Stargate The Movie Production Notes
The notion that ancient civilizations were visited by beings from other planets has long been hypothesized in books and documentaries. For the first time, STARGATE brings that concept to the screen in a spectacular science fiction tale that doesn’t ask “did they?,” but rather “what if…”For director/writer Roland Emmerich, STARGATE brought to fruition the germ of an idea that he began pondering more than ten years ago. “When I was in film school,” he expounds, “there was a wave of theories about aliens visiting Earth thousands of years ago and being responsible for the pyramids and such. It wasn’t so much that I believed in the theories, but I always thought the idea could be the basis for a fantastic adventure movie.”
It would be several years before Emmerich would discover the writing talents of a young actor whom he had cast in his film “Moon 44” named Dean Devlin. The director invited Devlin to join his film company, Centropolis Films, and collaborate on developing future projects.
“Roland told me about a concept he had for a film set inside the Great Pyramids of Egypt,” Devlin recalls. “I told him about an idea I had for a kind of desert epic in outer space. We decided to combine the two, and STARGATE was born.”
Even as Emmerich and Devlin moved on to other films, their work on STARGATE progressed. It was not until they were well into post-production on “Universal Soldier” that they felt they had a viable script.
The fascinating adventure then caught the imagination of Le Studio Canal + (U.S.), an affiliate of Canal +, one of the world’s largest pay-TV organizations. Le Studio Canal + and its French parent company have previously been involved in the financing of many major Hollywood films, including “Cliffhanger,” “Free Willy,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Basic Instinct,” “Sommersby” and “Made in America.”
Le Studio Canal + brought the project to executive producer Mario Kassar, and STARGATE was ready to be launched.
POPULATING TWO WORLDS
The clash between the military and scientific communities’ ambitions for the StarGate are brought to life through the film’s two main characters: Special Forces Colonel Jack O’Neil and brilliant young Egyptologist, Daniel Jackson.
For O’Neil, the StarGate represents the fulfilment of a personal as well as professional mission; for Daniel, it is the culmination of a life’s work. Producer Joel Michaels notes, “The Stargate is the object of conflict, because it has the capability of satisfying two very different objectives. O’Neil has his own clandestine plan, while Jackson understands that he has discovered something quite magnificent…and wonderful.”
“They each have their own agenda of what they want to accomplish when they go through the StarGate,” adds Devlin, “and they’re at opposite ends of the spectrum. One of the things this film is about is the two sides learning to respect one another and, ultimately, working together towards a single goal.”
The disparate nature of these two characters is perfectly captured on the screen by talented film stars Kurt Russell, who portrays Colonel O’Neil with the quiet intensity of a stalwart and very private individual, and James Spader as Daniel Jackson, who conveys the awe-struck wonder of a man whose lifelong dream has become reality.
“O’Neil is drawn to this mission because he has, in his own estimation, nothing left to live for,” Russell says. “That makes him mysterious…and certainly dangerous.”
Spader reflects, “I think Daniel is something of an island, an outsider. He’s become frustrated by the world around him and then, all of the sudden, this door opens up that is…perfect.”Despite the incongruous qualities of their roles, both actors were attracted to the project for similar reasons. Russell remembers, “Roland had a clear vision, and the producers were equally enthusiastic about it. It made me feel as if they could achieve what they were setting out to do. They cared a lot, and it was infectious.”
“The script was unlike anything I had ever done or even considered doing,” acknowledges Spader. “Then I met with Roland and found him to be tremendously excited about this. He and the producers made it seem like it was going to be a fascinating journey, and I wanted to go on it. So I did…and I’m glad I did.”
On the other side of the StarGate, the men encounter a strange and alien world, ruled by a godlike figure called Ra. In his first film since his Academy Award-nominated triumph in “The Crying Game,” Jaye Davidson portrays the powerful, enigmatic leader.
Originally, the filmmakers envisioned an inveterate character in the part, but as casting proceeded, the image evolved into someone younger, in Emmerich’s words, “less cliché.” It was executive producer Mario Kassar who ultimately made the unique suggestion of Jaye Davidson.
Another pivotal role was that of Spader’s love interest, Sha’rui, the beautiful young woman who emerges from innocence to understand the injustice with which she and her people have been treated. Yet, even as principal photography got underway, the filmmakers had still not found the perfect actress to play her.
Out of the last possible submissions, Emmerich selected a videotape which contained scenes of an Israeli movie starring a gifted young actress named Mili Avital.
Devlin recalls, “It was in Hebrew -- I mean, we couldn’t understand a word -- and yet,in an instant we all knew she was the right girl.”
