Blockbuster.co.uk travels back in time to explore the strange, ancient world of 10,000 BC.
Creating a new myth about a hero who emerges from an isolated tribe to challenge an empire, Emmerich sought to transport audiences into an adventure unlike anything they'd experienced before. "I have always been intrigued by the idea of classic storytelling, in the timeless way people have told stories round the campfire for generations," says Emmerich. "When your subject matter is early man, you have the opportunity to tell very rich heroic stories in which one character has to do the almost impossible. I wanted to make a movie that would allow audiences to fall into this other world that looks and feels like nothing they have ever seen."
In order to take audiences on an adventurous journey to another time and place, Emmerich and his cast and crew first had to travel to the other end of the world. Production took them from the blistering cold of New Zealand in the winter, to the hot, humid climate of Cape Town, South Africa, to the arid desert landscape of the African nation of Namibia.
Producer Michael Wimer offers, "A filmmaker like Roland is always looking for something original, but it can be quite difficult to find a canvas that hasn't been painted on, so to speak. It was an extraordinary challenge on every level - in fact, Roland said it was the most demanding movie he'd ever worked on. But I think the challenges are what a filmmaker like him thrives on."
Harald Kloser, who co-wrote the film with Emmerich, notes that
10,000 BC is a journey to a time when mysticism and the spirit world were a very real part of life. "Roland and I never intended for
10,000 BC to be a documentary," he explains. "Rather, we wanted to make a big adventure about the journey of mankind as they venture out and confront all these forces they can't explain. We loved the idea of pushing the boundaries of what was possible."
The film has all the elements of an action spectacle, depicting huge mammoth hunts, epic battles and spectacular vistas of giant pyramids and lost civilizations, with interweaving threads of myths and mysticism. However, as
Camilla Belle, who plays the role of Evolet, observes, "At the heart of the film is also a powerful human story. These two people, D'Leh and Evolet, are torn away from each other, and then have to find each other again, in the midst of this amazing journey. For them, and for the audience, it is really an escape into another world."
"There's something very beautiful about how the human condition hasn't really changed over the millennia," says actor
Steven Strait, who stars as young warrior D'Leh. "What makes us human beings hasn't changed since pre-historic times - love, compassion, conscience, sympathy. You see all of these things in this film."
Throughout his career, Emmerich has pushed the envelope on what was possible with visual effects, creating such memorable big-screen images as the White House explosion in
Independence Day and the giant wave in
The Day After Tomorrow. Ongoing technological advances allowed Emmerich to unleash his imagination for the epic experience he sought to create for
10,000 BC. Emmerich enlisted visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas to oversee the film's massive effects undertaking. "Karen is one of the most ingenious and visually inventive people I have ever worked with," states the director. "To her, nothing is impossible. I know I can count on her to bring even my most ambitious concepts to the screen - often more spectacularly than even I first envisioned them."
The most extensive work would involve the creation of the film's menagerie of mighty, ancient creatures - mammoths, the saber-tooth tigers and terror birds. Emmerich wanted lifelike movement for these creatures and so looked to their modern-day relatives. "We used a lot of reference footage of elephants, of tigers, of ostriches," he says. "The main issue was that no one knows exactly what a real mammoth moved like. They were a very distinct animal. You can only understand how an animal works from animal footage."
Goulekas joined the project two years before start of principal photography and began her work breaking down the script according to its effects needs, eventually translating each theme to concept art, maquettes (sculptures to be scanned into the computer) and models. Her focus was the three main set pieces of the film - the mammoth hunt, the terror birds sequence, and D'Leh's encounters with the saber-toothed tiger.
Goulekas built a library of illustrations, photos and CG images from television shows as references for all the creatures in the film. She also visited the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, which provided a rich source of research on mammoths, as well as the Tala Game Reserve in Durban, South Africa, where she shot HD footage of a variety of wild animals, including lions, tigers, leopards, elephants and ostriches. The images she gathered enabled the animators to study the animal movements from different angles.
One of Goulekas's most challenging projects was the film's terror birds - flightless predators with huge beaks - which are based on creatures that existed in South America. "They were gigantic," says Goulekas. "We know how fast an ostrich can run and how much damage it can do with its powerful feet, and combined that knowledge with the fact that there is a direct link between the terror birds and the dinosaurs. We based their look on a hybrid of different illustrations."
Perfecting the movements of all the creatures required multiple passes at their design in close collaboration with Emmerich. "It's a process of discovery," Goulekas says. "You change it and change it until you get it right. This film was creative and collaborative and forever evolving."
Emmerich collaborated with his behind-the-scenes creative teams to create a world for the film that would be primeval and harsh, and would also transport audiences to a time and place they had not experienced before. Though the film does not dictate a specific place, for Emmerich, it was always Africa. "It's the cradle of mankind," he notes. "But because of the story we wanted to tell, it became our own made-up Africa." The film would be shot predominantly on practical locations encompassing New Zealand and multiple sites on the continent of Africa, including Cape Town, South Africa, and the moonlight vistas of Namibia.
The production was originally scheduled to shoot just a few days in New Zealand, but during a helicopter location scout just six weeks before the start of production, Emmerich was captivated by this proverbial Eden. "We had spent the morning doing our helicopter work and I was going back to the hotel when I got an emergency text saying, 'Get back in the helicopters. Roland wants you to see something,'" recalls producer Wimer. "I was all ready with my speech to say, 'We can't change our location so close to the start date of the movie,' and then I got up in the helicopter, and just as I came over this certain rise, there in front of me, laid out was the perfect location as the script had been written, as it had been envisioned in all the storyboards. And it was just so perfect that we had to shoot there."
The icy white landscapes against the black rock formations of the untamed terrain provides a breathtaking contrast to deep greens of the South African tropical jungle that provided the backdrop to the middle section of the film and the burnt oranges and reds of the landscapes of Namibia, where the third act of the film was shot. These vistas made New Zealand impossible to resist, despite the fickle vagaries of the local weather, which forced the crew to negotiate fog, snowstorms and blizzards amidst the days of beautiful blue skies.
Wimer offers, "One of the things that we wanted to get across with the terrain is just how difficult our characters' lives would have been in those times... but also how grand and spiritual and beautiful it all is. That is one of the reasons we had to shoot there: it was just so unreal and so extraordinarily magnificent."
The pristine landscape was also protected, requiring the company to take great pains to leave as small a footprint as possible. "We used four-wheel drive access equipment, small buggies with light footprints, which we could drive across the turf without leaving tracks," comments New Zealand location manager Jared Connon. "And we used the helicopter a lot to first fly in the props and sets for the mammoth hunters' village and then fly them all out."
Waiorau Snow Farm, situated some 5000 feet above sea level on the South Island near the town of Wanaka (a site used for testing cars from around the world), provided five main locations for the film, including the mammoth hunters' village, Baku's Rock, the kill site and the grasslands. Approximately a third of the film was shot there. Other locations in New Zealand included Mount Aspring National Park and Poolburn Dam. For Emmerich, Snow Farm provided the perfect backdrop for the film as he saw it in his head.
"This is a landscape where you could go high up and turn the camera round and it would be like you were shooting the surface of the moon," he raves. "It has an ancient pre-historic feel to it. Our characters travel during the film and we needed big vistas to convey the new worlds they enter. There had to be as much variety as possible."
A mammoth tale, in every sense,
10,000 BC is available now from Blockbuster.