THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIESABOUT THE PRODUCTION"I was not interested in making a ‘creature’ movie. I was not interested in making a sci-fi movie or even a supernatural movie. I describe it as a psychological mystery with naturally surreal overtones.""The Mothman Prophecies" is based on the events chronicled in John A Keel’s 1975 book of the same name. It is author Keel’s personal account of the occurrences which took place in and around the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia for the thirteen months leading up to a tragedy that made headlines around the world in December of 1967. Told here as contemporary story, the film stars Richard Gere as John Klein, a Washington Post reporter who, following a terrible loss in his own life, becomes caught up in some very extraordinary events affecting the lives of very ordinary people. As Gere describes it, "This story we’re telling is really psychological. My character has gone through a horrendous loss, losing his wife in the beginning of the movie. Everything that happens for him relates to that event, that trauma. So we have our own universe being projected all the time. I think one point we’re trying to make in the film is everyone sees something different. It’s not like every drawing is exactly the same. Some people hear something, some people see something, and some people feel something. It’s the interpretation of reality based on one’s mental make-up, one’s emotional make-up." It is the psychological aspect of the story that attracted director Mark Pellington to the project. "Richard Hatem, the original screenwriter, did a fantastic job taking this book and putting it into a movie form," Pellington says. "By creating the character of John Klein as the pole by which all of these events revolve around, he established a hero for the story." Of his personal approach to this story, Pellington says, "This is difficult territory, and it’s really easy to veer into melodrama or wackiness. It’s really kind of unbelievable so you have to go deeper, to a metaphysical, naturally surreal, enigmatic, mysterious emotional place with this material to make it work. Otherwise it’s ridiculous." Though the movie will retain the basic overall detail of the book, executive producer Richard S. Wright gives Pellington credit for keeping the focus of the film on the human story and maintaining the psychological impact. "People have been trying to make a movie of 'Mothman' almost since Keel’s book was published," Wright says. "There are a number of writers who took various cracks at it but it’s a difficult subject to get right. Mark Pellington is the guy who figured out how to do it." Wright further explains, "We decided early on to stay away from UFOs but kept events we found more interesting, such as people seeing strange lights in the sky and getting phone calls featuring strange voices. We’re looking at Mothman as a presence. We’re not going for the full latex ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ version. Ours is much less obvious and more creepy." As Pellington described to the crew as production began, "We never say ‘creature’ or ‘monster.’ It is never manifested in the same way to any one person, although there are similarities." Lakeshore Entertainment president and producer Gary Lucchesi has been with this project for a long time. It is the believability of the story that convinced him it should be made. "I’m a producer who believes ‘If it can happen to me, I’m interested," he says, continuing: "If you think of the great Hitchcock movies - if you think of ‘Rear Window’ and Jimmy Stewart sitting there with a broken leg and he’s a witness to a murder - you say to yourself, ‘Well, that could happen to me!’ and I find that intriguing. It’s very Hitchcockian. It’s what happens when sane reasonable people are faced with the unbelievable. In this case the unbelievable is the harbinger of fate, the harbinger of death." For producer Lucchesi, having worked on four previous films with Gere, his casting decision was an easy one. He explains, "Richard is a populist movie star, a man who is very appealing to wide audiences. He was perfect for John Klein." Of the choice to cast Gere as John Klein Mark Pellington says, "He’s a great choice. You’ve got to have a guy that you’re going to believe when people tell him that they saw these things or when he says, ‘I got a call from an entity named Indrid Cold,’ otherwise you’d have to laugh." Pellington went on to say, "Across the board you have to find that perfect person for each part and our mission was to do just that. The material drew the people. It was not hard to get a cast of this caliber and that’s a testament to the material." When talking about the material Lucchesi observes, "What we have always tried to achieve in this script is to create a character in John Klein who is a total pragmatist. He’s a writer for the Washington Post. His entire life has been about finding facts. Now he finds something that he can’t quite put his hands around, that the most logical side of him knows can’t exist so it becomes a question of whether he can believe in something supernatural or metaphysical or more spiritual." Mark Pellington describes John Klein as, "A very clear rational man, but emotional trauma made him