Unholy Production With a Fairy-Tale Ending
A digital polar bear in the fantasy “The Golden Compass.”
By CHARLES McGRATH wri8ting on The New York Times, December 2, 2007
PHILIP PULLMAN’S novel
“The Golden Compass,” the basis for the new movie of the same name, is set in a parallel universe that runs on something called anbaric power instead of electricity, and where people travel in hot-air balloons and enormous, slow-moving zeppelins. Landing the movie in theaters, where it will open Friday, was not unlike inflating and then piloting one of these exotic, cumbersome airships.
Dakota Blue Richards plays Lyra Belacqua in the fantasy “The Golden Compass.”
The project nearly crashed at least once, while burning through $180 million, and it is unclear what audiences will make of such a craft, which is at once high-tech and deliberately old-fashioned. It relies on a technique that Dennis Gassner, the production designer, calls “cludging” — marrying the familiar with the fantastic — to track the story’s protagonist, an impish pre-teenager named Lyra Belacqua, on a journey from Oxford College to the Arctic Circle in search of her own identity and of some children who have been kidnapped and transported to the North for hideous experimentation. There are witches, armored bears and a glamorously wicked mother figure (Nicole Kidman, looking like a Botoxed Marilyn Monroe).
Mr. Pullman’s novel, a book for young adults, is part of a trilogy called “His Dark Materials” (the title comes from Milton’s “Paradise Lost and in England, where they were first published, all three books are often compared to the Harry Potter novels. They’re actually brainier and better written, but they’re like the Potter books in that readers tend to feel about them not just fondness but also something like proprietorship.
To deviate from the text probably puts the filmmakers at peril with that built-in audience, while in this country at least, where the books are less well known, the filmmakers have the added burden of explaining to everyone else how this parallel universe works. It’s a place where, in addition to employing airships and anbaric power, people, in the books’ most charming and engaging touch, manifest their souls in the form of animal-like creatures, called daemons, that walk or fly around with them.
As if that pitfall of cutesiness weren’t enough, there’s also the matter of the books’ theology, or anti-theology. The Pullman trilogy is, among other things, a carefully argued brief against organized religion, and aims at nothing less than to reimagine the story of the Fall in a way that does away with the notion of original sin. God eventually turns out to be a pathetic imposter, not unlike the Wizard of Oz. From a marketing standpoint, the movie represents the opposite challenge from “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” where the studio worried that the overtly Christian message of C. S. Lewis’s books would drive away moviegoers who preferred to see wicked witches and talking lions.
“The Golden Compass” was made by New Line Cinema, the studio behindf the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which is clearly hoping for a hit on a similar scale. To navigate all the obstacles, theological and logistical, and to boil Mr. Pullman’s complicated story down to two hours or so, the studio commissioned Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay.
Two years later, in 2004, after Mr. Stoppard’s script proved unworkable, the studio turned to Chris Weitz, of all people, and hired him both to write and to direct. At that point Mr. Weitz’s résumé consisted mostly of his having written and directed, with his brother Paul, the comedy “About a Boy" based on the Nick Hornby novel, and that great raunchfest “American Pie.”
“To be candid, it wasn’t like we were fighting off a Robert Zemeckis or a Steven Spielberg” Toby Emmerich, president of New Line Productions, said recently. “For whatever reason, we hadn’t attracted what in Hollywoodese would be called a no-brainer.”
“And for a project like this,” he added, “maybe you don’t really want a triple-A director. Maybe it’s better to have someone who’s a little hungry.”
In fact, Mr. Weitz wasn’t quite as much a long shot as he seemed. Though American, he was educated in England and has a degree in English literature from Cambridge. And both Mr. Emmerich and Deborah Forte, the co-producer, who originally bought the movie rights from Mr. Pullman, say Mr. Weitz bowled them over with his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the books — first in a Saturday-morning Polo Lounge meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Mr. Emmerich and then with a 40-page treatment he sent them both.
