Sanctum: With a little help from Hollywood friends
The name James Cameron is one that anyone would want in the credits of their film, and it will certainly shine the spotlight on what is Australia’s first live action 3D feature, Sanctum. Georgina Person reports.
Cameron is making international headlines during the worldwide promotion of Sanctum – due to his role as executive producer. However, director Alister Grierson and writer/producer Andrew Wight have little objection to the interest the project is attracting because of his involvement.Sanctum tells the story of a group of divers (including Richard Roxburgh, Rhys Wakefield and Ioan Gruffud) who become trapped in a series of underwater caves. It is based on Wight’s own near death experience whilst filming a documentary in Australia’s remote Nullabar cave systems. It was shot using the same 3D cameras and techniques developed from Avatar… with only a portion of the budget.
A BAR SET VERY HIGH
A long time Cameron collaborator, Wight worked with him on the documentaries where he first started exploring 3D (Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep). Knowing Grierson through a mutual acquaintance, it was Wight who recommended the director for this project and sent a copy of Kokoda to Cameron, who was then shooting Avatar in New Zealand. Cameron invited Grierson to meet him in Wellington.
“He invited me to hang around for the week, and he kind of confirmed [I got the job]. I then asked him if I could bring over my cinematographer, Jules O’Loughlin, because I wanted to show him how the 3D worked, and how Jim was using it. It takes a bit to get your head around a new workflow,” explained Grierson.
Sanctum was initially a daunting project for the director. “It was a little overwhelming conceptually in the early stages. 3D was something I had thought about doing years and years ago, but I had not really focused on that at all in any realistic way, so it really came out of the blue.”
With Cameron on board as executive producer, the expectations were high, and that made for a few early nerves. “Jim is a big part in getting the film financed; we needed to deliver a film that he’s going to be proud of, because he’s got to put his name to it. Sanctum is representing him as well and he has a pretty good track record so far so there was definitely that element of nervousness. But, fundamentally, it’s still filmmaking and I love that creative process. You just have to adapt to all the challenges.”
For Wight, assembling a crew with the skills to take on such an enormous challenge was no easy task. The stereoscopic feature involved a huge amount of re-training – most of the crew started entirely from scratch and it was difficult to find people with previous 3D experience. “There were people here, who had good skills and an understanding, but there was actually no one who I came in touch with who had previously worked on a 3D production, and that includes post-houses.
“The whole methodology by which Sanctum has been produced and the aesthetic that we used had to be detailed to all the people. 3D is in its infancy; there is no one who can jump up and say ‘I know all about it’ because it’s still evolving. There are no text books, no courses, no standard, there is no generally accepted set of deliverables. We’re dealing with a part of the industry which is evolving, growing and coming to terms with how to create good 3D and even then there’s still a lot of discussion about that.”
With a $30 million budget – and private financing coming from Wayfare Entertainment and Relativity Media, among others-, the shoot took 60 days at the Village Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast – including its huge water tank. The complexities of shooting underwater are many, not to mention dangerous. Grierson told Encore the shoot was precarious at times. “It was a difficult shoot. It is more complex with 3D and we’re very ambitious with the film, we’ve got $30m but we wanted to make it look like it was $90m and I think we have succeed in doing that. But to get more bang for your buck you have to work very hard. It’s stressful working underwater and it’s a dangerous environment to be working in.”
Grierson added that some of the water scenes were a struggle to direct. “We’ve got a couple of set pieces that have inherently dangerous qualities to them. We built a 60m high waterfall and there’s something like 2,000 litres of water a minute this thing can produce. It’s a complex engineering exercise, not to mention a deafening noise. We were also using technocranes, so it gave the cameras a huge amount of mobility, but then it got tricky because there’s water spraying everywhere onto these electronic cameras. There were issues with heat and issues with the cameras getting wet so we had a complicated lens cleaning system set up on our cameras.”
The fundamental difference in Sanctum is the James Cameron philosophy used to create it, Grierson explained: “It’s a conservative style of 3D, we are not trying to push the 3D in terms of big visual gags but we are trying to create a very pleasant viewing experience for the audience. We don’t really want the audience to be conscious of it; it’s very much Jim’s philosophy – looking through a window into another world, as opposed to bringing that world out onto your lap.”
To create such a seamless overall effect the postproduction work was extensive. According to Grierson, it was extremely difficult as they were effectively doubling all their effects.
“You’re dealing with twice as much material literally because you’re shooting in stereo, so every time you’re doing a VFX shot, effectively you’ve got two,” he explained. “There are also stereo issues that you have to manage – for example, one of the lenses might have a water drop on it, but the other one doesn’t – and issues that can be fixed in post–production.”
A WAY OF MOVING FORWARD
Marketed as an adventure/thriller, Sanctum has a compelling storyline, showcasing one of the most untouched and dangerous areas in the world. The element of truth will draw its audience in, and it is this element allows it to have such a wide scope – and the potential to become a blockbuster.
Wright agrees: “I hope that’s the result we have achieved, but we won’t know that until the audience gives it their approval. What I can say is that all good films are about good stories, so at the heart of the project there has to be a compelling story that will keep people engaged. And we’ve managed, with a great team of people, to put together, for a modest amount of money, a 3D film and a great story.”
And with such huge potential to stand tall on an international stage – Sanctum serves as inspiration for other Australian filmmakers.
“The exciting thing about Sanctum is that hopefully it shows that people in Australia, we can locally compete with Hollywood in a very special way, we can carve out a niche for ourselves. We have made a fully live action film 3D film, the first one to be made in Australia and it’s made with local people who basically came into this with very little, if any, 3D knowledge and have produced a world class film we can all be proud of. I think that should be used, or can be used, as a way of moving forward,” added Wight.
Universal Pictures will release Sanctum in territories including the US and Australia on February 3.
