the cast as Aaron, the Embreys’ young son. Although the 11-year-old stars in Berg’s series “Friday Night Lights,” the filmmakers read more than thirty young actors before settling on Head. “Kid actors can be tricky,” says Berg, “but Jae is untouched and uncorrupted. He lives in Texas, where his dad is a high school football coach and his mom is always with him. You get the feeling that he’s just as happy being a ball boy for his dad as he is hanging out on set with Will Smith. He’s a perceptive kid that’s gone through a lot in his life and he understands that every day is a gift; he has a great attitude. He throws himself into everything.”
Berg used his own family tradition of making spaghetti and meatballs every Sunday evening to illustrate the family’s close bond. Every Thursday night the Embreys celebrate “spaghetti madness” making sure to spend at least one night a week at dinner together rather than allowing work, school or other distractions to take precedence over sharing family time.
“I ate maybe 20 plates,” Head says about the family dinner scenes. “I forgot to eat breakfast that morning because I was so excited to get on set, so at the beginning I was happy to eat. But by the end of the day, I felt like yelling, ‘Don’t say the word ‘spaghetti’ to me!'”
About the Director and Producers
Once best-known for his acting, Peter Berg has lately won over critics and audiences with his powerful and inventive films as a director.
After collaborating with Michael Mann on Berg’s film The Kingdom, Berg stepped behind the camera to direct Hancock. Mann says that though Berg creates an easygoing and spontaneous atmosphere on the set, beneath the surface is a prepared and focused director. “Pete has an intuitive sense and is improvisational in his choices,” says Mann, “but he’s a lot more focused and intellectual than he lets on. He thinks quite seriously about everything.”
“Peter Berg seems like a good-hearted little boy who wants to have fun,” echoes Goldsman, “but it’s a mask he puts on in order to generate an ambiance, a spontaneity, around process. In truth he is a deeply thoughtful and very smart individual who tries to wink and nod his way out of engaging those attributes until he feels it’s useful.”
“Pete has a distinct voice,” Smith says. “It’s a style and flavor that is uniquely Pete. He’s on a savant level in terms of how he shoots and how he creates. I was excited to see what would happen when Pete put Hancock, as a real dude with real problems, into a superhero suit.”
“Pete has an actor’s confidence that’s very different from what a writer, director or producer exudes,” Mann continues. “He knows when he has to hold on to a thought or an emotion and how to make a shot or a scene work for a specific actor to achieve the emotion he’s looking for from the audience.”
“He was very upfront and honest about how he liked to work,” says Theron, recalling her first meeting with Berg. “He told me he was just going to yell things in the middle of takes. He said, ‘I’m not going to cut, I don’t like to cut, so I hope you’re OK with that.’ I had never worked that way before, but now, I can’t imagine not shooting that way.”
Berg was part of the team of filmmakers that came together to bring Hancock to the screen. Each one — Smith, Lassiter, Mann, Goldsman, and Berg — each brought something to the table that helped Hancock’s journey to the big screen.
“Filmmaking is a team sport,” says Smith. “For a film like Hancock, we needed as many off-center points of view as possible — and everyone on this team is one degree off of normal. What made this a wonderful collaboration is that we all had these really strange ideas — anyone could say anything — and the number one idea, an idea that felt like part of the DNA of the material, would stand out.”
“We formed a group where we really relied on each other,” explains Goldsman. “Pete can write, direct, and produce a movie, Michael can direct, write, and produce, Will can produce and direct, J.L. can certainly produce, I can write a movie and if you put a gun to my head, I could probably direct a scene. It doesn’t mean you do one another’s jobs, it just means that each of us had the other’s back.”
“I had to keep bobbing and weaving,” laughs Berg. “A group like Akiva, Michael, Will, and J.L. is like a force of nature; they kept me on my toes. Michael would come at me, bam, and then Akiva, and then J.L., who is like the silent assassin,” he jokes. “We tweaked parts of the script and dialed in some details, but the credit for this story really goes to Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan.
“As an actor, I learned that it’s important to get your head right and be in the right moment,” he continues. “There is so much subterfuge in moviemaking that we forget what matters — the audience, sitting in a theater, enjoying what they’re watching a year after we’ve completed production. Will’s got this saying, ‘If you stay ready, you never have to get ready.’ Staying in the right frame of mind makes that possible for me.”
