What about those who use the actual events of September 11, 2001 for FINANCIAL gain? Or Katrina? And I’m not talking about retelling a story in book or movie fashion, per se, which is still the act of creating, when you come down to brass tacks. Anyway…
So I’m reading this interesting article in WSJ.com about a rash of post-apocolyptic flicks soon to come out (I am attracted to this sort of stuff, but more in book form- The Stand, Lucifer’s Hammer, On the Beach, etc) thinking that one or two of these might actually cause me to watch a movie, which I rarely do.
And then I read this:
In the film version of “The Road,” as in the novel, the apocalypse that blackened the landscape and set the narrative in motion isn’t described. Director John Hillcoat says he pressed author Cormac McCarthy for an answer about what happened. Mr. McCarthy “said it didn’t matter whether it was nuclear war or mini volcanoes or a comet,” Mr. Hillcoat says. What mattered was the backdrop for the intimate relationship between a father and son.
Though the calamity remained ambiguous, the filmmakers used real disaster footage to render their setting. A panoramic scene in the movie includes the improbable sight of ships marooned on a highway. The image was shot in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina hit, captured on 70mm IMAX film by a crew that had been in the area to shoot a documentary about the bayou. [bold emphasis added]
Hmmm. It continues:
Rather than use computers to create massive smoke plumes, the filmmakers patched in news footage of the billows that erupted from the World Trade Center as it burned. Other images came from Mount St. Helens and volcanic devastation in the Philippines. The collage technique was both allegorical and practical (and helped keep the budget to a lean $20 million), despite the fact that most viewers won’t recognize the source material. “Our logic is if you’re within that place, whether it’s Katrina or the Twin Towers, it would be the same as a global apocalypse to you,” Mr. Hillcoat says. [bold emphasis added]
Using footage of the events of the Katrina aftermath or September 11 as a means to save money in the course of making a fictional movie? Boy, I’m not sure that sounds right at all. What do you think? Should I not care?
