| 'The Day After Tomorrow' - II
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 Climate change. Melting polar
ice caps. Ice Age. The “super freeze”. According to Dennis Quaid, these
words describe the weather inside and outside the Montreal sound stages where
the production was based for five months during the winter of 2002-03.
"It was cold everywhere,”
says Quaid who portrays climatologist Jack Hall. “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 recognise 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.”
 “Challenging is an
understatement,” says Quaid, 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 80 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.
"I have to admit, as an
actor, it was a bit odd shooting this movie,” says Jake Gyllenhaal, “but odd
in a good way. As an actor, you realise that in this kind of a movie, you play a
small ‘part’ within a massively huge ‘whole.’ One of the more
interesting things for me is that I spent six months filming something and I
really have no idea what three-quarters of it is going to be because so much of
the film is created without me and the other actors or will be created during
post-production. It's almost like being a member of the audience in the sense
that I never really knew what was coming next. It’s going to be fun sitting
down in a dark theatre and watching it all unfold.”
“It’s the first time I’ve
done a film like this so I knew I was in for some surprises,” says Gyllenhaal.
“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."
Gyllenhaal, along with Emmy
Rossum, Arjay Smith and Austin Nichols, endured a gruelling New York City flood
sequence that was shot in a giant water tank constructed inside Montreal’s
massive Alstom train repair and maintenance facility. For two weeks, the actors
and hundreds of extras withstood torrential winds and rain while running up and
down a Manhattan “street” that was submerged in almost four feet of water.
 “It was like doing water
aerobics all day long for two weeks wearing wet wool clothing,” says Rossum,
who portrays the brainy and beautiful student Laura. “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 – simultaneously hot
and cold, sticky and shivering, windy and rainy underwater torture. And it was
one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life.”
One cast member who eluded
shooting any of the massive weather sequences was Sela Ward, who, as Dr Lucy
Hall, Jack’s wife and Sam’s mother, stays inside the hospital saving
patients throughout the course of the storm.
“Besides loving the role of
Lucy,” says Ward, “I thought there were some wonderful messages behind all
these great big effects. I think the film speaks to the survival of the family
unit and how important it is to struggle to keep that together.
“Then, of course, there is
the environmental message or warning,” says Ward. “Although the film is
dramatised and in some places exaggerated for dramatic purposes, there is a real
solid basis for what it is saying: if we don’t take care of our planet now,
she won’t be around very long to take care of us anymore. It’s a sobering
thought and I think it’s one the audience is going to think about when they
come out of the theatre and say, ‘Whew…hey I’m glad that was just a
movie'.”
“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.
 “Having worked with Roland
before certainly helped in terms of knowing his likes and dislikes, but on 'The
Day After Tomorrow' there were so many intricacies just due to the scale of the
sets and effects, that it became, at times, overwhelming to see just how far you
could stretch yourself and your department.”
Chusid and his staff took a
mostly unremarkable looking block just north of downtown Montreal and turned it
into a bustling, colorful, and even odoriferous, New Delhi marketplace. The site
was replete with artifacts, rickshaws and automobiles that were shipped from
India specifically for the scene. Costume designer Renee April dressed over
1,000 extras in native Indian garb and Neil Corbould’s special (physical)
effects crew took care of providing the light, fluffy snow for the day.
Two of Chusid’s other huge
undertakings were the interior and exterior of the Manhattan Public Library
(that totaled 50,000 sq ft) and a frozen Russian freighter which makes its way
up Fifth Avenue.
For the exterior of the
library, Chusid designed a Manhattan streetscape that led up to the massive
stone steps to the library. The streetscape and the 100’ x 60’ library
facade set piece were built inside the huge water tank used for an epic flood
sequence. The library interior was composed of several other mammoth set pieces
housed in several different stage facilities around Montreal. The production
built the interior sections on various stages to give the film-makers the
flexibility to “dress” the set pieces according to the amount of weather
needed for each individual scene in the library.
