He had a hunch it would work

THE psychological thriller “Premonition,” which opens Friday, is a study in managed confusion.

Sort of a “Groundhog Day” meets “The Sixth Sense” with a smidgen of “Laura” thrown in, the film stars Sandra Bullock as Linda, a wife and mother of two children who is devastated to learn one day that her husband (Julian McMahon) has died in a car crash. But when she wakes up the next morning, her hubby is very much alive. So all is well with the world until the next morning, when he’s dead again.

Is Linda losing her mind? Is there a conspiracy to drive her crazy?

It’s nothing that logical. She’s actually living her days out of order, though her husband, family and friends are existing in a different time frame. Once she realizes this, Linda frantically must try to save her husband before he perishes in the fiery crash.

Screenwriter Bill Kelly (“Blast From the Past”) has long been fascinated by stories that play with time.

“What I liked about it was, thematically, the idea of regardless of where you are in time, that at the end of the day, there is no future, no past, all there is is the moment,” Kelly said.

Writing the script was a balancing act, he said, “in terms of laying out the structure and working with it. There were a lot of revisions in terms of wanting the audience to be with her, to have the same questions she had, have the audience not get ahead of her and to have her epiphany come with the audience’s. It was the juxtaposition of the order and disorder that was compelling and interesting.”

Kelly decided to have the film span a week, because “for most people it is sort of a time frame they are used to, sort of juggling internally in their head because of their scheduling. Then it was just a matter of figuring out a way [for it] to make sense.”

And if audiences are flummoxed by some of the plot’s machinations, Kelly admitted he also had a difficult time keeping track of the story line.

After Linda realizes she’s not going crazy and discovers what actually is happening to her, she draws a chart to keep track of the events. Kelly devised the same sort of chart for himself while writing the script. “I had to figure it out and be able to see the whole thing and what happens on what days.”

German-Turkish filmmaker Mennan Yapo, though, didn’t have a problem directing the chaos. “You break it down into scenes and sequences,” he said.

What he insisted on was shooting as much of the script as possible in sequence, from beginning to end. Otherwise, he said, the production would have run into difficulties -- particularly for Bullock.

“It would have been a nightmare for her to keep track of, ‘Where I am in the film, where’s my emotions, what’s going on?’ ”

That, of course, created problems for the rest of the cast, whose characters were living in a different time frame than hers. “They had to figure out what day it was -- ‘How much madness have I seen of hers? What is going on?’ But it was easier for Sandy.”

Also, by shooting the film in sequence, Yapo was able to have continuity in terms of light and mood.

“When you see the film, each day is different,” he said. “Each day she wakes up in the bedroom, it’s shot differently. What we did was try to give the camerawork an arc. The more crazy she becomes and the wilder things get, the wilder the camera gets. Most of the times the camera will support what is going on inside of her.”

Bullock, he said, understood that “you have to crush your hero in order to build them up again, to have them come back and take matters into their own hands.”

Though Yapo storyboarded the movie, he let the energy of a pivotal scene -- in which Linda reaches her lowest point -- guide that harrowing sequence where she is taken away from her home by a doctor and his orderlies to be institutionalized.

“It’s all about energy, movement and bodies in space,” Yapo explained. “We rehearsed it once to make sure no one got hurt.” Using two hand-held cameras, the sequence was shot in just four hours.

To enhance the suspense and play with audiences’ expectations, Yapo fades the screen to black at the end of each day.

“Having a hard cut out of black really propels the audience to the next day,” he said. “It’s gutsy to go to black and then you pop up the next picture.”

Some of the confusion that existed in the writing and filming continued in the editing room, where creative differences flared between the editors, the director and the producers.

“We needed three editors to find something we liked,” Yapo said. “We all knew we had a great film in our hands and we all knew we were going to solve that problem the moment we had the right editor who would basically satisfy all of us.” That turned out to be Neil Travis.

The editing process was arduous, Yapo says, because “we realized in the editing when you edited the way it was written, it didn’t actually work in every detail. We mainly shortened scenes that were too repetitive or gave away a little too much.”

susan.king@latimes.com