Director Jon Amiel on the Mission Control set (click image for larger view).

When director Jon Amiel began work on his new science fiction thriller, Paramount’s The Core, which opens March 28, he started with a promise to the actors, and to himself. “I made a promise that we would work on character, in great detail, and with as much care and attention to detail as [we] would if they were making The Hours or any other character-driven movie,” he said. “ We researched the characters. Each of them went to astronauts, Ph. D’s. geophysicists, Nobel Prize winners to breathe in the atmosphere. We rehearsed for two weeks, working not only on the scenes but on the back story….the stuff that gives an actor a sense when they are on the screen that there is a life lived off the screen before the story started.

“I really felt that we needed to reclaim the visual effects movie for people, for characters. In all great enduring epic dramas, characters always are larger than the circumstances around them. In The English Patient, do we really care about the war that is going on behind them? Not at all. It’s about two people.”[an error occurred while processing this directive]Amiel brings a degree in English Literature from Cambridge University and 10 years of theater experience as a background to his film directing work, which has included Entrapment, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Copycat and Sommersby. He directed the acclaimed dramatic series "The Singing Detective," and a documentary drama, The Silent Twins.

An intense electromagnetic storm threatens Earth as the planet's electromagnetic field declines (click image for larger view).

The cast of The Core includes Academy Award winner Hilary Swank (Boys Don’t Cry), Aaron Ekhart (Erin Brockovich), Delroy Lindo (The Cider House Rules), D.J. Qualls (Road Trip), Richard Jenkins (The Man Who Wasn’t There), Tchwky Karyo (Kiss of the Dragon), Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days), and Alfre Woodard (K-Pax).

The premise of the film is that the earth’s inner core has stopped rotating, causing the planet’s electromagnetic field to deteriorate, creating disaster on the surface. A team of scientists travel to the earth’s core in a spaceship-like craft to detonate a nuclear device that will reactivate the core and save the world.

“Because I knew we were going to have six actors in a small spacecraft working off each other, we strove to create a playing style that was not… that one two-word line, cut to one two-word line…that’s come to characterize this genre. I wanted to sense real people bouncing off each other and talking in a way that we could identify as being real,” Amiel explained. “I encouraged the actors to play off each other. There is a very lively dynamic between the actors; a lot of that was just created in rehearsal or on the set.”

Plasma particles from the Sun penetrate the Earth's protective field, destroying the Golden Gate Bridge (click image for larger view).

Visual Effects
When it came to planning the extensive visual effects in the film, “I simply let my imagination run, and deliberately avoided thinking about how practically I was going to do it,” Amiel commented. “I tried not to worry about how to achieve it. I think that’s a great secret of doing visual effects: let your imagination run. Imagine the biggest most extraordinary thing you can. Then describe it to the storyboard artist, who will put it on paper until you've got, frame by frame, the image you want to see. Go to your visual effects [supervisor] and say, ‘This is what I want to do,’ They start the business of actualizing. Is it going to be a set, set with green screen extension, set with CGI extension? Is it going to be an entirely CGI-generated thing, or a model? Once you have your visual template, you break it down into the practical elements of each shot. And each shot is very carefully analyzed, so that everybody can get on the set and know exactly what we are striving for.

“I’m happy to say [Visual Effects Supervisor Gregory L. McMurry] did an astounding, astounding job. He was the Rock of Gibraltar on this movie,” Amiel said. “For me it was a very steep learning curve. But any fear and loathing I had about visual effects is gone.”

Scan of the Earth's core (click image for larger view).

One of the visual effects challenges was creating the look of inner Earth. “Nobody knows what the core looks like. We do know that it is about 9,000 degrees … and it’s essentially a hyper fluid, which means it’s somewhere between a molten metal and a gas, those pressures and temperatures … So, energy glares swirling around, and elements of trace minerals, which would give color, even in glaring whiteness. Those were some of the conceptual images that we started with.”

A considerable amount of fact and scientific research was the inspiration for this movie, Amiel explained, noting that scientists have puzzled over the Earth’s magnetic field for decades. “I always thought there was great drama to science,” said Amiel. “But I’ve seen very few movies where they dramatize scientific thinking. So I wanted to put science back into [science fiction].”

In one sequence, the space shuttle has difficulties due to the changes in the earth’s electromagnetic field and makes an emergency landing in Los Angeles. Amiel called the scene a “tragic case of life imitating art,” and explained the decision to preserve the scene. “In our sequence, no lives are lost, largely because of the resourcefulness, ingenuity and heroism of the crew. They are not only saving their own lives, they prevent disaster that could have cost many other lives as well. It was our opinion, and happily that of NASA too, that the sequence stands as a testimonial to the heroism and ingenuity of these people, as well as to the dangers and fragility of any effort to push the frontiers of knowledge.”