Junkyard Dodge

One might think El Nin~o was visiting its wrath inside Stage 16 on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. The rain is pouring down, the wind is kicking up and lightning strikes are igniting the garbage throughout what appears to be a colossal refuse dump.

Wet, exhausted and bloodied, actors Kurt Russell and Jason Scott Lee are duking it out for a climactic scene in “Soldier,” a science-fiction epic being directed by Paul Anderson (“Mortal Kombat,” “Event Horizon”). “Flood, mud and blood,” observes one well-drenched crew member.

El Nin~o references are common on this set. It may be a quip to some, but it wasn’t funny a few months back when Anderson, producer Jerry Weintraub and production designer David L. Snyder were discussing just how to shoot their action-adventure.

Set in the mid-21st century, “Soldier” postulates a future in which military men and women are raised from infancy to follow orders without question and are denied any emotional life. One such soldier (Russell), left for dead on a garbage planet at the edge of the galaxy, is nursed back to health by settlers and discovers his own humanity.

When Weintraub hired Snyder--an Oscar nominee as art director on the now-classic sci-fi-noir “Blade Runner”--back in late 1995, plans called for most of the exteriors to be shot on location in an Azusa rock quarry. The interstellar dump was to be created there.

But El Nin~o intervened. Late last year the creative team decided that constructing elaborate, expensive sets in the face of the weather phenomenon was just too risky. Snyder convinced studio executives to let him build his multilayered, wreckage-strewn world on the Warner lot.

“We made exactly the right choice,” says Anderson. “It would have been a disaster if we’d been outside. The sets would have collapsed and we’d have been waterlogged. Now we can choose when it rains.”

And rain it does, to the tune of up to 10,000 gallons of water a day inside the cavernous sound stage that has variously been home to King Arthur’s court in “Camelot” (1967), Gotham City in “Batman Returns” (1992) and the cryo-prison in “Demolition Man” (1993), which Snyder also designed.

Two-thirds of the film takes place on this planet, so the look needed to be varied as well as practical for shooting purposes.

Starting from the script by David Webb Peoples (“Unforgiven,” “Blade Runner”), Snyder wrote a “thesis” about the strange world that included a rough inventory of the kinds of junk that might be deposited there. He then consulted thousands of research photographs taken of junkyards in four states.

The four-and-a-half-story set consumes an estimated 2 million cubic feet. Visible at its highest levels are the cockpit of a DC-3, a massive satellite dish, a half-destroyed Vegas billboard, the front car of a Japanese bullet train, an F-117 Stealth bomber and, as an inside joke for sci-fi buffs, a vehicle from “Blade Runner.” The dozens of little touches ranges from discarded compact discs (a child’s mobile) to banks of fused electrical meters (“your tax dollars thrown away,” Snyder says).

“Not only are they dumping the daily 21st century refuse on this planet, they’ve dug up all the old wrecking yards and the junkyards, picked it all up and brought it here,” Snyder says. “What that gives me is a visual strata of our history of the 20th century going into the 21st century.”

It took two shifts of workers (125 to 175 a day) 65 days to construct the complex set, Snyder says. The stats are impressive: 24 miles of steel pipe scaffolding, 12.5 tons of pencil-rod steel, 8.2 tons of angle iron, to create the world on Stage 16. On various levels are living space for the settlers, their garden, a kitchen, a children’s playground, and more.

“Doing a large interior set like this, meaning the entirety of the village on [one] stage, is theatrical and operatic as opposed to realistic,” says Snyder. “It’s almost a surreal kind of approach. It would have been a completely different film had it all been on location.”

None of the principals involved would discuss budget figures. Asked to compare the mammoth set on the Warner lot to estimated costs of using location sites, Snyder said, “In the long run, it’s a break-even process. I don’t believe that the extra amount of money it took to construct this is an extravagance.”

Weintraub says Peoples’ script, “a Western in space,” has been around for more than a decade. “I’m not an action-movie guy,” he says. “I don’t know what action movies are anymore because the genre seems to have been eaten up. We’ve blown up everything and we’ve flown everything and we’ve done every kind of visual effect and CGI thing you can do.

“I wanted to find a piece that had some kind of morality to it. It also had a big canvas that you could paint.” There was a catch, however: Russell, first choice of both Weintraub and Anderson, had just finished shooting “Breakdown.”

In that film, Russell says, “the guy’s not a physical specimen of any kind. I told them it’s going to take me a year, and then some, to get in shape for this movie.” They agreed, and filming on “Soldier” was postponed for a year until Russell--already an action-movie star with such strenuous roles as “Executive Decision” and “Escape from L.A.” among his recent credits--could pump up even further.

“There’s a difference between playing a character who’s in shape and a character that looks as if he’s been at war all his life,” he says.

Russell, 47, was also intrigued by the script: “I thought it would be very interesting if you took somebody from birth and never exposed them to any emotions other than those that surround violence and aggression, to see what that person would do when unleashed on a normal society. I thought also that it was an opportunity to set it in a spectacular backdrop.”

Anderson notes that “for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the movie he doesn’t say anything. He’s having to convey what is usually conveyed in acres of dialogue, with just looks and glances.” In fact, Russell says only about 130 words throughout the entire movie.

“It’s almost like a throwback to silent movies in a way,” Anderson says, “having to tell a story in pictures.”

Which makes the film’s look that much more important. “We had to create something that was unique and impressive in the sense that it seems to surround the action in the film a lot better than in the location,” says Snyder. “We have El Nin~o to thank for that.”