Spooky But True

In July 2002, during pre-production, a deadly hailstorm struck central China. The hailstones were the size of eggs and the storm killed 25 people and left numerous victims with near fatal head wounds. The storm uprooted trees, smashed car windshields, caused major power outages and destroyed some buildings in the northern parts of the Henan province. The following month, parts of Europe were ravaged by what became known there as the “Floods of the Century.” For almost three weeks, torrential rains battered the regions, flooding London’s subway system, decimating vineyards and olive groves in northern Italy and sweeping away tourists on Russia’s Black Sea coast. At least 108 people were killed and tens of thousands had to be evacuated. In November, just three days after principal photography began in Montreal, a major outbreak of severe weather and tornadoes occurred in the United States. A total of 75 tornadoes touched down in one day, killing 36 people and causing damage in thirteen states.

Additionally, the production suffered through four months of what would become one of Montreal’s coldest winters on record, with daytime temperatures topping out at minus 25 degrees C on numerous occasions. In an even more eerie example of life imitating art, the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica fell into the sea in March 2002, a few weeks after Emmerich and Nachmanoff had written a scene describing its collapse. Director Roland Emmerich recalls well what was said. "At that time we joked that we had better start shooting soon or we’d be making a documentary". In yet another coincidence, the Pentagon released a report in February 2004 evaluating the national security risks posed by the threat of global climate change. The report takes seriously the possibility of a sudden and cataclysmic change brought on by global warming.

