APPROACHING ARMAGEDDON

Starlog Magazine, July 1998

Can Bruce Willis & his Dirty Dozen prevent the end of the world?

NASA welcomed Armageddon with open arms, and who could blame them? When producer Jerry Bruckheimer handed the Navy Top Gun and Crimson Tide, their cooperation resulted in recruiting hitting al all-time high. By saying yes to the reality-driven Armageddon--in which NASA quite literally saves the world--muscling in on their turf, they could only come out ahead.

But there were those occasions, when the Armageddon crew slipped into the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers in May 1997, that made life difficult.

"I remember this once scene we were shooting," explains cinematographer John Schwartzman where Bruce Willis is messing around (underneath this B-2, and this hand was coming very close to this piece of equipment. The NASA guy comes up to us, looking kind of pale, and says, `You know, guys, that part his hand is next to is worth $60 million, and it damages it, I could lose my job.'"

And, when the Armageddon crew wasn't playing with expensive government property, there was the day they almost blew the place up...for real. "We were on the launch pad," chuckles director Michael Bay, "filming a shuttle that was getting ready to blast off, and one of our actors is standing nearby. Well, he foolishly decides to light up a cigarette, not realizing that he's within spitting distance of a whole tank of liquid nitrogen, and that there's 100-foot tall sign right behind him that says `no Smoking.' He could have blown the whole place to kingdom come."

Needless to say, there were signs of relief when Armageddon finished its three weeks of filming and returned to Southern California where, on day 107 on the Disney lot, things are being mopped up. Pick-ups are being taken on some final insert shots that will be critical to this tale of, in Hollywoodese, "The Dirty Dozen in Outer Space nuke an asteroid."

There's a sense of urgency on the lot that belies the trouble-free nature of the shoot. One special FX man scurries between soundstages, stopping just long enough to utter, "Fire gags, water gags, lots of people on this film." Production designer Michael White, likewise, leaves a soundstage, quickly disappearing into his trailer, where he's constructing a miniature Chinese harbor for a last-minute effects shot. Actor Peter (The Lost World) Stormare rushes by on his way to makeup and crafts services but promises a chat later (see page 24).

Directing Disasters

Armageddon, admittedly, doesn't come across as groundbreaking material. It's your typical summer action blockbuster with Bruce Willis saving the world again, mountains of special effects and mole hills of characterization. But this release from Disney's Touchstone Pictures is offering some twists to a familiar tale. For openers, half the cast of Fargo--and that's only a slight exaggeration (Stormare and Steve Buscemi)--turns up in Armageddon, promising some quirky takes on the expected superheroics. The cast also includes Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Jessica Steen and Will Patton And Willis' character isn't exactly the Die Hard heroic archetype audiences may expect Could it be that Touchstone is actually plopping down in excess of $70 million and more than 120 days of shooting on something that might not merely be the latest round of connect-the-dots, fast-paced moviemaking?

While those on the Armageddon set would just as soon the question not be asked, the fact remains that the similarly themed Deep Impact has hit theaters first. Director Bay--when he's not being openly derisive of the competition--claims that "Ours is a different story, a more exciting story." Bruckheimer is slightly defensive when he says, "I'm clean. I have not seen their script and I have no idea what they're doing."

"OK! Let's get ready to key this thing!" Bay yells as he jumps from his chair to the camera and back to his video monitor. "Let's get in tight on his face, and I want a lot of fear!"

Bay, all blustering and animated inside a dark, cavernous soundstage amid the tangles of cable and clutches of camera equipment, lights and technicians, is shooting what would be considered a minor piece of business: the close-up of a space jockey, amid shaking and steam across the windshield, in what appears to be a shuttle crash dive. But, for Bay, there are no minor shots on Armageddon.

"These pick-up shots we're shooting on Day 107 are just as important as the stuff we shot on Day 2," says the director as he uses a momentary break in lensing to state his case for Armageddon. "And that it's all important is what we have to keep remembering."

Bay, last in the action arena with The Rock, ran into Armageddon in October 1996 when screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh "called me up with a three-sentence idea." Bay, by that time, had gone through "every script that Disney had" and found them lacking. But the writer's missive appealed to him, so the premise was fleshed out over the next two-and-a-half weeks and pitched to the Disney executives.

