Shoot first, fill it in later

Everywhere you look, it’s blue -- an agreeable baby blue, interspersed occasionally with polka dots of various hues. It’s rather soothing, like being enveloped in a comfort blanket.

In fact, it’s just the sound stage for “World of Tomorrow,” a period action-adventure with science-fiction elements starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie and being filmed at these studios 15 miles northwest of London. Why blue? Because it is being shot entirely on (you guessed it) blue screen, which means backgrounds behind the actors are filled in digitally after principal photography.

“Yeah,” cracked producer Jon Avnet, “it’s ‘My Blue Heaven’ around here.” Paltrow views it differently: “I’ve acclimatized,” she says. “But after a day here, I feel like I’ve been swallowed by a blue whale. It’s having a funny effect on me.”

For all that, there’s a state of high excitement among cast and crew: They’re convinced they might be involved in something radically innovative. “World of Tomorrow” is written and directed by first-timer Kerry Conran, a computer whiz who has seized the notion of digitally created special-effects sequences and taken them to an extreme conclusion. “The whole movie is a special effect, even a scene with two people sitting in a room,” he said. “Really, it’s a live-action cartoon.”

Conran, 37, shy and soft-spoken, developed “World of Tomorrow” over eight years, mainly on a computer screen alone in his Sherman Oaks apartment. “I reasoned what was most expensive and difficult about making films was going on location, building sets, things beyond my scope or unavailable to me,” he recalled. “I thought, if you can build sets or travel anywhere in the world in a computer, you have gotten rid of the most complicated part of filmmaking. Then you locate it all in a central facility like this. In my case, I’d built a 15-foot blue screen in my living room. It stayed there for three years. That was what I woke up to every morning.”

He started experimenting with archival photographs, using them as backgrounds for his film-within-a-computer. Early in the process, Conran believed he could create an entire feature film on his own, without leaving his apartment: “But 3 1/2 years in, with only six minutes of film to show for it, I decided that was a bad idea, and I needed some help.”

Derring-do of matinee days

“World of Tomorrow” is set in 1939 (the title comes from the New York World’s Fair of that year) and owes much to the Saturday-morning serials that movie theaters used to show. It is split into seven “chapters,” with titles like “Winged Terror” and “Shadow of Tomorrow.” As for the film’s content, Avnet, an experienced producer who found success with “Risky Business” 20 years ago, and who also directed such films as “Fried Green Tomatoes” and “Up Close and Personal,” described it as “Buck Rogers meets Indiana Jones.”

It begins in New York City, where Polly Perkins (Paltrow), crack reporter for the Chronicle newspaper, wonders why so many world-famous scientists are missing. Around this time, strange flying machines threaten Manhattan, and gigantic walking robots tramp down the city’s streets, crushing everything in their path. Polly joins forces with her old flame and sometime adversary Capt. Joseph Sullivan (Law), also known as Sky Captain. He commands the Flying Legion, battling bad guys in his Warhawk P-40. He and Polly fly to a remote part of Nepal (think Shangri-La) to track down the crazed mastermind Dr. Totenkopf, who seems to want to destroy the world.

But this outline doesn’t do justice to the look of the film, which is tentatively scheduled for U.S. release next year. In his office, Avnet finds a DVD of its opening scenes, hauntingly beautiful in black and white. They show the Hindenburg III, a zeppelin, docking 100 stories above New York on the Empire State Building. The visual iconography is very 1940s: visible radio waves emitted from radio masts, towering skyscrapers, men in snap-brim fedoras, spotlights fanning the night skies.

Conran recalled that when he had his six-minute informal show reel together, “I was mortified by it. I didn’t want anybody to see it.” But his brother Kevin, now on the film as production designer, persuaded him to show it to Marsha Oglesby, a producer who had worked with Avnet. “She wanted to show it to Jon the very next day,” Conran said.

“Kerry brought a terrific visual style to that six minutes of film,” Avnet recalled. “It was unusual, and I was intrigued. And it made me think we could make this big-looking film inexpensively.”

He decided not to approach a studio, but to raise money independently and make a distribution deal only when “World of Tomorrow” was complete: “We wanted the freedom for Kerry to make this film as we all wanted. I thought I couldn’t put him through a studio process. Too many cooks.” To attract financing, Avnet called on two scions of the De Laurentiis dynasty, Raffaella and her brother Aurelio, who are executive producers.

