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director's chair Len Wiseman: Total Recall H OLLYWOOD — Director/writer/ producer Len Wiseman, who began his career as a storyboard and con- By IAIN BLAIR This reboot was shot on Red Epics with anamorphic lenses. ceptual artist as well as an art department assistant on such Roland Emmerich block- busters as Independence Day and Stargate, has since racked up his own string of hits, including Live Free or Die Hard and the Under- world franchise. Now Wiseman, who also successfully rebooted the iconic TV show Hawaii Five-O, (by directing the pilot and setting the tone for the series) has remade Total Recall, the beloved 1990 sci-fi thriller starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and directed by Paul Verho- even. This time out, Colin Farrell takes on the Schwarzenegger role, alongside a cast that includes Jessica Biel, Bryan Cranston and the director's Underworld star — and real-life-wife — Kate Beckinsale. Here, in an exclusive Post interview, the director, who was deep in the final stages of post at press time, talks about making the film and dealing with 1,800 visual effects shots. POST: What sort of film did you set out to make with Total Recall? LEN WISEMAN: "A very grounded, realis- tic fantasy film. That sounds like a contradic- tion, but that was my aim. It's got such a fan- tasy element to it — in both its futuristic world and the whole concept of being able to implant your own fantasies through a chemi- cal brain alteration — and I wanted to sur- round that with a very gritty real world, with real settings and characters." POST: How tough was it rebooting the origi- nal, and what are the main changes you made? WISEMAN: "I first attacked the tone, and felt there was a much different vision of the concept in its tone. It was very tough. It's always a challenge when there's a loved version already out there, and I wrestled with the idea of even doing it. Christian Wagner cut the film on an Avid system. "I had the same experience with Die Hard, which wasn't a remake, but it was picking up a sequel to a franchise so many people loved. So there's always a lot of opinion about what a new version should be, and some people will agree with me and others will want it to be much more like the original. You can drive yourself crazy worrying about the right direc- tion to take and, ultimately, you just have to trust your own instincts." POST: What were the main technical chal- lenges of pulling all this together? WISEMAN: "The whole movie was very 10 Post • July 2012 Len Wiseman on set, directing Kate Beckinsale: "I really love the DI. That's where I start to feel more like an artist again, and it's more immediate." gers rotate, and there's another big zero gravity action sequence. Again, I wanted to shoot it and not do it greenscreen or just CG, so we built sets upside down, had camera systems upside down and actors on wires, and used a lot of tricks so it's hard to tell if they're on wires. So it was extremely compli- cated to even figure out. I'd line up the shot, go to the video village and check the shot, and they would look like they're floating — it looked great — then walk on set and it would be completely the reverse of what's in www.postmagazine.com Red and anamorphic. So we got a great filmic look with all the technical advantages of the digital process." POST: How tough was the shoot? WISEMAN: "It was long and hard. We shot it mostly on stage with some locations. We had massive sets — the biggest sets I've ever been on." POST: How long was post, and do you like the post process? WISEMAN: "It's been 23 weeks so far, and I don't like post as much as shooting. I love ambitious and incredibly technical. There's this huge hover-car chase that was so challenging, and a big elevator action sequence. With my prop background I still like to do as much as I can practically — I just didn't want to go CG with all that. So we built six of these hover- cars, put them on a race-car chassis, put the actors in them and shot them with a Russian Arm at 65 mph like a regular car chase. That way all the VFX become a slave to that real car chase, instead of the reverse. But it was so tricky in how you're manipulating all that and knowing what you're going to change and add later in post, so they all look like they're really hovering. "Then we had all the zero gravity ele- ments of the elevator sequence, which trav- els through the core of the Earth in the future — there's no more air travel. So we built these massive sets, like a futuristic sub- way, and as you travel through the core of the Earth the gravity changes, and all the passen- your monitors. It was almost like directing performance in a mirror." POST: You and your DP Paul Cameron, whose credits include Collateral for Michael Mann and Man on Fire for Tony Scott, shot this on Red Epics with anamorphics. Wasn't that a first for you? WISEMAN: "It was. I had produced the last Underworld film and used the Epics on that, so I had a sense of what they were like. I actually set out to shoot this on film and we only changed over at the last minute. We'd even ordered our camera package and had to send it all back because I was waiting for Red to be able to adapt anamorphic lenses. "That was a big part of the futuristic look I really wanted, and I also feel that the digital cameras are almost too clean for me. I like that organic feel you get with film. So Red developed the Panavision anamorphic lenses for us, brought them up to Toronto where we were shooting, and we're the first film to use