"Jonathan and I walked into the meeting and said, `We're going to make this Disney's biggest movie of '98.' They believed us and gave us the green light without a script."

Armageddon, as conceived by Hensleigh, was heavy on hard science. So the filmmakers felt it was essential to not only have NASA's approval but their wholesale cooperation.

"We felt that to make this really work, we had to be able to go down to the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers and actually shoot there," says Bay, "and NASA hasn't given their approval to much of anything since Apollo 13. But since the space program basically saves the world in this movie, they quickly went from, `We're not sure we can let you guys do this to, Sure, anything you want.'"

What Bay wanted and got--besides the opportunity to shoot in and around actual shuttle launches and classified aircraft--was the specs to their most modern equipment. "We brought NASA people in on designs and told them we had to make our shuttles and other equipment NASA-accurate as well as movie-accurate," reflects the director. "They also helped us out with calculations about how long it would take our asteroid to hit Earth, how much time there would be to go up and try to deflect it and how our shuttles would accurately maneuver around the world."

Bay is just getting warmed up when his A.D. slides over and says that the next angle on the shuttle shake is ready to go. Leaving the director, the stage where the asteroid set resides seems like the next logical place to go.

Creating Cataclysms

The asteroid's surface is marked by a 30-foot-deep pit from which jut rock-like escarpments, buttresses and imaginative overhangs. It's at once familiar and a total flight of production designer White's fancy. And it is not hard to imagine the moments during filming, when Willis jumps and dodges as an asteroid quake opens up the ground in jagged holes beneath him.

"Oh yeah, that 30-foot pit in the asteroid stage," chuckles Bruckheimer, who's sharing executive-producing duties with Gale Anne Hurd. "We had to convince Disney to let us do that as well as to give us the money."

The high-powered producer is no stranger to this kind of business; his impressive, explosive action credits include Top Gun, The Rock, Crimson Tide and Days of Thunder. But, despite Willis' presence, he stops short of guaranteeing a slam-dunk when Armageddon appears. "You never really know if something is going to work." Bruckheimer says, hedging his bet. "You just have to go out there and go with what you've got. ideas like Armageddon are just hanging around there out in the ether. They surface once in a while, and you just pick them up. And this idea is pretty straightforward. We have these guys who are going to have to fly up to an asteroid, drill a hole in it and drop in a nuke. They have no choice. They have to deal with it. It's pretty simple stuff."

Back on the other soundstage, Bay is attempting to properly light and frame the close-up on the shuttle pilot's panic. There are steam jets to adjust, camera angles to jiggle and shake for the proper perspective, facial expressions and screams to match with scenes shot 105 days ago. While Bay rattles off instructions, gestures with his arms and turns the concept of lining up an insert shot into a marathon race, cinema-tographer Schwartzman sits down next to Bay's video monitor and rattles off his take on Armageddon.

"Marathon is a good way to describe this," laughs Schwartzman. "This has been a difficult mother to shoot. The physical aspects of this movie have been murder! We had this sequence on the asteroid where the drillers are caught in a methane ice stone and we were right in the middle of this set, trying to shoot the scene and being pelted with chunks of prop ice. We took a beating, and it points out that we really have been like marathon runners."

The cinematographer understands Bay's sense of time after having worked with the director on The Rock. He highlights the project's immensity when he clicks off the fact that the film lists five FX supervisors, 3,000 total scene set-ups and, on the asteroid scenes, 400 steamlines and three giant 100-mile-per-hour fans. "We had air guys, dust guys, it was just totally labor-intensive Blowing up 100 cars in that scene in The Rock was easier than much of the stuff we're doing here."

Schwartzman offers that Armageddon is being shot "a little differently than The Rock" and that there are "not man tricks in this movie. We've gone for mixed black-and-white and color look to the asteroid sequences in an attempt to emphasize how far away from Earth these people actually are We're bringing a real sense of energy to the scenes. For Armageddon to work, we've got to put audiences right in the middle of the action, and I'm convinced we've done that."

At this point, Schwartzman drops all pre- tense of being even-handed in his support of Armageddon. "You're going to shit when you see this movie! You're going to have to bring a seat belt with you to the theater. This is bitchin', fun and just way cool!"

In need of a little objectivity, the tour leapfrogs over to the production designer trailer where White finishes up poring over design sketches. He notes what challenge the script for Armageddon offered him.

