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In Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, murder has been eliminated. The future is seen and
the guilty punished before the crime has ever been committed. From a nexus deep within
the Justice Department’s elite Pre-Crime unit, all the evidence to convict – from imagery
alluding to the time, place and other details – is seen by “Pre-Cogs,” three psychic
beings whose visions of murder have never been wrong.
It is the nation’s most advanced crime force, a perfect system. And no one works harder
for Pre-Crime than its top man, Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise). Destroyed by a tragic
loss, Anderton has thrown all of his passion into a system that could potentially spare
thousands of people from the tragedy he lived through. Six years later, the coming vote
to take it national has only fueled his conviction that Pre-Crime works.
Anderton has no reason to doubt it ... until he becomes its #1 suspect.
As the head of the unit, Anderton is the first to see the images as they flow from the
liquid suspension chamber where the Pre-Cogs dream of murder. The scene is unfamiliar,
the faces unknown to him, but this time, the killer’s identity is clear – John Anderton
will murder a total stranger in less than 36 hours.
Now, with his own unit tracking his every move, led by his rival, Danny Witwer (Colin
Farrell), Anderton must go below the radar of the state-of-the-art automated city, where
every step you take is monitored, every car you drive can be controlled by someone else,
and your own eyes tell the world who you are, what you want and where you’re going.
Because you can’t hide, everybody runs.
With no way to defend himself against the charge of Pre-Crime, John must trace the roots
of what brought him here, and uncover the truth behind the question he has spent the past
six years working to eliminate: Is it possible for the Pre-Cogs to be wrong?
From Steven Spielberg comes a futuristic thriller Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as
a detective who must race to uncover the truth before he becomes a victim to the system he
helped create. Written by Scott Frank (Out of Sight) and Jon Cohen, based on the short
story “The Minority Report” by legendary author Philip K. Dick, the film is produced by
Gerald R. Molen, Bonnie Curtis, Walter F. Parkes and Jan De Bont. Gary Goldman and Ronald
Shusett are the executive producers. Buzz has been stirring for months already. Get in
on it at the newsgroup rec.arts.movies.current-films .
With Minority Report, Spielberg and his team investigate the nature of crime, technology
and destiny with both a sense of adventure and the inscrutable mystery reminiscent of
classic noir films of the 1940s. “I want to tackle subjects I haven’t really tackled
before,” the director explains. “I’m in a period in my life of experimentation and
trying things that challenge me. Minority Report is really a mystery. It’s a who-done-it
or who-will-do-it, and you’re along for the ride. It’s also a very human story, about a
man who has lived through a tragedy and is working through it.”
Spielberg decided early on that he wanted the visual world of Minority Report to reflect
essentially that which is around us every day – specifically Washington, D.C., where the
story unfolds -- with pieces of the future peaking out. To aid in envisioning this
future, Spielberg brought together the men and women helping to shape it. “I thought it
would be a good idea to bring some of the best minds in technology, environment, crime
fighting, medicine, health, social services, transportation, computer technology and other
fields into one room to discuss what the future a half a century hence would be like,”
Spielberg notes.
From M.I.T. scientists such as John Underkoffler to urban planners, architects, inventors,
writers (such as Generation X author Douglas Coupland), the Think Tank came together at a
hotel in Santa Monica, California, to hash out the social and technological details of our
very near future during a three-day conference. Sitting in were the filmmakers, along
with screenwriter Scott Frank, and production designer Alex McDowell and his team. “We
sat around in a room and talked through the aspects of how society would be affected over
a five-, ten-, twenty-, thirty-year period,” McDowell recalls, “what would change, what
the trends were, and where they would logically end up. We knew that we would have to
learn the answers to those issues we would have to go into a consumer environment.”
The conversations encompassed everything from advances in medicine, to how people would
brush their teeth, to transportation, urban planning, architecture and art. “Steven
wanted backgrounds that we were familiar with, that we could relate to, and within the
context of the familiar have spectacular props,” notes producer Bonnie Curtis.