Avnet worked with Raffaella on his 2001 TV movie “The Uprising.” In the cast was Law’s wife, Sadie Frost. “When I visited the set, Jon said in passing, ‘I must show you something,’ ” Law recalled. “I saw six minutes of visual inspiration. I said I’d love to be a part of it. But who’d write the script? Jon said the guy who had made the film, which made me wonder. But it’s a wonderful script. Kerry’s found an important adult thread: a relationship between this couple who love each other but argue, don’t trust each other and have a past they nag each other about.”

Law and Frost were so impressed, they joined “World of Tomorrow” as producers, each using their influence to attract others to the project. Law, who worked with Paltrow in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” helped persuade her to take part. Frost, a friend of fashion designer Stella McCartney, urged her to design the film’s key costumes. “We thought it would be good to rethink those period clothes through a modern designer’s eye,” Frost said.

Sometimes less is more

Thus Law and Paltrow face each other on the sound stage today, he square-jawed in a slim-fitting, superbly cut aviator’s leather jacket, she in an exquisite beige trench coat with a large gold belt. Paltrow’s blond hair, swept off her face, cascades in ringlets onto her shoulders. Both look like golden-age movie stars or, more precisely, our idea of how stars looked in that era.

The most striking thing about “World of Tomorrow” is how minimal its sets are. In this scene, Law must stand on the wing of his plane and toss baggage down to Paltrow. But only the cockpit and part of the wing have been built; the rest will be added digitally later. Everything else is blue screen. In the next sequence, Law and Jolie (playing an old friend of Sky Captain who runs a mobile reconnaissance outpost for Britain’s Royal Navy) pore over maps on a table. And that’s all there is on stage: maps and a table.

“Blue screen is tricky and unusual, but I’ve found the process freeing, almost theatrical in a way,” Law said. “It’s like working in an empty space. I’ve played in several theaters with basic props and an empty stage. Here we have half an airplane, and only suggestions of sets. But you have so much information about what it looks like beforehand, which is so valuable.”

What he means is that “World of Tomorrow” already exists on Conran’s computer screen: In a sophisticated variation on storyboarding, he has already devised every scene, with computer-generated figures standing in for human actors. Law, Paltrow and Jolie need only watch a scene on the computer screen to see how they fit in.

Conran insisted that this method of filming makes for speed and flexibility. “We can walk the actors from location to location on the same stage, and start again within minutes,” he said. “It’s quick, there’s no down time, and they seem to enjoy that.”

“For a type of movie like this, you’d be seven months trekking all over the world on different locations,” Paltrow added. “I was grateful the other day, lying on a pile of fake snow surrounded by blue, rather than freezing on some glacier in Canada or somewhere.”

Jolie agreed: “This method of making this film is what made it possible for me. I just came off ‘Tomb Raider’ 2, and if this film was not done in this way, it would take a year to shoot. Because of the technology, I’m only here for a week.”

$5,000 budget to $50 million

Could Conran be on to something here -- a groundbreaking way of making films that drastically cuts costs? The thought has crossed Avnet’s mind: “You wonder, is this guy maybe the next George Lucas? I hardly even like to mention it, but there’s a chance.” Avnet would not disclose the film’s budget other than to say it was more than $50 million, which he noted was “far cheaper” than if it had been made in a conventional manner.

Whether he’s a visionary or not, Conran’s story is remarkable. Born and raised in Flint, Mich., he started attending CalArts in Valencia when he was 20: “I just got dropped off there. I knew nobody. It was my first night away from home. I’d never been to California in my life. I didn’t have a car, and for a while I kind of lived at the school. It was rough to go out there.”

At CalArts, he enrolled in a filmmaking program but gravitated to animation. Astonishingly, the budget for his original six minutes of film was just $5,000 over three years: “The biggest expense was at the end, with costumes [for the unknown actors he used]. We spent $1,000 renting them, which seemed shocking. When we shot little bits of live action, the catering budget went on little bits of bread and baloney. We were quite thrifty.”

He admitted to feeling uneasy when he first walked on the set to direct Law and Paltrow: “They looked at me and I could see in their eyes the history of the filmmakers they’ve worked with. And here was I, walking in like a sheep. But they’ve been so generous. They’ve overcompensated for my utter lack of experience. Because they’re so gifted, I don’t have to do much.”

Still, he’s no innocent abroad: People on the set like working with him but agree he has strong opinions, especially about how “World of Tomorrow” looks. “He’s a monomaniac, in the best way,” Avnet said.

Conran himself thinks he may be on to something radically new: “I think everything in filmmaking was pointing to this.”