“He creates a really nice atmosphere on set,” agrees Smith, “where anybody from the cast or crew can give him ideas and he’ll listen. He’s open and he likes to have fun so everyone enjoys coming to work. It’s still high pressure and high tempo, but the work is done with a good spirit.”
About the Stunts and Visual Effects
Director Peter Berg depended on a retinue of experienced artisans when it came to creating the look of the film. From his director of photography, Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Tobias Schliessler (Dreamgirls), to production designer Neil Spisak, Academy Award-winning visual effects designer John Dykstra, stunt coordinators Simon Crane and Wade Eastwood, and special effects gurus John Frazier and Jim Schwalm, every department worked in tandem with the others.
The overall process began with Steve Yamamoto, who created Berg’s pre-visualization renderings. Like storyboards, “previz” footage has become the standard in action films, and on Hancock it was the reference guide each department would look to as board for new ideas.
Schliessler, with whom Berg had worked on The Rundown and Friday Night Lights, teamed with camera operators David Luckenbach and Lukasz Bielan. A good portion of the movie was shot using the hand-held techniques Berg is known for, but with a twist: filming variations of the same sequence using different levels of camera activity and different lenses.
“I didn’t want the same kinetic effect I was trying for in The Kingdom,” explains Berg, “so we stabilized some of the camera work by varying more with the techno dolly on this film. It also helped protect the epic size of the story of a superhero when a frenetic style just doesn’t help.”
In keeping with their desire to do much of the film with handheld cameras, Berg and Schliessler even strapped their cameras and operators into harnesses similar to those worn by Smith and his stunt double in order to keep pace with the action.
Stunt coordinators Simon Crane (who also acted as the film’s second unit director) and Wade Eastwood supervised the details of the flying sequences as well as overseeing their customary fight scenes and chase sequences. But unlike many action movies, Crane and Eastwood were called upon to come up with less-than-graceful moves for the main character.
“It’s not like Superman or Spider-Man(tm), where we would plan a nice, stylistic landing,” says Eastwood. “We’d have to test and test to get an accurate landing where Hancock stumbles or falls down on his knees and has to balance himself before he can stand up, which means you have to program every point into your winch and counterweight and we’d simply have to rehearse over and over with Will. I’d always heard he was athletic and fun, and the reports weren’t wrong; he was a trouper.
“My favorite gag was when we flew him sideways, lying down, about an inch and a half above the ground,” he says. “It was one of our simpler rigs, but it went very fast and visually it looked great. As Hancock flies toward a stranded cop who is hiding behind a downed police car, he’s traveling at about 35 miles per hour, head first, toward the car. We needed to use a separate set of winches to pivot him up so that he stops right next to the cop in a kind of sitting or kneeling position, and we had to do it all in one shot. Despite rigging the night before the shoot, we had to remove our lines during the day because of traffic, and then set it up again and test it again with weight bags before putting anyone in the rig.”
Smith did as much of his own wire and harness work as was possible. “There were a couple of hairy days,” laughs Smith. “Flying 100 feet above the street at night and then free falling until a wire kicks in about two feet from the ground, all in about 1½ seconds — that drop was a real rush. It’s like being on a roller coaster without the coaster. Now that was aggressive!”
Actors and stunt doubles agree the different harnesses can be constricting at the most inopportune moments, sometimes making acting and concentration difficult despite a couple of weeks of stunt rehearsals and flying practice, but rehearsal and staying limber is always the key to avoiding injury.
“Although it may look fun, everything takes planning and preparation,” says Crane. “There’s a lot of pressure to get the stunts right in one go because if something goes wrong, well, you don’t get a second chance. That’s why we test and retest. It takes a long time, but you just never want to hurt someone, and I would put my own son in one of our rigs.”
“Some of the moves are awkward,” explains Smith. “Even taking off from a bench can jolt you because the wires pull with such force that if you tense, you can pull your neck or your hamstrings, or put too much pressure on your knees. You don’t even realize it until you do the movement a few times, then suddenly you feel nagging little injuries sneaking up on you.”
“We would rehearse with Will in a parking lot,” describes Crane. “We’d start slowly at first, because it’s a scary move. Will was traveling over 300 feet, 50 to 100 feet in the air, at a maximum speed over 50 miles an hour — varying his body position all the while — and when we get up to full speed, that’s when the feeling of weightlessness creeps in and we just hope he hasn’t eaten too much,” he laughs. “We tell every actor the key word when it comes to the harness is ‘suffer.’ It’s going to look great, but can be harsh and sometimes painful.”