vulnerable, intuitive. He is a loyal thinker, sensitive to events around him." Gere expands on this idea, saying, "I think there’s an openness that this character starts to approach where he doesn’t have to have proof of things anymore." What his character ultimately realizes, Gere observes, is something on a very human plane. "I think in this process we have a lot of people on various levels healing themselves and helping each other, which I find valuable in this work. These are people who wouldn’t normally even come into contact with each other. My character and Gordon, played by Will Patton, for instance, would never have any relationship outside of what happens in this story and I think a very strange kind of friendship evolves from that." Gere’s character and Laura Linney’s character Connie also form an unusual bond. Commenting on Laura Linney in the part of Connie Parker, Gere says, "I loved working with her on ‘Primal Fear’ and I thought she was perfect for this. She’s believable as a small-town person - smart, open. She would be someone in this town people would trust. Laura’s had a life, like we all have, and that comes through her work." Director Pellington also found Connie to be a source of strength for others in the story. As he describes the character, "She had to be strong, you had to feel like there was a backbone to her. You had to feel that there is a sense of fair play and strength and she could jack you up against a wall if she needed to but you have to get the sense, most importantly, that she’s a good listener, that she’d be fair." Putting Linney in that part, was an easy choice for the director. "Within five minutes of meeting her I’d seen a range of emotion that just told me I was sitting across from Connie," Pellington explains. "I think she bridges the gap between being a character actor and being a leading lady much like Meryl Streep or Jessica Lange who are also very attractive, but their looks never overpower their believability." Linney was enthusiastic about the project, not only for the opportunity to play a very different part - that of a small town police officer - but also for challenge of the story itself. She explains, "It’s a very risky project which is one of the reasons I wanted to do it, other than working with Richard again, which is the main reason I did it, and the producers who I’ve known for a long time. I think Mark Pellington is so visually interesting that he brings something to it that will be a little more unusual." RE-CREATING POINT PLEASANTBut Linney also sees the respect and the pride these people have in their community. "No one in this town is a hick," she says adamantly. "This is a community, all these people grew up together. All the histories are intertwined, so there’s an ease and a respect that they all have. My character is a responsible character - she’s a law enforcement officer and she’s responsible for the town. It’s scary but she is secure enough in herself that she knows what her own world is. I think she feels like she has control over that and she does, up to a point." It’s a trait that producer Gary Lucchesi sought to maintain as well and comments on in Linney’s character. He feels that the level of sophistication Linney brings to the part of a small town cop is one of the reasons the two lead characters work so well together. "You have two very logical, practical characters: a police officer, Laura Linney’s character; and a journalist, played by Richard Gere," he says. "She watched ‘Meet The Press’ and she’s seen John Klein, and she recognizes him. She’s not a country bumpkin." As important as any single character in the story is the town of Point Pleasant. After investigating the possibility of actually shooting in Point Pleasant, the production found the small West Virginia town not only lacked the infrastructure to support the demands of the production but no longer has a bridge leading into the center of town. The search continued and the production found exactly what they needed in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where principal photography commenced on January 24, 2001. As Richard Wright explains, "The movie came to Pittsburgh largely for three reasons. It had the terrain to pass for West Virginia; it had a good crew base and the necessary services that a film shoot requires; and it was near a small town with a bridge that could be shut down for filming." In addition, the area also had neighborhoods that served as both Georgetown and Chicago. Kittanning, a small town in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, was selected to double Point Pleasant. At one point during the production a group of real Point Pleasant residents traveled down to Kittanning to see the filming. All agreed the production couldn’t have made a better choice. One of the observers, Point Pleasant Police Chief Dale Humphrey peered though the window of the coffee shop set built by the film crew and stated, "This looks exactly like Point Pleasant. We even have a bar-b-que place that looks just like this." On February 28, 2001, the film crew moved from Pittsburgh to the borough of Kittanning, Pennsylvania, where they virtually took over the entire town for the month that followed. Gere had a particular fondness for the location. "When I first saw the town I was delighted," he