The main cast also includes: veteran actress Viveca Lindfors as Catherine, the head of the team assembled to unlock the secret of the StarGate; talented young actor Alexis Cruz as Skaara, the leader of the shepherd boys; Erick Avari as Kasuf, the patriarch of the people beyond the StarGate; Leon Rippy as General West, the military head of the project; and John Diehl as Lt. Kawalsky, one of the soldiers led by O’Neil on the most dangerous mission of their lives.
In addition, STARGATE can literally boast “a cast of thousands,” as almost 2,000 actors and extras descended on the Arizona desert to breathe life into an alien world.
CREATING TECHNO-EGYPT – THE ARTISANS OF STARGATE
STARGATE transports audiences to the city of Nagada on the planet Abydos, millions of light years from Earth. However, its culture is steeped in an ancient--and earthbound--civilization. To create an atmosphere that is at once ancient and otherworldly, the filmmakers turned to some of the most talented creative people in the industry.
Devlin explains, “One of the leaps we ask the audience to accept is that the Egyptian culture didn’t evolve, but was actually a legacy--an imitation of something that had been there before. We needed to juxtapose a very primitive society with what could have been the inspiration for ancient Egyptian art and culture. To do that our creative team had to design a world that would have the style of ancient Egypt, yet seem high-tech.”
Long before the start of production, Peter Mitchell Rubin, who had created a computerized system of storyboarding, spent weeks turning blueprints, sketches and verbaldescriptions into extraordinarily realistic images. With the computer, Rubin was able to provide the filmmakers with virtually three-dimensional storyboards that could display depth of focus and lighting. Cameras could even be placed in “sets” which had not even been built. “We were astonished,” says Devlin. “It was almost as if we had a test shoot of the film before we had even started filming.”
Patrick Tatopoulos was responsible for the concept and construction of the alien life forms with which our heroes are confronted. The beastly mastadge was a combination of an elaborate mechanical costume and special effects, built to make an even larger creature out of the already stately one wearingit, a Clydesdale horse. In stark contrast to that lumbering, slovenly, gentle creature, the designs for the mythological warriors--the birdlike Horus, and the jackal, Anubis—as well as the helmet worn by Ra, were sleek, sculpted…and decidedly menacing.
Tatopoulos and his team also collaborated with costume designer Joseph Porro, who had the daunting task of clothing thousands of people for a story that spanned 10 centuries.
With no research available on what fashionably dressed North Africans were wearing in 8,000 B.C., Porro considered the sequence of the film set in that bygone era to be one of the most difficult. His solution was simply to guess. “I don’t know if it’s accurate,” he admits, “but I hope it’s pleasing to the eye.”
Moving into the 20th Century, his team had to costume 1,500 cast members and extras in period clothing for the discovery of the StarGate, set in 1928. Porro naturally assumed that present-day Earth would be the easiest segment to wardrobe, but soon discovered that stock military uniforms are made of a polyester blend that would have beentorturous in the heat of the film’s primary desert location. All of the army uniforms had to be remade in natural fabrics and to exact government standards.
Taking his imagination through the StarGate, Porro’s costume designs for Abydos had to blend the recognizable style of ancient Egypt and the unknown of something alien. They also had to reflect the dichotomy between Ra and his overlords and the slave population in the city of Nagada.
For the latter, Porro and his staff manufactured four to five thousand garments, inspired by those of ancient Bedouins. The costumes had to fill three criteria: they had to be in natural fabrics; they had to cover the body to protect the wearer from the sun; and they had to be able to be put on quickly, given that the wardrobe department could be dressing thousands of extras on any single day. Through his research, Porro incorporated unique designs of cords and ropes to give the robes distinction.
Finally, there were the costumes of Ra’s palace, a dramatic display of silks, linens and velvets in a palette of rich colours. Using airbrushes, latex paints, custom dyes, intricate embroidery, molded plastic and Porro’s own specially designed style of pleating, the fabrics were given an otherworldly effect.
They were then ornately embellished with hand-made beads and jewels. Every piece of jewelry is an original; every bead, every scarab, every hair ornament was designed. Porro even took it a step further, creating a crude version of the jewelry that looks like it was carved out of sandstone to be worn by the general population.
Giving the look of the entire production continuity, the theme of the patterns seen in the jewelry was carried over from the designs of both Patrick Tatopoulos and productiondesigner Holger Gross.
Gross assembled a gifted team, including art directors, set decorators, conceptual designers, scenic artists and computer designers, to name only a few, to give form to Roland Emmerich’s vision.
No ordinary soundstage was large enough to hold the magnificent main chamber of Ra’s palace, so it was constructed in the cavernous dome in Long Beach, California that had once housed the Spruce Goose. The largest of the film’s interior sets, it measured over 300 feet long, 60 feet wide and 40 feet high and the entirety of it was sculpted, engraved, painted or polished.