“We especially rehearsed as much as we could before there was full darkness if it was a night shoot,” says Eastwood, “because the most important thing is spotting the lines, spotting the pulleys up high, watching that there’s no fouling of the line, everything is running smooth and all of our dynos are reading the same. When it gets dark we still inspect each point with flashlights or work lights, but unless we fell safe, we won’t proceed. Some aspects are easier at night because there’s no traffic, fewer pedestrians, I’d much rather do it that way.”
The opening stunt sequence of the film was one of the most difficult to film, taking several weeks in different locations, plus filming on stage against green screen to complete. When a small gang of street hoods flees the scene of a crime in an SUV, Hancock tails them in hot pursuit.
“This freeway chase was the biggest chunk of our job and the biggest challenge,” Crane continues. “Not only did we close down the 105 freeway for five days and bear the wrath of a detoured public, we had to use handheld cameras to shoot cars flipping and blowing up or one car shooting over the top of another. You have to have countless meetings with Pete and the transportation department, and we worked closely with the visual effects and special effects departments. I’m a great believer in doing as much as we can for real, so the challenge is to come up with new ways of doing live action as well as effects.”
Special effects veterans John Frazier and Jim Schwalm produced the physical special effects, whether producing thousands of bullet hits during a shootout, blowing up an intersection, dropping a car from the sky, throwing a bad guy through a liquor store window, or yanking a refrigerator through the wall of a house, their contribution is a fundamental ingredient in the recipe that turns creative imagery into reality on the big screen.
“The stunts and special effects were half of the process,” explains Berg, “then we turned to our visual effects designer, John Dykstra. We depended heavily on all of his guys working together with stunts, camera, wardrobe, and just about everyone.”
“I met with Peter Berg and Ian Bryce and got a glimpse of how Pete’s mind works,” says Dykstra. “He explained he wanted everything to look real, not as stylized as most superhero movies are. For lack of another term, I’d say ‘documentary style’: it’s aggressive, using hand-held cameras, which is unusual for a very technical film. So that was the challenge.”
Dykstra was also drawn to the project by the chance to work on the full range of visual effects, from digital human work for the scenes in which Hancock flies to CG destruction and the creation of virtual environments. However, the greatest and most exciting challenge for a visual effects artist is the chance to do something that’s never been done before. As Dykstra explains, it goes with the territory. “One of the issues with visual effects is that the technology that exists when you begin a film is obsolete by the time you finish it, so you have to go in making assumptions that you’re going to be able to invent some new technique to raise the bar,” he says.
The scale of the visual effects invented for the film by the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks, led by visual effects supervisor Carey Villegas and digital effects supervisor Ken Hahn, ranged from the minutiae of falling rubble, to the intricate movement of clothing and skin against the wind in flight, to the enormity of destroying a city block seen from a distance as well as close up. The same principles in building the environment and weather conditions applied, whether the artists were creating twisters or a falling big rig or destroying a hospital.
Although it should not even enter the viewer’s mind, the intrinsic problems inherent in building Hancock’s clothing had more to do with the number of outfits rather than the technology. Like the average person, he changes clothes every day. He does not have a secret identity that would require him to slip into a cape and tights every time he flies or accosts the bad guys.
“Hancock flies at mach five through Los Angeles in a hoodie and shorts,” describes Dykstra. “Making cloth move properly is a challenge, and then translating that movement from one type of cloth to another, keeping it consistent, and making it look real or making the patently incredible look credible (which was Pete’s primary concern), is difficult, but it’s also fun.”
Even as he and his team faced these technical challenges, Dykstra never forgot that visual effects exist to serve the story, and not the other way around. “Hancock uses his powers on a whim,” Dykstra continues, “and not everything he does is spectacular. Sometimes his actions just reflect his personality and the way he thinks or feels at the moment. That’s when we stop thinking so much about the technology and engineering of what we’re doing and concentrate more on how to advance the arc of the story.”
Interestingly, being true to that arc of the story represented a fun change of pace for the animators, who’ve never worked with a superhero like Hancock before. “Because Hancock’s flying style is so fast and loose, rather than being smooth and gracefully sweeping as with most superheroes, it was a challenge for the animators,” Dykstra says. “Hancock just plows through whatever is in his way.”
Green screens popped up everywhere, including San Pedro, where the production utilized the services of the city’s Harbor Red Line Trolley tracks to shoot Ray Embrey’s near death experience.
