irector Ivan Reitman--who turned the supernatural into genre-bending comedy with 1984's Ghostbusters--attempts a similar alchemy with science fiction in Evolution. This time around, he has the help of The X-Files' David Duchovny and two-time Oscar nominee Julianne Moore, who join up-and-coming comic star Orlando Jones and teen-film staple Seann William Scott.
Evolution, based on an original idea by writer Don Jakoby and a script by Jakoby, David Diamond and David Weissman, tells the story of two small-town community college professors (Duchovny and Jones) who stumble upon the greatest discovery ever: a meteorite with alien life.
But what starts out as a ticket to fame and glory morphs, quite literally, into a planet-threatening nightmare, as the extraterrestrial microbes rapidly evolve into larger and more dangerous creatures. In steps the military and a no-nonsense scientist (Moore) to try to stop the alien threat from destroying all life on Earth.
Reitman, Duchovny and Moore took a moment recently to talk with Science Fiction Weekly about Evolution, which opened June 8.
Ivan Reitman, is it true that Evolution actually started out as a serious science fiction script by Jakoby?
Reitman: Yeah, it was a straight-ahead kind of science-fiction thriller, but it had this wonderful central premise, which is that, instead of a standard invasion of Earth in spaceships with alien creatures in them, you had a meteor that falls to Earth, containing these little single-celled organisms that evolve so quickly that they become a menacing group of creatures that are a real threat to this Earth.
How do you get broad comedy out of a premise like that?
Reitman: Well, I knew then that this is kind of a very original threat. And I said, "Let's keep all that. Let's sort of pay homage to the science fiction part of it. But at the same time, in the situations and in the characters, let's create a more comedic approach."
When you made Ghostbusters, which had a similar kind of tone, you didn't have the ability to do the kinds of things that you can do today. How did that affect the making of this film?
Reitman: I don't think that it would have been possible to tell the Evolution story [more than] 15 years ago, when I did Ghostbusters. I don't think I could have done it even five years ago, because the computing power wasn't there, and the software wasn't there. The sheer number of different creatures, and what we expect them to do, and the complexity of the animation in a film like this, really requires the most up-to-date technology that we have. [Visual effects supervisor] Phil Tippett ... is probably the best at this in the world. He's the guy who put the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, among other things. And the design of the creatures, the way they differentiate from each other both in scale and in character and in weight, are part of the challenges that ... could only lately be fulfilled.
Talk about the design of the creatures--they look both familiar and alien at the same time.
Reitman: What I decided is that they shouldn't just be exaggerated outer-space creatures. After all, this was sort of alien DNA that is now on Earth, that somehow, following the evolutionary path that we did here on Earth, might be kind of a familiar territory that would at least ground the storytelling point of how they're evolving more clearly. So one of my ideas to Phil was, in our design of these creatures, that they would pose some similarity to Earth creatures, except sort of tweaked up with the sort of the alien part of them.
What was the most difficult shot?
Reitman: The finale was extraordinarily tough, because we're dealing with something of such an enormous scale [the huge creature at the end] that shifts light. You're working in darkness, but in fact, we had to shoot outdoors in light. And you've got a fire truck involved, and you've got … six actors involved, and it was such a large, amorphous creature, kind of a departure from all the other creatures in the film, that in terms of finding the comedy to play in [it] was a little bit tricky.
David Duchovny, tell us about your character.
Duchovny: His name is Ira Kane, and it's a character that is kind of in the classic Ivan Reitman school of lovable losers or underachievers: a guy who's made kind of a big mistake in his life and is still paying for it. I had had a job in the Pentagon and had lost it through making a big mistake that you learn about in the movie. And now I am teaching biology at a community college in Arizona.
You have some experience acting with aliens. This is a pretty broad comedy. Can you talk about balancing the comedy with the science fiction?
Duchovny: That's the hardest part. That's what it's all about. You can't just play the reality or the fear or the shock or the disgust or whatever it is at the aliens. It has to be undercut with comedy, and the comedy has to have a sense of reality, or else both of them fall down, and it becomes a mishmash of neither. And I think what Ivan has been able to do--and his great strength--is he's able to build a foundation of reality, of real characters, and still have the comedy and not have the whole house of cards fall down.