The gradual loss of privacy was a near unanimous prediction. “The reason is not so people
can spy on you,” explains Frank, “but so they can sell to you. In the not too distant
future, it is plausible that by scanning your eyes, your whereabouts will be tracked.
They will keep track of what you buy, so they can keep on selling to you.”
“George Orwell’s prophecy really comes true, not in the twentieth century but in the
twenty-first,” the director explains. “Big Brother is watching us now and what little
privacy we have will completely evaporate in twenty or thirty years, because technology
will be able to see through walls, through rooftops, into the very privacy of our personal
lives, into the sanctuary of our families.”
Spielberg’s vision for Minority Report was devoid of the natural disasters and wars that
shaped many other futuristic films. Notes McDowell, “The technology is benign and getting
more and more efficient and serving the world better.” Offices would be entirely portable
and personal technology like computers and phones would become built-in human accessories.
Generation X author Douglas Coupland dreamed up a number of products for the Washington
D.C. of 2054, such as a sick-stick, a weapon that causes involuntarily vomiting, spray
meat, and boosted cats, which have been engineered to grow to the same size as dogs.
Though the corporations would drive development, such technologies would naturally prove
valuable to law enforcement – to find and track suspects and, by extension, catch them.
“Philip K. Dick was always interested in the consequences of technology and science,”
comments M.I.T. science advisor John Underkoffler, who for 17 years has worked at the
institute’s world-renowned Media Lab. “But Phil Dick took it past where most other people
stopped, because he was one of the few people who understood that good science fiction is
actually social science fiction. Technology is a reflection or an echo of what’s
happening socially. Dick was interested in what the anthropological effect would be. I’m
not sure if he ever passed a real judgment, but he was always asking. And that’s what
makes him so great.”
Spielberg had similar aims in devising Minority Report. “Steven wants the audience to be
split down the middle in their perception of this world,” says McDowell, “whether it’s a
good world or a bad world, and not be black or white about it. He didn’t want the
audience to think everything about this future world was evil or dystopic, but an
extension of a world that we absolutely recognize.”
“We want the audience to take the technology we show them for granted by having so much of
it in the movie,” says Spielberg, “so they can sit back and focus on the mystery.”
Fossil fuels have given way to the development of Magnetic-Levitation traffic system and
while the potential to prevent murder is an optimistic one, it comes with a price. “To
Steven’s credit, the world we have in the film is edgier and more realistically gray than
the kind of utopian world imagined by futurists,” says Underkoffler. “And that’s always a
more exciting place and a more interesting place for a story to unfold.”
The complex drama and action Spielberg conceived for the film demanded a number of
large-scale believable sets and intimate synergy between all departments – from lighting
to design to visual effects to the massive special effects and stunt sequences. Using
both practical locations and soundstages at three major studios, Alex McDowell’s art
department created preliminary sketches and storyboards that, once approved, gave way to
Ron Frankel’s animatics from Pixel Liberation Front, a company which helped Spielberg and
McDowell create 3D, moving storyboards to pre-visualize virtually every scene in the film,
saving the production potentially millions of dollars in tests.
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who has worked on every Spielberg film since 1993’s
multiple-Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, points out that the large scale sets and visual
effects required all departments to work closely together. “More than any other
production I’ve been involved with, I would say this is the movie where all the
departments collaborated the most,” he says. “We incorporated our own ideas to the sets
in terms of lighting and how the camera is going to move. There are sequences where the
camera moves through an entire house and that has to be designed to fulfill that kind of
demand. So, to maintain coherence of the images and continuity of the lighting and visual
style, we had to become involved in building the sets and working with wardrobe months in
advance.”
Spielberg saw Minority Report as a noir film from the beginning. “I said to Janusz I
wanted to make the ugliest, dirtiest movie I have ever made,” Spielberg remembers. “I
want this movie to be dark and grainy, and to be really cold. This isn’t a warm adventure
the way A.I. was. This is, rather, the rough and tumble, gritty world of film noir.”
Consequently, Kaminski and Spielberg worked to create a visual world that would mirror
Anderton’s dark, emotional and psychological journey. “We wanted to create a world that
feels realistic, kind of seedy, and full of shadows,” Kaminski describes. “We wanted it
to be a dangerous world.”