“If you shoot an outdoor film indoors, it shows,” explains Imageworks’ visual effects producer Josh R. Jaggars. “Filming real exteriors actually gives us some photographic advantages. For example shooting in hard sunlight as we did on the train tracks when Hancock saves Ray gives the scene a level of credibility that’s immutable but it challenges us to invent new ways of doing things.”
About the Sets and Locations
The most important set was the Embrey house located on the back lot of Universal Studios. Sitting at the very end of the cul-de-sac on Elm Street, just around the bend from the Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane, the mid-century modern house was designed by production designer Neil Spisak in conjunction with art director William Hawkins and lead set designer Jeff Markwith.
Built from scratch by construction coordinator John Hoskins and his crew, the house is based on a mélange of styles but most closely resembles a streamlined modern California home that has been updated through the years, with its fieldstone and wood exterior, sleek lines, and open spaces. Spisak took the same tremendous care with the planting around the exterior, selecting split-leaf philodendron, iceberg roses and additional greenery with softer, rounded edges effectively nestling the house into the surrounding sun-dappled landscape. The house is a permanent structure with running water and electricity that will remain on the Universal lot and eventually be used for other projects. Together, the art, construction and set decorating departments assembled a home that everyone on the cast and crew were willing to purchase despite its not having a bathroom or a completed second floor.
“I thought it was a real house,” laughs Jason Bateman. “In fact, I called my wife and said, ‘I found our dream house!’ The bad news is that it’s on the Universal lot so even though the security will be great, I don’t think we’ll be able to get a clicker for the gate.”
According to Spisak and set decorator Rosemary Brandenburg, the symbolism heavily sprinkled throughout the house was Peter Berg’s idea. He requested the duo research mythology and incorporate their findings into the design.
“Pete wanted a deep back-story for his characters,” says Brandenburg, “so I went through the many cultures of female goddess figures from Rome, Greece, all of Europe, Asia, Africa, and even Native America. We wanted to get the whole pantheon going but we didn’t want to hit people over the head with it so we had to be selective and make sure the objects would make sense in a home.”
Not only did Brandenburg tell a story with the art she selected, from paintings to sculpture and busts, even the books, musical instruments and furniture hold clues to the plot’s back-story. Creating a balance between Mary, Ray and Aaron, Brandenburg took each character into consideration as she built a composite of the Embrey family home. She also secured multiples of each piece of furniture and each accessory given the extensive stunt and effects work taking place in the house.
“We needed the rooms to flow given the open nature of the space,” she says, “from Mary’s kitchen and living room, you can see that she’s definitely in charge in a gentle way, to Ray’s domain where he works as an advertising executive, to Aaron’s things spread all over the house as well as in his fort in the backyard.”
Hancock’s dilapidated trailer features a magnificent ocean view from atop a vacant, brush strewn bluff in the Deer Creek area of Malibu. At times a refuge from a public he doesn’t like very much, Hancock’s home sadly resembles a deserted wasteland from which he cannot easily escape. His “lawn” is strewn with heaps of drained bourbon bottles, empty Dinty Moore stew cans, and aluminum Jiffy Pop containers.
Art director Dawn Swiderski worked with Brandenburg to develop Hancock’s home — two vintage Boles Aero Airstream trailers married together by a makeshift awning and the odds and ends Hancock finds that remind him of a richer past he cannot remember. A $5 bill portrait of Abraham Lincoln taped to his refrigerator, the pile of broken sunglasses he wears in homage to his musical hero Miles Davis, various animal tchotchkes he’s drawn to collect all help define the character.
When Brandenburg finishes dressing a set, just before the cast and crew descend, she adds the final exclamation point to her department’s creation by burning incense or candles she hopes are motivational. For example, in the Embrey home she burned essential lavender oils, at the hospital she used ammonia, and in Hancock’s trailer, it smelled of whisky. She calls the process “smell-o-rama” and believes it sets a tone for the actors who frequently walk cold onto a finished set, having never seen the room prior to their first rehearsal on camera.
Spisak established two definite color palates for the film, assigning environments as those belonging to Hancock in hues of blue (including cooler blues bordering on white) and purple with splashes of red, or to Mary whose sets were more warm-toned, done in greens and wheat or cream colors with a pop of orange here and there. The orange and red acted as a visual bridge between the environments as well as the characters.