At A Glance There's no doubt that most of us take it for granted that the world as it is today, as we see it and enjoy it, will be there for our children and their children's children, in perpetuity. In all honesty, the truth is, it won't. Since the industrial revolution and the age of expansion, followed by the wealth generation, mankind has been treating Planet Earth as it's garbage pit. Even worse. Mankind has been treating our planet like a toilet bowl in a batchelor's pad. It gets dirtier and dirtier all the time. You know something, I never ever imagined I'd write anything like that. And no, I'm not a card carrying member of Greenpeace, nor do I belong to any left wing or extremist group. Nor am I, as one dickhead described people who care about the environment, "A tree hugging yoghurt drinker." I am genuinely concerned what the future holds for each and everyone of us. NOt in the long term, because like "The Day After Tomorrow", I sincerely believe we, the human race, have put off, for far to long, the inevitable. We have to do something now and without delay. Time is running out for all of us. And I for one didn't need "The Day After Tomorrow" to tell me that. Hopefully, thanks to "The Day After Tomorrow", many will get the message and start thinking about what the heck is going on with our fragile planet. planet. The senario in "The Day After Tomorrow" shows who will be the biggest losers. Those losers are you, me, our kids and possibly their kids. So just how close to the real thing is the senario portrayed in "The Day After Tomorrow"?
"The movie departs most radically from real science in the speed at which things happen," says producer Mark Gordon. "When scientists talk about an ‘abrupt’ climate shift, they’re speaking in terms of five to ten years, not a few weeks. Our goal was never to fully explore a complex scientific issue in a two-hour movie." But there is still an element of truth, a warning that is real through the film, isn't there?
"At the core of any ‘disaster movie’ there always has to be something factual, something real for the audience to grab onto," says the films director Roland Emmerich. "What we already know about global warming and climate change has provided us with a great fact base for the movie and that directly affects the believability of the characters and the world that we have created for them." One person who noted a big climate change was actor Dennis Quaid who spent five months working on the film in Montreal's winter where temperatures reached -25 degress Clecius during the day.That's right, during the day! Quaid, who plays climatologist Jack Hall, the man who discovers the coming Ice Age describes what it was like. "It was cold everywhere," he explained. "It was cold inside the stages, it was cold outside the stages, it was cold during the day and cold as hell at night. There we were in Montreal from November to April during one of their coldest winters on record making this huge disaster movie about the next killer Ice Age. We couldn’t escape from it. It actually got to a point where we learned to recognize people not by their faces but by the color of their parkas." "During production, if we weren’t trudging through the middle of a blizzard," says Quaid, "then we were probably freezing wet because of the torrential rains or hailstorms or floods or hurricanes that were happening on the other stages. Anyone who isn’t a fan of the Weather Channel now certainly will be after they see this movie because it has it all. It’s every disaster flick you’ve ever seen all rolled into one giant non-stop global meteorological cataclysm." He also says it was a more than a challenge for all those working on "The Day After Tomorrow",especially when he talks about those wind machines. "Challenging is an understatement," Quaid says laughing. "It was more about survival. We were all trying to survive filming a movie about surviving. I’ve done special effects movies but never one this big. There were definitely different challenges the actors had to overcome. We were dressed in four or five layers of polar clothing and boots and then they start blowing fake snow at us with these huge wind machines that blow at like eighty miles an hour. The stuff gets inside your mouth and up your nose and inside your goggles and you’re just trying to keep your eyes open."
Quaid's co-star Jake Gyllenhaal agrees. "It’s the first time I’ve done a film like this so I knew I was in for some surprises," he said. "I figured if I was going to do a picture like this, Roland Emmerich was the guy to go to. He’s a genius with these things and he really understands the nature of this particular kind of beast." Actress Emmy Rossum who plays Laura, the love interest in the film said it was a wet experience filming parts of "The Day After Tomorrow". 'It was like doing water aerobics all day long for two weeks wearing wet wool clothing. Imagine running back and forth on the street and up and down the library stairs that are covered in four feet of water. It really was an indescribable experience. And it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life." Hard to image it being cool when she further explained that while working in the specially constructed tank inside Montreal’s massive Alstom train repair and maintenance facility, she was, "simultaneously hot and cold, sticky and shivering, windy and rainy, underwater torture." Those specially constructed sets sure come across as totally lifelike in "The Day After Tomorrow. In fact the special effects seen throughout "The Day After Tomorrow" are the real stars of the film. The huge task of creating and building these fell to three men, each of whom had worked previously with director Emmerich. And what a job production designer Barry Chusid, visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas, Academy Award®-winning special effects supervisor Neil Corbould their crews and technicians have done. So how big was the task? "In this movie," says Chusid, 'we have hailstorms in Tokyo, hurricanes in Hawaii, tornadoes in Los Angeles, floods in Manhattan, and an East Coast deep freeze. We see Scotland, Mexico, New Delhi, even outer space. Therefore, we run the gamut of sets from small interior helicopter cockpits to a snowy street scene in New Delhi to a 15,000 square foot Manhattan Public Library." Remember, all this was done in Montreal. In fact, the first five weeks of shooting was hectic. The schedule included shooting the Delhi market scene, "was replete with artifacts, rickshaws and automobiles that were shipped from India specifically for the scene." And costume designer Renee April had to outfit 1000 extra's just for that shoot! Ands the streets of Manhattan? They were constructed inside that massive water tank. Then there are those stunning CGI effects. These come thanks to the creativity of Karen Goulekas, her team, and the Los Angeles-based visual effects company Digital Domain. So how did they do it?
Goulas explains. "We used a photorealistic scenery rendering software program called Terragen™, which was actually developed by Digital Domain to help us create all the landscapes of Antarctica. We also used Lidar, which is an amazing laser scanning technology which allowed us to scan huge buildings in Los Angeles and about thirteen blocks of New York in high detail. We did not build any miniatures for New York. Thanks to Lidar and a New York database from a company called Urban Data Solutions, we basically created the entire city in the computer." It's true to say that realism is the hallmark of "The Day After Tomorrow". And while there is much more to the story behind the making of the film, revealing too much will take some of the magic away from the experience of seeing the finished product. Neil Corbould assures those who see the film that "We tried, no matter what it took, to make everything, from the hailstones to the flood to the airplane turbulence, look as real as possible." But in the end, it's all down to audience appeal. And why do the filmakers believe "The Day After Tomorrow" will have huge appeal? The answer to that question is, according to Mark Gordon, "Audiences love visual storytelling. They love spectacle, action and adventure and they love watching larger-than-life characters going through larger-than-life situations. For two hours, they become the hero or the victim, the savior or the saved. They become a part of something that they probably won’t experience in their own lives. They not only like to find themselves in the disaster but they like to lose themselves in it, too." Cast & Crew Bytes "The Day After Tomorrow" was directed by Roland Emmerich ["Universal Soldier", "The Patriot", "Godzilla" and "Independence Day" and "Stargate"], produced by Roland Emmerich AND, Mark Gordan ["Hostage", "Laws Of Attraction", "Saving Private Ryan", "Tomb Raider" and "Man on the Moon"] and from the screenplay by Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff ["The Big Gig" and "Hollywood Palms"], Cinematography by Anna Foerster ["Bird Of Passage"] and Ueli Steiger A.S.C ["Godzilla", "Bowfinger", "Black Knight" and "Some Girls"], edited by David Brenner A.C.E ["Wall Street", "The Patriot" and "Independence Day", "Unfaithful" and "Identity"] original soundtrack music by Harald Kloser ["Marlene", “The Thirteenth Floor", "The Venice Project" and "After the Truth"], production design by Barry Chusid ["The Thirteenth Floor", "Mystery Men", "Blade" and "Daredevil"], visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas ["The Fifth Element", "Eight Legged Freaks", "Titanic", "Godzilla" and "Spider-Man"] with costume design by Renée April ["Agnes of God", "Children of a Lesser God', "Map of the Human Heart" and "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"]
"The Day After Tomorrow" stars Dennis Quaid ["The Alamo", "Far From Heaven", "The Rookie" and "Traffic"], Jake Gyllenhaal ["Proof", "Donnie Darko", "Moonlight Mile" and "The Good Girl"] Emmy Rossum ["Songcatcher" and "Phantom of the Opera"], Dash Mihok ["Foxfire", "Sleepers", "The Perfect Storm", "The Guru" and "Basic"], Jay O Sanders ["Starting Over", "Glory", "My Boyfriend's Back" and "Along Came a Spider"], Emmy Award winner Sela Ward ["The Fugitive", and "Dirty Dancing 2"], Austin Nichols ["Durango Kids", "BraceFace Brandi" and "The Utopian Society"], Arjay Smith ["Malcolm in the Middle"] with Ian Holm ["The Homecoming", "From Hell", "Alien" and "The Fifth Element"] as Terry Rapson and Kenneth Welsh ["Covergirl", "Radio Days", "The Freshman" and "Habitat"] as Vice President Becker. The Story While taking core samples from the polar ice-cap, climatologist Jack Hall witnesses a terrifying and unusual event. The ice cap around Hall and his two assistants shatters into an iceberg the size of which the world has never seen. Curious as to what caused this dramatic event to happened, Hall checks his core samples. It seems that, as recent as 10,000 years ago global warming caused a great ice age. And by Hall's calculations, it appears that the planet is due for another one. At a major conference he gives his facts, but while there is concern over the state of the environment, there is also scepticism about his warning that it could happen sooner or later. What Hall doesn't know is that it's all come too late. Mother Nature is about to infict her awesome powers upon the planet. Giant hailstones, huge wind storms, snow falls in New Delhi, tornados descimate LA and a snap freeze hits Britian. But there is worse to come. Far worse than Jack Hall ever envisaged. Far worse than the scientists ever predicted. Three giant storms are combining over the whole northern hemisphere. As sea temperatures plunge the storms combine, becoming even more powerful. Mankind is about to reap what it has sown. Mother Nature is about to fight back! The Verdict "A long-winded, over the top, production, the only high of which is the real stars, the special effects. Jake Gyllenhaal plays that dumb, dark, smouldering look [that is his trademark] to boring perfection. "The Day After Tomorrow" is a cliché riddled, stereotypical disaster film of epic proportions. You'll need matchsticks under your eyelids for this one. The real danger is not the freakin global warming but rather the fear that you could fall asleep in the theatre. Two thumbs down!! And don't forget, leave your brain at the cloak room on the way into the theatre. This really is a no-brainer disaster. See it for the stunning special effects. They are brilliant." The Cast