To achieve this affect, Kaminski designed the lighting to allow for such elements as
darker shadows and grainy skies, and used a bleach by-pass process in developing the film
to desaturate the colors and create a grittier world. “Normally, when you develop the
print, the film goes through a process in which the emulsion gets bleached out,” Kaminski
explains. In skipping this process, “the highlights become much more severe in terms of
not seeing any details. The blue skies get eliminated; the shadows become really dark; and
the grain structure gets altered, making it grittier. The movie takes place in the
future, but we wanted to create a world that feels realistic but also dangerous. Lighting
the movie with heavy contrast and not allowing the viewers to see any details in the
shadows, automatically creates a sense of danger.”
The main set pieces broke down into several sections – Anderton’s apartment, where we are
first introduced to a device called the Mag-Lev, a network of magnetic “roads” for
advanced magnetic cars running both horizontally and vertically throughout the city;
Pre-Crime headquarters and the area called the Temple, where the Pre-Cogs are kept; and
the Hall of Containment, the state-of-the-art suspension chamber where murderers are
stacked end to end in pneumatic tubes. For both the Mag-Lev track and the cars, a
synthesis between practical effects, real cars and functional models, and visual effects
elements was essential.
Additional set pieces involve a car factory and tenement where elaborate stunt sequences
would play out, Mall City, the Cyber Parlor, and finally, the private garden of Iris
Hineman, which contains some very unusual flora.
Production designer Alex McDowell, whose previous work includes Fight Club and Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas, began his research as early as 1998. After participating in the
Think Tank, he set to work creating and designing the plausible future reality in which
Minority Report would unfold. “Steven was very clear about what worked and what didn't
work for him,” says McDowell. “It tended always to veer away from a traditional,
classical sci-fi vision. Anything that tended too much to the fantastic he steered us
away from. It's an interesting challenge to try and really make a world that's as
believable and real as possible.”
Scott Frank found McDowell and his team a constant source of inspiration throughout the
development of the script and the various tweaks necessitated during production. “They
had a whole Bible of the technology for me to work from,” he describes, “what the
computers were going to look like, what the visuals were going to look like. So, I really
wrote from that. More than anything else, they inspired me and came up with a lot of
stuff that I then used to help tell the story. They really started thinking, if we were
going to make this real, how would it work? How could we do this?”
Spielberg conceived a visual vocabulary that would communicate a believable future some
fifty years from now, focusing on Washington, D.C. “We will still have the Washington
Monument, the Rotunda of the Senate and the Capitol Building,” Spielberg comments. “There
will still be a White House. There are great swatches of the District of Columbia that
are not going to change in the next hundreds of year. But around that city are going to
be the vestiges of the future architecture and technology, so I thought it was really nice
to always return to a city that has the icon of the Washington Monument, or the Lincoln or
Jefferson Memorials. It’s a touchstone to reality, and I think every time you see
Washington D.C. it reminds you that this is happening in our world, in a real world just a
little bit ahead of our time.”
“The film has been a great experience because of the range of sets and environments we’ve
needed to create to satisfy the story,” continues McDowell. “Our future architecture is
very diverse. At one extreme we’ve got the very traditional federal office building of
Max von Sydow’s character and on the other, we’ve got Pre-Crime headquarters that, in the
tradition of Frank Gehry, has been liberated from the square.”
Working with Spielberg, McDowell extrapolated that Washington, D.C. has evolved into three
layers – the D.C. of monuments that does not change; an upscale, “bedroom community”
across the Potomac where Anderton lives that has developed vertically; and the old part of
the city that has not kept up with the technological advances afforded to the rich.
“There’s a dark, decaying city which is where our tenement hotel, the alley chase and a
significant part of the movie takes place,” he says.
The transportation in D.C. has been supplemented with a Mag-Lev (Magnetic Levitation)
system based on magnetics. “Mag-lev, three dimensional system was based on a combination
of taxi cabs and elevators, in the way that they are beginning to be released from their
trappings and made free. It can take you wherever you want to go on command.” Adds
Bonnie Curtis, “The Mag-Lev can go horizontally, vertically; it can spin; it can turn; and
you sit in the middle and never spill your coffee.”