said. Reminding him of a small Pennsylvania town of his youth he said, "These towns just haven’t changed much in the last hundred years. You see the old architecture, some of it not well kept up but a minimum of new things and it still has a downtown. The strip malls and the malls outside have not really taken over yet." The Point Pleasant that director Pellington was looking for was not simply a small town. He described what he wanted this way: "The place feels strangely out of place but never obviously or overtly weird or spooky. It is simple and sad." To achieve the very specific look needed the production turned to production designer Richard Hoover. "Mark is highly involved, visually, with every aspect in a very unique way as a director," says Hoover. "For me that’s the fun part, it can also be the painful part but that’s the collaboration, and that is the fun - making the ideas mesh in a way that works. I came in with a whole set of notions about the global aspects of the story." Hoover explains, "It’s in the United States, it’s in a place that we know about, Pennsylvania, and making it West Virginia is actually pretty easy. But then Mark and I spent three weeks going through the script in detail and created a 130-page document where each scene is discussed. What do you see in this scene? What do you want in this scene?" This document then became a kind of guide that each of the departments in the production could use to understand the vision and tone that Pellington wanted the film to have. It was not as much a physical description of each scene as a map that moves through the film, offering insight into the mood of the charters and the atmosphere they’d travel through. In this document Pellington offered everything from a list of "key" words such as "ambiguity, subtlety, scary and beautiful at the same time" or "eerie and strange, yet inviting" to the very last line: THE GOAL IS TO GET ALL THE IMAGES WE NEED TO MAKE THE FILM… PERIOD!!" Hoover describes the transformation, subtle as it was, made to the town. "This is a story about a man in control that loses control. That’s just the physical fact, he doesn’t have control, mentally or physically of his world, when he comes in to this town. So we decided to make the town strange, up to a certain point, because it’s John’s headspace that we are exploring. That’s why we did the color agenda, kind of reduced the pallet, used black, made it more generic, and got rid of all the signs except the few that we wanted to look at. There is a generic nature that we are exploring and actually America is filled with it and film allows us to focus on it. There’s a lost feeling and I think that’s part of that headspace." RE-CREATING THE SILVER BRIDGETo create the event, production had to utilize for basic elements. Special effects supervisor Peter Chesney designed and oversaw the construction and operation of an actual section of bridge that would match perfectly the actual cantilever bridge that crosses the river into Kittanning. This section, dubbed the "stunt" bridge was built in Los Angeles then shipped to Pennsylvania where it could be loaded up with cars and actually tipped to an angle of about 40 degrees, for close-ups of vehicles sliding across the deck. A computer-generated component of the suspension towers and I-bar chains was then added to the actual bridge but as Richard Hoover noted, "The thing I am learning is - reality is better. The visual computers and models can accentuate that but in a sequence like this you really have to have reality." The final element for the master shots of the bridge is a model built near Los Angeles. The model was 128 feet long, 28 feet high and had a deck five feet wide. It was a structure about which Hoover can say simply, "It’s huge!" then more seriously, "We’re doing maps of Point Pleasant so that everyone knows where every thing is in relationship to the bridge. Once we all agree on that, and have it all on paper the four big elements are one bridge." For director Mark Pellington, the complexity of the story is not in the mechanics of the production’s effects, but on the emotional affect of the film on the audience. "Richard Gere said something at the beginning of the film about just letting things happen, and I think that’s what’s happened on this film in every performance, every choice, exists in a zone that feels right." He explains, "That’s subjective but if it feels right to me, and everybody else, we kind of go with it." As for what he personally wants the film to be, Pellington says, "Perception is a trick thing. Everybody has their own experiences and everybody has little mind tricks or things that say, ‘Was that real? Was it not real? From simple deja vus to blackouts. It’s hard to put that abstraction in a box for people. How do you put that on a poster?" he asks. "My goal is to make it believable to the people sitting in the theater and for them to feel something even if they have no clue what is going on. Everybody wants to know, as the puzzle builds, why John is where he is and what’s going to happen. Those are the two questions that need to be answered. If those are answered and the audience leaves the theater feeling something, and I hope a range of emotions, then we’re okay." |
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