“I also wrote the first draft of a screenplay that was about 186 pages,” Mr. Weitz recalled. “It was utterly unfilmable and would have cost half a billion dollars. The thing is, I absolutely love the books. I’m one of those people who think of them not just as fantasy novels but as exceptional works of the intellect.”
A year later, however, before he had shot a foot of film, Mr. Weitz suddenly proved himself less than hungry and quit the movie. “I just kind of blinked,” he said, explaining that what pushed him over the edge was a visit he had made to Peter Jackson's New Zealand special-effects facility.
“I had no C.G.I. experience,” he said, “and when I saw how complicated it was, it was utterly terrifying. I was single at the time, and I thought, I’m looking at three years of my life that are just going to get swallowed up and spat out.”
The studio then turned to an even more unlikely director, Anand Tucker, known mainly for “Shopgirl," based on the Steve Martin novel, who impressed the executives with storyboards suggesting how the movie might look. But Mr. Tucker and New Line soon ran into the kind of impasse that in Hollywood is called “creative differences.”
“You know, sometimes that’s really what they are: creative differences,” Mr. Emmerich said. From Mr. Emmerich’s own account and that of others, it appears that the problem with Mr. Tucker’s “Golden Compass” was that it was paradoxically both more expensive than the movie New Line was hoping for and smaller in scale. The deal breaker may have been when Mr. Tucker, as a cost-cutting move, decided to eliminate the bear fight, the movie’s great set piece.
The studio then re-enlisted Mr. Weitz, who had had a change of heart. He was more settled personally, having met the woman who would eventually become his wife, and, having stayed on the project as screenwriter, felt more comfortable with the story.
“I don’t know how or when the movie would have been made if Chris hadn’t come back,” Mr. Emmerich said. “Who knows what would have happened?”
Fans of Mr. Pullman’s version may be surprised to learn that the movie stops before the book does, leaving out Lyra’s long- anticipated meeting with her father, who plans to wage war on the Almighty himself. Instead the movie ends in stirring fashion, with Lyra saving the kidnapped kids from what amounts to spiritual lobotomy and heading off in an airship with Iorek, an armored bear who has become her friend and protector. “There was tremendous marketing pressure for that,” Mr. Weitz said. “Everyone really wanted an upbeat ending.”
He added, “They’re looking for a franchise here,” meaning that if “The Golden Compass” does well, the studio will go ahead with films based on the two remaining volumes of the trilogy.
The foreshortened end of “The Golden Compass” also has the advantage of lopping off some of the book’s most heavy-duty theological discussion (presumably leaving some of the thornier issues to the sequels). The script also carefully turns the villains from sanctimonious churchmen into all-purpose, nondenominational authoritarians and mind-controllers, though in what will probably feel like a poke in the eye to some people, it has left intact the book’s name for these totalitarians’ ruling body: the Magisterium, which is the same word the Roman Catholic Church uses for its official teaching authority.
William A. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who also raised a fuss, not very successfully, over “The Da Vinci Code,” has already called for a boycott of “The Golden Compass,” which he described as a “stealth campaign” to introduce children to atheism. At the time of his complaint, he hadn’t actually seen the movie, but claimed he didn’t need to. The problem, as he sees it, is that the “film is bait for the books: unsuspecting parents who take their children to see the movie may feel impelled to buy the three books as a Christmas present.”
Mr. Emmerich said the studio just wanted to make a good movie: “The religion was never a reason to make the movie, or not to make it. I always felt the heart of the story was the relationship between Lyra and Iorek. That and the idea of the daemons. It’s a story about a little girl creating a new family for herself.”
Mr. Weitz says that if he gets to film the rest of the trilogy, he will begin right where the current movie leaves off. “I mean to protect the integrity of those remaining chapters,” he explained. “The aim is to put in the elements we need to make this movie a hit, so that we can be much less compromising in how the second and third books are shot.”