Emmerich explains, “The volume of detail was tremendous, because even though you may not see it all, you get the sense of it, which you need to make it convincing.”
To engrave the expansive walls of the palace with a seemingly endless pattern of hieroglyphics, the creative unit employed a rare tool known as an anarouter. Ordinarily used for sign making, the machine was able to do the engraving work of 100 men in one day. One of only nine in the world, the anarouter was being utilized by the film industry for the first time ever on STARGATE.
There were approximately 30,000 square feet of vacuform walls built onto the set and every square inch was coated. After the walls were painted gold, a chemical process was used to make the paint react, resulting in a crusted, ancient effect. Even the floor was patterned and bevelled, with gold leaf implanted in it to catch the light. Five coats of varnish were used to polish and protect it, and it was rewaxed every day. To preserve their hard work the crew was forced to wear booties that would not damage the floor.When the set was replete with imposing columns several stories high and colourful silks dancing to the “winds” blowing in from the surrounding desert, the palace was as exotic and mysterious as its ruler.
DESERT STORMS – ON LOCATION
To serve as the desert landscapes on both planets, the filmmakers chose the barren area surrounding the city of Yuma, Arizona. “We needed a true desert location,” says Joel Michaels, “and Yuma, with its endless vistas of sand dunes, was still only an hour’s plane ride from Los Angeles.”
Those endless vistas of sand provided a perfect backdrop for the story of StarGate, but also presented some enormous hurdles for the filmmakers to overcome. The first obstacle was how to move the literally tons of equipment across the soft surface. The crew used an innovative material called Geoweb, which was previously employed by our troops in Desert Storm. Made from a honeycombed rubber-like material, when rolled out on the sand and wetted down, it forms an instant road.
Keeping the sand dunes in their pristine original state during an entire day of shooting proved nightmarish. Devlin notes, “When you first arrive at a sand dune, it’s perfect; it looks fantastic. But the minute one person steps on it, you’re done.”
Roland Emmerich recalls having thousands of extras poised to come charging over a massive sand dune. “We knew we had to get it in one take, so we instructed them in as many languages as we knew that it was imperative to follow the lead guy. I called ‘Action,’ the lead guy went left and half the crowd went right. To this day, I don’t know why.”Adding to the footprints of thousands of actors and crew members walking on the dunes, the company had arrived in Yuma at the height of dune buggy season. Despite their best efforts to establish a perimeter around location sites, the cast and crew were often forced to move to another dune to avoid having dune buggies flying through the scene or capturing telltale tracks on camera.
From storyboards, to set design, to special effects, the STARGATE production team used state-of-the-art technology. To combat “sand prints,” they tried a giant jet fan and even helicopters to blow the sand back to its original condition. In the end, however, nature demanded a more basic solution, and a brigade of men and women with brooms--dune sweepers--were on constant call.
Sand notwithstanding, the relentless, pounding heat was the greatest challenge to everyone working in the harsh arid environment. As temperatures soared to upwards of 120 degrees, minimal exertion became exhausting, and water, water and more water became the most essential provision on set. Pockets had to be sewn into the costumes of the actors and extras to hold little bottles of water, and thousands of dollars were spent on keeping a constant supply of water coming to the location.
“As a producer,” Michaels acknowledges, “it would never have occurred to me that a substantial budgetary consideration would be for something that we usually take for granted. Luckily, during pre-production we figured out that we were going to need an inordinate amount of water and were prepared.”
To recreate desert sandstorms, visual effects supervisor Kit West used a system of ten huge wind machines. But the ever-changing real desert winds seemed to delight in doing battle with the fans, and West’s team would often have to re-set the heavy equipment from one take to the next for the sake of continuity.
Perhaps the most exciting storm footage audiences will see resulted from the sudden onset of the real thing. Whereas most film companies would have been running for cover from the stinging wind-blown sand, Emmerich’s crew began running for cameras, as they knew there would be no second take.
Kit West also worked closely with digital effects supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun and the Kleiser-Walczak Company to create the spectacular special effects seen in STARGATE, including the swooping gull-wing gliders and the internal transporter. The most stunning effect is that of the StarGate itself, a self-supporting 20-foot ring with symbols that rotate into position. As the symbols are lined up in the correct combination, the ring seems to come to life and its otherwise hollow center transforms into a radiant doorway to another world.
As the city of Nagada on the planet of Abydos began to take shape in the Arizona desert, the filmmakers, cast and crew experienced a sensation similar to that of stepping into a new world.
