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Into The Blue
Local director Alister Grierson is set to bring the 3-D spectacle of Avatar down under with the James Cameron backed, Sanctum.
James Cameron's Avatar may be imprinting on box office history and entertaining the hordes of movie-goers with its 3-D spectacle, but the director's got another project dogging the footsteps of his cinematic masterpiece. And it's right on our shores.
The production of Sanctum, an underwater adventure, executive produced by Cameron and his long time associate, Aussie Andrew Wight, is underway in Queensland. Incorporating the Cameron-Pace 3-D camera technology that brought Avatar to life, and boasting a $30 million budget, Sanctum promises to mark Australia on the 3-D filmmaking map. And at the helm of the action is Alister Grierson, directing his first feature film since the acclaimed 2006 flick Kokoda, which he made soon after graduating from the Australian, Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS).
"I was working for a company called GSM, which is the company that produced Kokoda," Grierson says about the way the project fell into his lap. "Somewhere along the track the producer of Sanctum [Andrew Wight] was introduced to Tony Hughes, a producer at GSM. He was looking for an Australian director and I was very well placed to be at the top of that list. Andrew looked at a lot of people and eventually saw Kokoda, liked it, and sent it to James Cameron."
The rest you could say is history. But that would undermine the adventure Grierson undertook to meet with Cameron. It involved a flight to New Zealand, a bunch of technical gear and getting to watch the mastermind at work on Avatar.
"At the time Jim was filming Avatar in Wellington in New Zealand. So they flew me across there while he was shooting and we met and I spent a week on location at the studio there looking around at the gear," Grierson explains. "It was really the opportunity to see the cameras and work flow in action. Avatar's shot with all this equipment Jim has built from scratch essentially, working with others, including Vince Pace and Andrew Wight. It took me three days to get my head around how it all worked."
Sanctum was written by Andrew Wight, and is inspired by his near death experience after an underwater cave entrance collapsed during one of his diving expeditions. The potentials of shooting an underwater movie completely in 3-D is something that excites avid fans of deep sea adventures Wight and Cameron, and has found a new fan in Grierson.
"No one had ever done a film like this before," says Grierson. "It's an action/adventure kind of thriller, but very realistic - realism is one of our core themes - that's set in a natural environment. It's a very dangerous, natural environment, and it lends itself very well to 3-D. It's in a cave, a kind of passageway, a frame within a frame. If you can visualise looking down a tunnel, that's the experience of 3-D."
But that's not the only exciting part of 3-D technology, as any Avatar appreciator will tell you. It's the visual splendour that allows the audience to immerse themselves in the action onscreen. "What we're trying to achieve is a better experience for the audience," Grierson acknowledges.
"The unfortunate thing with 3-D is the people who grab hold of it want gags," he says, "They want things leaping out of the screen into your lap. It's distracting and it reminds you that you're sitting in a cinema. Our philosophy is very different. We never want to draw you into the 3-D. We're not making a film about 3-D. The 3-D is just a delivery system to the audience, to make the audience more absorbed in the story."
As for Cameron's absorption in the project beyond producer, Grierson notes that he will be an "arm's length mentor". "He's been very supportive and it's very exciting when a filmmaker like that gives you respect," he says. "I'm a huge fan, of course. He's one of the great living filmmakers."
At this stage, Sanctum is looking to be released in late 2010.
Picture Caption: Filmmaker Alister Grierson on the set of Kokoda.