“The most futuristic thing about the movie, and maybe the most science fiction-y thing, is
the look of the Mag-Lev systems,” Spielberg comments.
Spielberg and McDowell turned to Lexus and car designer Harald Belker, a visionary of
multiple futures who worked on vehicles for Batman and Robin, Armageddon and numerous
other films, to create the vehicles for Minority Report.
Pre-Crime headquarters was conceived as a building installed within the last ten years,
and designed to be a statement about Pre-Crime. “Steven liked the idea that Pre-Crime is
a transparent organization,” says McDowell. “It had nothing to hide. There was no hidden
secret, and at the same time it's hiding the biggest secret of all, suspended above, in
the egg. We conceived of the egg as this pebble dropping into a pond, and very early on
came up with a spiral design that incorporated this expanding ripple that, at the same
time, in the three-dimensional design expanded into a series of spirals.”
Very different from the egg containing the three Pre-Cogs is the monument dedicated to
them outside the building. “The Pre-Cogs are unknown to the public completely,” says
McDowell. “They've become these very idealized, almost godlike figures, because they're
saving people from murder on a daily basis. Pre-Crime has encouraged this attitude. So,
we wanted to come up with a Washington Federal-type sculpture that reflected the idea of
the power of the three Pre-Cogs and at the same time had a kind of religious overtone. We
had our own sculptors developing this and I think they have achieved something that's very
close to a piece of art in the real world.”
Following McDowell’s lead, costume designer Deborah L. Scott designed the costumes
according to imagined segments of a futuristic Washington, D.C. “There are three segments
of society,” she explains. “There are the inner city people who can’t afford any
luxuries. Then, there is a middle class, consumer-oriented strata made up of people who
hang out at Mall City. And, finally, the traditionalists whose old money buys old
things.”
For Pre-Crime officers, Scott referenced astronauts and Air Force pilots to “make the cops
look like heroes,” she explains. For the Hall of Containment, where the murderers are
incarcerated, she fitted the prisoners with costumes loosely based on NASA cooling suits
with tubes and wires for life-support type.
One of Spielberg’s most imaginative set pieces was to take place in a tenement hotel.
Spielberg consulted with cinematographer Kaminski, McDowell and visual effects supervisor
Scott Farrar on how to accomplish one long take that follows robotic spiders from room to
room until they locate who they’ve been programmed to identify as Anderton.
“Very early on, I showed Steven a foam core model of the tenement hotel” says McDowell.
“Like most models, it didn’t have a roof on it, and within a few minutes, he said
‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this in one overhead shot?’ So the crane now follows
the action, follows the spiders and reveals piece by piece the action leading up to the
spiders discovering Anderton. It was a tremendous challenge for the art department and
the grip department but we were aided tremendously by Pixel Liberation Front’s animatics.
Essentially, they converted the design into a 3D computer storyboard, so we were able to
perfect the crane move before anything was ever shot.”
PLF created animatics not only for how the shot would appear on film, but also how the
cranes, cameras, lighting and actors would move to accomplish the scene. “I wanted to do
it all in one shot, looking straight down overhead, and I didn’t know if that shot was
possible,” Spielberg comments. “So, I designed the shot with the computer guys on their
software. They even showed me how to get the shot by actually putting the crane into the
set, so on screen you have a pre-visualization of what the shot was going to look like.”
The visual effects challenges of Minority Report were not in the number of effects shots,
but in the detailed elements and compositing of those elements that would need to be
perfect to create a seamless representation of Spielberg’s vision. The 481 visual effects
shots in the film were divided up, with the majority of the work going to San Rafael,
CA-based Industrial Light & Magic, which has played a vital role in numerous Spielberg
films.
For Minority Report, the ILM team, led by Scott Farrar (Oscar nominee for A.I. Artificial
Intelligence) created vast interior environments using digital set extensions and their
groundbreaking proprietary software to create 3D modeled people. Further, ILM was intent
on matching Janusz Kaminski’s grainy and textured visual style. Farrar decided to shoot
blue screen work on a very fine grain negative and degrade it to match the rest of the
film. With the majority of the scenes taking place in broad daylight, the visual effects
team had no place to hide.