The X-Files has a lot of special effects, and this does. What is it like playing against a big flying dinosaur in a mall that's not really there?
Duchovny: Sometimes it's hard. The great thing about acting is, when you're acting with another person, you get stuff back, you get reactions that you would never would have thought of. So it builds you up. It makes you change, different. When you're just reacting to a bunch of tennis balls flying through the mall, you can tend to fall back on just stock reactions, just open your mouth or whatever. The task is to keep it real and keep it varied, keep it specific. And Ivan was able to show us drawings of these creatures, so that we could actually at least have an idea of what they looked like, so we weren't just looking at a bunch of balls. We had a mental image of what we were doing. So that helps. And then, sometimes, it's as simple as trying as many different faces as you can [laughs].
And then Ivan will put in the appropriate reaction, because sometimes the appropriate reaction is funny. Like the scene where the big, uh, waste pore breaks wind on Seann, and he goes, "Nasty!" That's a funny reaction, I laugh at that every time, but it's not like a real reaction. ... It's back and forth, between the real and the funny.
Didn't you and Orlando work up some stuff on the set?
Duchovny: Yeah, we tried sometimes. We were living with the characters, so we thought we had a certain kind of insight into how they would react or how they would behave after a certain point. And Ivan was very generous with letting us improvise. After we had got the scene as written, he would say, "OK, now go ahead and do what you want." ... Ivan was a good judge. He doesn't care where a good idea comes from. He doesn't care if it's yours or his. If it's good, it's in the movie.
Julianne Moore, tell us about your character, Dr. Allison Reed.
Moore: She's an epidemiologist who works at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. ... She ... ends up working with these guys, and they beat back the aliens to save the world.
You fall down a lot in this movie. Did you end up black and blue at the end of the day?
Moore: I didn't. It wasn't that bad. I mean, when you're falling on purpose, you kind of know where you're falling, and you know what's going on. Or maybe I had kneepads on or something like that. And I know how to do it without tearing up my joints. So I did OK. I had cuts and bruises on my shins from, like, being around the car. Getting in and out of the jeep, actually, you always bang yourself up.
Wasn't it your idea to make Allison such a klutz?
Moore: Yeah, it was. I had a meeting with Ivan. ... And I was reading the part. And I said, "I don't think she's funny." And he's like, "You're right, she's not." I said, "Maybe we can figure out something. We could maybe do some physical comedy or something." ... And he said, "Great."
You're known primarily for your serious dramatic roles, such as those in Hannibal and Boogie Nights. What's it like to do such broad comedy?
Moore: It's nice to be able to do something where I don't have to cry, and it's nice to do something that's ... physical.
What it's like to act where there's nothing there? Is it difficult?
Moore: It's not. It's silly. Because we're pretty used to it. There will be a situation where you can't always look at an actor that you're working with. ... The degrees to which you have be involved are tough sometimes.
Were there lots of practical jokes on the set?
Moore: [dead serious] No, we make no jokes, no. We're not funny people [laughs]. There was a lot of goofing around. ... I liked to goof around when I'm working on a drama, let alone a comedy. I think it's nice with a comedy.
I heard that David and Orlando played lots of jokes on Seann William Scott.
Moore: Yeah, well, who can resist Seann? He's so cute. You want to do stuff to him. That's the thing.
What's it like working with David Duchovny?
Moore: David is just a surly drunk. I don't know if you know that or not. He's awful. He's never on time. He's always rude. And he likes to take his clothes off. So maybe I'm trying to do my close-up, and David takes his clothes off. I'm like, "David, I can't concentrate, and you're too drunk to be at work." And he refuses to put his clothes back on. It's awful. I bet all the SCI FI fans didn't know that. ... It's about time somebody spoke about it, because it's been going on for years [smiles slyly].
Back to the top.
Also in this issue: David Chokachi
.