"This is a huge fantasy centered in the present day, and so it was important, in order to keep the reality of the film in place, to pick the brains of the NASA people to find out where the technology was going in the next 20 years, and how we could utilize some of their technologies. I felt what we were doing had to be responsible to existing, contemporary technology. There was a form and design that I had to follow."

A diligent observer of the actual NASA footage shot, White reasoned that the interiors had to completely match the existing exteriors. When it came to the asteroid's look, he researched extensively and then discarded that research. "What I discovered was that an asteroid is pretty uninteresting; it looks like a big Russet potato. But, because our asteroid is another character in the movie, we went all over the place in our design and left the reality behind."

The Mir space station, which plays an important role in Armageddon, turned into a more antiquated version of the existing Russian technology. The space shuttle exterior and interiors were based on "what exists. In fact, what we ultimately ended up doing was modifying the shuttle's exterior, and then using CGI to composite our design over footage of the actual NASA gantry and hunch pad to make that element a combination of their world and ours."

Additionally, White was allowed to go comparatively wild when it came to designing the space suits. "The existing space suits are bulky and very non-heroic. They would snake our drillers look like the Michelin Tire Man. So what we did was go with something more form-fitting and very much influenced by the Navy SEALs combat gear."

White and his production team had a little more than four months to work pre-production magic, and he concedes, "that it has been a little tight. Look at this! The film is almost complete and I'm still designing stuff."

Effecting Explosions

Some of White's most ambitious work is, this day, on display on an adjoining sound-stage. Built on top of a multi-story elevated set is a series of shuttle set interiors being put through their second-unit paces of POV and various establishing shots under the guidance of Armageddon special FX honcho John Frazier. The set, a rivet-studded, dial-encrusted series of cramped metal walkways, makes shooting a slow process, which gives Frazier, during a break to turn around cameras, the chance to step outside for some air and some talk.

"I didn't even have to look at a script to know that this film was going to be real intense," he offers. "We knew that Michael Bay was a powerful director, and so this film was going to be very energetic. And I was right."

High up on Frazier's hit list was the Armadillo, the outer-space drilling vehicle. "We worked closely with Michael White. He told me, `You make it work, and I'll make it look pretty.' So we took a HumVee chassis and gave it a real wide wheel base. Then, we gave it to Michael. I thought he would never be able to make it look great, but he did."

Frazier and his crew used simple hydraulics to create the illusion of the asteroid quake. "We didn't want to make it look like a conventional earthquake, so we designed the set to break apart in sections like glass that could be closed up again real fast like a theme park ride. With take one, we could take all the time we wanted, but they wanted take two five minutes later."

Simple hydraulics also played a pivotal part in shaking the space shuttle. "It's on a gimbal that rocks and rolls it and gives the illusion of everything coming apart. It's not real extreme and over the top. In fact, simple has been better than complex on many things on this film."

Frazier ticks off "steam, flames and lots of ice" as some of the elements he supplied to the outer-space adventure, proclaiming "we gave the director everything he wanted. Much of this concerned how much we wanted to push these actors and crew people. We didn't want anybody to get hurt. We kept it safe, but this movie has definitely kept us on our toes."

"Come on, people:" yells Bay back on the shuttle set. "Let's turn those lights and cameras around! Let's key this thing!"

The director is now totally determined to get this tiny moment from every possible angle. As some final adjustments are made on this particular set-up, Bay comments effusively on Armageddon's offbeat casting.

"We haven't gone in for the typical action casting," he yells over the hubbub on the stage. "We have a bunch of cool actors. including many independents who are bringing real quirks and personality to these characters that is more than what's on the page. It's a big part of what we're trying to do by going against action type. These people aren't just yelling and pushing buttons. They're bringing some incredible emotion to a movie that's surrounded by technology."

The pace, he finally concedes, is intense even by his normal standards. "There were days when I just threw up my hands and did not have a clue. Those were the days I just fought my way through. The days we had scenes with just people talking were considered a relief. Having John Schwartzman around made the process much easier. I've had days on this film when I've just lost it. That's when John would come up to me, get right in my face and say, `One shot at a time. Let's just keep it one shot at a time.'"

"That's how we survived Armageddon," Michael Bay laughs. "One shot at a time."