Chusid designed the Russian
freighter, then visual effects supervisor Karen Goulekas reviewed the scene’s
computer-generated effects requirements. Chusid then was able to determine his
department would have to build a section of the freighter, with the rest being
filled in with computer generated imagery. “I was ecstatic we got to build
some of the freighter,” says Chusid, “instead of it being all CGI because I
think it turned out to be a really fantastic set piece.”
“We used a photo-realistic
scenery rendering software program called Terragen™, which was actually
developed by Digital Domain,” says Goulekas, “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 13
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.”
 Special effects supervisor Neil
Corbould says that Roland Emmerich’s desire for realism was constant
throughout any sequence in the film, whether it was a blizzard, hailstorm, flood
or freeze. “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
for him,” says Corbould.
For the hailstones (that ranged
in size from grapefruit to bowling ball) that batter Tokyo, Corbould and his
crew bought hundreds of blocks of ice and carved each hailstone according to the
sizes needed for the scene. They created a hurricane sequence set in Kona,
Hawaii using giant wind machines, numerous rain towers and an elaborate cable
and hydraulic ram system to facilitate the flapping and flying of pieces of the
beach shack.
By far, the film’s biggest
practical effect was the flooded New York street sequence. Countless crew
members from several departments working seven days a week for six weeks began
the tank construction by joining and reinforcing 3.5 foot high concrete road
barriers around the perimeter of the Manhattan street set. Then a waterproof
membrane was sprayed on to seal the barrier. Once it was “water-ready”, the
film-makers filled the tank with 250,000 gallons of water that was heated and
filtered. A second “holding” tank was built behind the set that was filled
with another 150,000 gallons of water.
Ten spinning rain tower heads
were laid out high above the set and were hooked into the elaborate pumping
system that essentially recycled the water in the two tanks at a rate in excess
of 5,000 gallons a minute. For added effect, two big V-8 wind machines were each
mounted on a “zoom boom” (forklift-type mechanism) which allowed the wind
machines to be raised as high as 20 feet in the air and positioned as close or
as far away from the action as needed.
“The flood sequence really
was a blend of new and old technology,” says Corbould, “and it was a
complete collaborative effort by everyone involved. I think it, too, is going to
look spectacular.”
This genre of film has
flourished for decades, through earthquakes, towering infernos, capsized ocean
liners – even out-of-control rollercoasters. Why do audiences love the
disaster genre so much? What is it that makes these films so appealing to such a
widespread audience?
“Everybody’s got a rubber
neck, including me,” says Dennis Quaid. “Whether it’s a fire or a train
wreck, we all stop and look. In a split second, we all wonder if it’s somebody
we know…then we’re thankful when it isn’t...then we wonder ‘what would I
do in that situation?’ Disasters – and disaster movies in general – seem
to churn up human emotions. I think audiences enjoy that combination of highs
and lows and I think they like having their imagination sparked by a ‘what if’
kind of situation.”
 “Disaster movies are all
about people’s humanity,” says Jeffrey Nachmanoff. “For audiences, they
want to see how other people respond to disaster; some respond with courage,
others respond with cowardice and sometimes there are people who actually try to
take advantage of the situation for their own gain. I think audiences like to
look for themselves and, most of the time, imagine themselves as the hero.”
“Audiences love visual
storytelling,” says Mark Gordon. “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 saviour 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.”
“If
the world goes down, you’re forced to take a look at your life,” says Roland
Emmerich, “and audiences know that when they watch a disaster movie. They have
to think about their life and they have to make decisions like what they really
want and who they love. It’s scary and exciting at the same time.
“That’s why I love these
kinds of movies,” says Emmerich. “I also wonder what would I do…even when
I am in the middle of making a movie, I ask myself, ‘What would I do in this
situation?’ It’s a compelling question and sometimes the answer isn’t an
easy one.”
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