The production spent six weekends shooting a pivotal bank robbery sequence at the corner of Figueroa and 5th Streets. Even the bank, built in a completely raw space on the main corridor of Figueroa, was created by the art department from scratch. From the teller windows to the crystal chandeliers, every facet of the modern, efficient-looking lobby had to be seen from every angle and was put together knowing it would be dismantled in stages as the action unfolds. Similarly to the finale in the hospital, the art department had to reset and redress the sets every day with stunts and physical and visual effects in mind.
“We had to make transitions overnight,” explains Brandenburg. “A wall that was solid one day had to become a wall with a gaping hole the next. And during the course of a shootout, bullets go through walls, glass breaks, charges go off, each of which takes specific planning. Continuity is complicated and scenery is scenery, it’s not real, so if you want the inside of a wall to look real, you have to art-direct even that kind of detail.”
Executive producer Ian Bryce is a proponent of shooting in Los Angeles and surrounding areas whenever possible. “One of the ways we help to keep movies in Los Angeles is to communicate properly with all the various authorities in town, whether it be the Mayor’s office, CalTrans, other official permitting offices or with the local residents to make sure they all know what we’re doing. We set a proper plan and then we try to live with it because it’s really about community. Shutting down freeways, shutting down Hollywood Boulevard, shutting down a railroad line, all for multiple days, takes a great deal of care and precision and a lot of coordination with a lot of different agencies. Those were big challenges for Ilt Jones and his location department and he pulled it off as beautifully as he always does. This movie is a virtual postcard of Los Angeles.”
The film’s centerpiece, of course, was the highlight. Closing down Hollywood Boulevard between Orange and Highland Avenues for a week is an uncommon feat normally reserved for such auspicious events as the Academy Awards® or the annual Hollywood Christmas Parade.
“When we closed down those intersections, it made me realize the size of our production,” says Berg enthusiastically. “It was crazy. Half of Hollywood came to visit us. Even Jimmy Kimmel — we were shooting right outside his studio — he’s seen it all, and his jaw just dropped. Seeing crowds of Will Smith fans gather every day makes you remember why tourists come to this city. For them, watching a movie filming is a dream come true; it was fun being part of the Hollywood Boulevard spectacle.”
About Hancock’s Supersuit
Any good publicist wants their client looking sharp and in style, and Ray Embrey is no different. He knows perception is half the battle when it comes to improving Hancock’s image so he insists that John Hancock wear a special costume fit for a superhero of his caliber.
Peter Berg turned to costume designer Louise Mingenbach (who worked for him previously on The Rundown) to create Hancock’s mismatched homeless look and his super suit, as well as Mary’s more classic understated wardrobe that develops into a much sleeker look later in the story. Friends since they both arrived in Hollywood twenty years ago, it took Mingenbach and Berg years to coordinate busy schedules and be able to finally work together again. She also worked closely with Spisak in terms of following his strict color palette.
Mingenbach, who acted as the costume designer on the two X-Men films and on Superman Returns, knew she had to come up with something new for such an unusual hero as John Hancock.
“Pete was pretty adamant from the beginning about Hancock not wearing spandex,” she says, “which eliminated a whole section of ideas. He also said, ‘No cape and no underwear on the outside of the tights!'” she laughs, recalling their conversation. “So the supersuit evolved into something tough but practical, and specifically something that Ray could have made for him.
“Given Hancock’s flying record and the trouble he caused, I thought he should probably be dressed head to toe in caution yellow,” Mingenbach continues. “He’s a menace really, but we compromised and used just a little of that yellow in the detail. We also carried through with Hancock’s obsession with eagles and included this in several pieces. But at the beginning of the story, he’s just a mismatched guy who doesn’t care about fashion trends, or looking good for anyone, which underlines how uninterested he is in fitting into society.”
Of course, Mingenbach made several versions of Hancock’s supersuit for use in water, for both flying harnesses as well as jerk harnesses and for Smith’s photo doubles, who were not his identical size.
Production notes provided by Columbia Pictures.
Hancock
Starring: Will Smith, Jason Bateman, Charlize Theron, Daeg Faerch, Lauren Hill, Darrell Foster, Valerie Azlynn, Kate Clarke
Directed by: Peter Berg
Screenplay by: John August, Peter Berg
Release Date: July 2nd, 2008
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some intense sequences of sci-fi action and violence.
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $227,946,274 (37.8%)
Foreign: $375,870,502 (62.2%)
Total: $603,816,776 (Worldwide)