Dennis Quaid Jake Gyllenhaal Emmy Rossum Dash Mihok Jay O Sanders Sela Ward Austin Nichols Arjay Smith Tamlyn Tomita Sasha Roiz Ian Holm Nassim Sharara Carl Alacchi Kenneth Welsh Michael A. Samah Robin Wilcock Jason Blicker Kenneth Moskow Tim Hamaguchi Glenn Plummer Adrian Lester Richard McMillan Nestor Serrano Sylvain Landry Chris Britton

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Jack Hall Sam Hall Laura Chapman Jason Evans Frank Harris Dr Lucy Hall J D Brian Parks Janet Tokada Parker Terry Rapson Saudi Delegate Venezuelan Delegate Vice President Becker Saudi Translator Tony Paul Bob Taka Luther Simon Dennis Gomez Science Officer Vorsteen

The Crew Directed by Roland Emmerich From a story by Roland Emmerich Screenplay by Roland Emmerich & Jeffrey Nachmanoff Produced by Roland Emmerich & Mark Gordon Original Music by Harald Kloser Cinematography by Anna Foerster & Ueli Steiger Film Editing by David Brenner Casting by Andrea Kenyon & April Webster Production Design by Barry Chusid Set Decoration by Victor J Zolfo Costume Design by Renée April Rated M15+ [AUST] Run Time 123 minutes Copyright ©2004 - Twentieth Century Fox - All Rights Reserved Copyright Protected © 2004 - Impact Internet Services - All Rights Reserved