One of the more complicated compositing sequences involved the master shots of the Mag-Lev
traffic system within within 21st century Washington, D.C. “This is a broad cityscape
full of buildings, with rising steam and hundreds of cars, a tremendous number of
elements,” says compositing supervisor Scott Frankel. Add to that racing cars and their
drivers, shadows and reflections, and the only physical element of the shot -- Tom Cruise
who, when Anderton’s car is recalled to Pre-Crime headquarters, must jump out of his own
Mag-Lev vehicle and try to escape by leaping from car to car. “The blue screen element of
Tom we shot against a blue screen,” says Frankel. “The rest is completely synthetic.”
Farrar shot aerial background plates of the Washington skyline, which then had to be
augmented with touches of the city’s newer development. “The idea of Minority Report was
to somehow combine old and new,” says Farrar. “The challenge was that no matter what we
did, putting new buildings into pre-existing backgrounds, if you made it too fancy, too
modern, too excessive, it stood out like a sore thumb. So, through Alex McDowell, and
then our art director Alex Laurant, designing our futuristic buildings had to be pulled
way back. We were trying to make it as gritty and real as possible. So, we’ve spent a
lot of time trying to put the grit and texture of real city backgrounds into all the stuff
that we’re putting into the foreground.”
The Hall of Containment sequences take place in a massive, 21st century “jail” in which
the prisoners of Pre-Crime are kept in a coma-like state of suspended animation in which
their crimes are played out on a continuous loop before their eyes. Spielberg and
McDowell decided to use a nineteenth century prison model called a Pentopticon, which has
a central tower surrounded by containment pods, that would have been converted into the
Hall of Containment. “Layered on top of that old, hundred year old prison are these
shiny, perfect tubes that are keeping these guys really in cold storage,” McDowell
describes. “The image that Steven came up originally with was that it would be almost
like Arlington Cemetery, and when Anderton walked in it would appear to be a space full of
grave stones. And then Gideon reveals that in fact the gravestone was just a cap of a
tube full of people. So there's this great moment when this field of gravestones suddenly
rises up out of the ground and you realize that there's, you know, thousands of people
stored in this enormous space, stacked one on top of each other.”
For ILM, the challenge was to take the actors and a minimal set and create not only the
extended digital Hall, but each individual prisoner within each individual sled. “In the
Hall of Containment, we have hundreds of people that have to be 3D because we’re going to
see them from all different angles,” says Farrar.
To manually paint photo-realistic digital humans on that scale was not time or cost
effective, so the production took a chance on software being developed by one of ILM’s
engineers, Steve Sullivan, called 3D photo modeling.
Using 19 extras, the effects team set up 12 cameras photographing them from all different
angles against a green screen. “Each camera has an outline and you can extract the person
from the background create an outline,” says visual effects producer Dana Friedman. “The
computer can then piece those outlines together and create a 3D model based on those
pieces. Then, you use the textures of the photos and map that back onto the 3D model and
voila. You have a 3D model that you can put anywhere.”
Each image had to then be variegated and inserted into each digitally-created containment
sled, and composited together with the live action footage and other elements for the
scene.
In addition to various wire removal, and adding flames and heat ripples from the jet
packs, ILM worked with Michael Lantieri to create supporting footage for a giant hover
craft used by the Pre-Crime team to arrive quickly at crime scenes. Though there was an
actual physical hover craft built to scale, ILM made it fly, creating the floor and
missing parts of the craft digitally. The team also created the fantasy images in the
Cyber Parlor, where consumers live out their wildest dream, which provides Anderton with
some key clues as he unravels the mystery. Other dazzling surprises include two digital
face effects, and a peculiarly aggressive garden maintained by researcher Iris Hineman.
Minority Report appears to be a movie packed with adventure and amazing special effects.
Oh, and the story actually sounds decent. :) Check it out on June 21, 2002!
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"Minority Report"
