Red
Planet Strikes at Dawn
Several interesting items of note about the
upcoming movie RED PLANET. The first's from the web site CINESCAPE.com.
The second's from the web site SCIFI.com and the thirds from the
site SPACE.com. As for the image contained below with the SPACE.com
information; I really have not idea what it is. It may represent
the set for the movie or perhaps it's the camp for the crew of the
movie, I'm not really sure. 8/22/99
'Red
Planet' Prod Start
Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow
have announced the start of production on their own Mars movie,
Red Planet. According to Variety, the film began filming
on location in Jordan and Australia on August 30th. The film production,
which stars Val Kilmer, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin
Bratt, Simon Baker and Terence Stamp, is currently racing against
Disney's Mission To Mars to be the first of three Mars projects
to hit the screen. The latter film starring Gary Sinise, is currently
shooting near Vancouver. At this point Mission is slated
to debut on March 10, 2000 while Red Planet is scheduled
to arrive in theaters later that month on the 31st.
Red Planet Takes Off
The Warner Bros. film Red Planet began
principal photography on Aug. 30, according to a company press release.
The picture is being directed by Antony Hoffman and stars Val Kilmer,
Carrie-Anne Moss, Tom Sizemore, Benjamin Bratt, Simon Baker and
Terence Stamp.
Red Planet follows a team of American astronauts
on the first manned expedition to Mars. Earth has become a dying
planet, and establishing a Martian colony is humanity's only hope
for survival.
During the mission the astronauts, each
a specialist in a different field, struggle to overcome the differences
of their personalities, backgrounds and ideologies. When their equipment
is damaged, the crew members are forced to depend on one another
for survival.
Australia Provides
Martian Stand-In
By Stewart Taggart:
Australia's
flat, red, rock-strewn Outback is proving an ideal backdrop for
a film starring Val Kilmer about the first piloted mission to Mars.
For the past two weeks, cast and crew of
the Warner Brothers film "Red Planet" have been shooting in the
desert roughly 15 miles from the mining town of Coober Pedy. The
bleak, desolate, near featureless terrain has hardly any vegetation.
"Areas around here look almost identical
to Mars Pathfinder photos," says Trevor McLeod, special projects
officer for the town council. "One place up the road from here is
called Moon Plain, because it looks just like the surface of the
moon."
Coober Pedy is located in the harsh desert
of South Australia, near Australia's geographical center. It's long
been popular among science fiction filmmakers. Last September, the
still-unreleased American sci-fi film "Pitch Black" featuring Farscape
star Claudia Black was filmed around Coober Pedy. But by far the
most famous film shot in the area was 1985's "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome"
in which climactic chase scenes took place along a railroad line
roughly 25 miles west of town.
"Red Planet" is set in the near future. Earth
is a dying planet and a team of American astronauts is sent to Mars
on a last-ditch effort to find a suitable refuge for endangered
humanity. As personality conflicts and equipment breakdowns threaten
their mission, the astronauts have to work together to survive.
Besides Kilmer, the film also stars Carrie-Anne
Moss ("The Matrix") and Terence Stamp ("Superman II" and "Star Wars:
The Phantom Menace"). Others in the cast, including Tom Sizemore,
Benjamin Bratt and Simon Baker, are better known for non-science
fiction roles.
The cast and crew of "Red Planet" arrived
in Coober Pedy earlier this month after two weeks of shooting in
Wadi Rum, Jordan, where dramatic rock outcroppings provided a different
backdrop than the flat Australian desert. The non-Australian portion
of the movie originally had been scheduled to be filmed in Iceland,
but the location moved to Jordan when production crews couldn't
find an area completely barren of vegetation.
Once filming is completed in Coober Pedy,
production on "Red Planet" shifts to interior photography at Sydney's
Fox Studios. Shooting should wrap up by Christmas, and theatrical
release of the film, directed by feature film neophyte Anthony Hoffman,
is expected sometime next year.
Primeval verite
So far, clear weather has kept the production
on schedule. However, one major dust storm did kick up winds of
up to 35 knots [40 miles per hour or 64 kilometers per hour], making
the wind machine the crew parked in the center of town a bit of
a joke among the locals, McLeod said.
Undaunted, production officials said the
natural storms added realism.
"The storms really helped us provide some
additional atmosphere," said one production aide reached by phone
at the unit's Coober Pedy offices. "But a lot of time also has been
spent waiting for the dust to die down, because you can't shoot
if the camera's in danger."
While Coober Pedy, Alice Springs in the Northern
Territory, Broken Hill in New South Wales and the Flinders Ranges
in South Australia offer filmmakers otherworldly film backdrops,
the Australian Outback also has attracted its share of scientists
over the years.
That's because its terrain has been largely
unchanged and untouched in the billions of years since Australia
broke off from Antarctica and the prehistoric supercontinent of
Gondwanaland.
Renowned comet-finder Eugene Shoemaker used
to make yearly trips to the Outback in search of rocks from space
that might have fallen here. On July 18, 1997, Shoemaker died in
a two-car accident near Alice Springs, north of Coober Pedy.
Most science fictions films shot around Coober
Pedy are filmed in the roughly 120-mile square Breakaway's Reserve
just 15 miles from town. The nearness of such good locations is
one of Coober Pedy's main attractions.
The town also has made a name for itself
for such non-science fiction films as "The Adventures of Priscilla:
Queen of the Desert," a road movie about transvestites who travel
by bus to Alice Springs. The more recent Australian film "Siam Sunset"
chronicled the adventures of an English industrial chemist who travels
to the Outback in search of the perfect ochre color to produce for
his arts supply company.
To get an idea of the vastness, just south
of Coober Pedy lies the Woomera Prohibited Area, a rocket range
roughly the size of England. The area was used in the 1960s for
Europe's early rocket tests before those operations were shifted
to Kourou, French Guiana.
Since then, the range has been underutilized,
although a top secret US satellite listening post at nearby Nurrungar
provides employment for the tiny town of Woomera itself, located
about 180 miles south of Coober Pedy.
The Woomera rocket range is now on the verge
of rebirth thanks to a US company -- Seattle-based Kistler Aerospace
-- that hopes to start launching reusable rockets from there next
year to deliver satellites to low earth orbit. An Australian/Russian
joint venture also plans to start offering launches to low earth
orbit using converted Russian SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missiles
in 2001.
From Mars to Tatooine?
The vastness of the Outback, coupled with
the harsh conditions, each year claim several lives as tourists
and adventurers suffer car breakdowns and are unable to make it
back to civilization. Some areas can be unvisited for years at a
time, since no dirt or paved roads exist across much of the area.
With deep, cloudless blue skies and rich
red rock and sand, along with an unbroken flat horizon in all four
directions -- it's easy to feel as if you're in atmosphereless,
gravity-free world in which you could easily fall off into space.
Roughly half of Coober Pedy's population
of about 3,000 live underground in converted mines to escape the
searing surface temperatures. The town exists mainly for opal mining,
a hit-or-miss business in which finds are generally uncovered at
random by digging gingerly through soft underground rock.
While McLeod said he knew of no other productions
scheduled to use Coober Pedy in coming months, George Lucas will
be gearing up production on the second "Star Wars" prequel at Sydney's
Fox Studios early next year.
While the Coober Pedy town council hasn't
yet been contacted by Lucas or his representatives to film in the
area, Lucas is known to be interested in using Australian locations
as backdrops for the film.
Check out even more information
about the movie RED PLANET
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