Devlin marvels, “The Nagada set was eight stories tall, and the entrance to the pyramid alone became one of the largest single exterior sets ever built. Here was something that began as a collective dream of Roland’s and mine, and now I could touch it, I could walk on it…it was eerie.”
In no small part, Emmerich, Michaels and Devlin all credit the fulfilment of that dream to their extraordinary crew. “These were not just people who worked on the film;these were partners,” Devlin states. “They made this movie happen.”
The cast was equally impressed with the scope of the project. “The scale of this picture became clear to me my very first day on the set,” James Spader remarks. “We drove out into the desert into a basin, and there was this gigantic installation that stretched out for miles.”
“I’ve never been involved in an undertaking this huge,” adds Kurt Russell. “I’ve always loved these kinds of pictures; you can’t see StarGate anywhere but on film.”
To capture the two worlds of STARGATE on film, Emmerich relied on the talents of his longtime collaborator, cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub. “We have very similar tastes,” the director notes. “He has an innate understanding of what I like and don’t like. It makes doing a movie of this size so much easier.”
“Roland and Walter (Karl) are a championship combination,” commends Michaels. “Roland is beyond organized. He has the entire movie in his mind’s eye, and yet can turn on a dime and adapt without compromise. And Walter has a terrific eye. His composition is beautiful; his lighting is exquisite. Together they put wonderful images on film.”
THE LANGUAGE OF STARGATE
Not only did the filmmakers create another world for STARGATE, but the language of that world as well. To accomplish this, they called on the expertise of Stuart Tyson Smith, Ph.D., a research associate at the Institute of Archaeology at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Smith was asked to reconstruct what ancient Egyptian might have sounded like if it had developed over thousands of years.Researching from contemporary evidence, Smith began analysing such things as which words had masculine or feminine endings and how to conjugate verbs, etc. Ultimately he came up with a set of rules from which he could base the grammatical structure.
It was a fascinating process for all concerned, especially the actors who would have to speak the language. Eric Avari, who was already fluent in several languages, almost immediately spoke like a “native.” Mili Avital, with her knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, also picked it up quickly.
James Spader, whose character is a linguist as well as an Egyptologist, found Smith invaluable as a dialect coach as well as a technical advisor. For his part, Kurt Russell quips, “I quickly went over the script and said, ‘now wait a minute, I don’t have to say a word of this ever…do I?’.”
“Speaking a foreign language in a film can sound awkward,” says Devlin. “We were extremely fortunate to have a cast that had an aptitude for dialects.”
He continues that there were contributions to the film by the stars in other areas as well. “Kurt’s ideas for his character were right on the money, and James can identify a line that’s not right and knows just how to change it to make it work.”
“They are both extremely talented actors,” Emmerich adds, “but their styles and approach to their work couldn’t be more different. James examines his role from an intellectual point of view, while Kurt is more emotional, going straight to the heart of the character. Ironically, their parts were similar in that way, so the relationship between them worked perfectly.”
In turn, the two stars had high praise for the filmmakers and each other.“I had a great time,” Russell comments. “Roland runs a fun set and I think that’s an important aspect of making a movie. James and I shared a lot of laughs. He loves to act; he loves the process of it, and it’s inspiring to work with somebody who’s excited about what they do.”
Spader offers, “It was a terrific experience. I really enjoyed working with everybody on this film. Roland created an environment that’s tremendously conducive to filmmaking. He has a vital sense of humor and used it to get us through even the hardest day. As for Kurt; if you’re going out to the middle of the desert and you want to keep your head, he’s a great guy to have along. He keeps things light, and we had a lot of fun."
IT’S A WRAP
The director and producers agree that no discussion of STARGATE could be complete without acknowledging the vital contribution of executive producer Mario Kassar. Joel Michaels says, “Roland, Dean, the cast…we were all integral, but Mario deserves a tremendous amount of the credit. Without his conviction and indomitable will, it would never have come together. He is the one who really believed in the project and made it come to life.”
“STARGATE is a great journey,” Kurt Russell says, “but in the end, it is a very human story. That is to say, simply, that you can travel to the other end of the universe, but whatever life form you encounter, you are still going to have to deal with your own humanity.”
Spader notes, “My character spent his life studying entire civilizations spanningcenturies. The breadth of one lifetime is meaningless to him. I think what he discovers in the course of the story is the value of that one life and that every culture is made up of millions of single lifetimes.”
Emmerich and Devlin concur that the humanity of the story shines through the hardware. “You can take this wild ride to another planet and encounter incredible things, but ultimately it’s the people you have to care about,” Devlin says.
Emmerich reflects, “Unlocking the StarGate begins the journey that these two people have to make.”
Devlin sums it up: The StarGate is a doorway to adventure.”