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Canwest News Service
The set for the action-fantasy Sucker Punch sprawls through four Vancouver sound stages that together amount to an onscreen explosion of what's in writer-director Zack Snyder's imagination.
The director of Dawn of the Dead, 300 and the Vancouver-filmed Watchmen has returned to the city to film his first original story — after the zombie remake and the two graphic novel adaptations — and a walk through the various sets gives a clue to just how all-encompassing this genre-blending story is.
Sucker Punch is set in the 1960s, when a teenaged girl (Emily Browning) is sent to an asylum by her nasty stepfather.
Once inside, the girl bonds with several other teen patients (Vanessa Hudgens, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Jamie Chung), and she retreats into a multi-level fantasy world where she and her friends are, by turns, the star attractions in a Moulin Rouge-esque night club brothel, and sexy warriors battling robotic Germans in a stylized version of the First World War. As well, they fight dragons and knights in a medieval world, kick alien butt on a futuristic planet, and battle giant samurai in an ancient temple.
All of which means that at any time, Snyder is telling a couple of hundred artisans, technicians and stunt performers what's in his head, from intricately carved Japanese swords to rhinestone-studded fishnet stockings, with the cast along for the wild, imaginative ride.
"You're not just working with a director who found a script that they liked and maybe did a few storyboards a couple of months ago," says Malone, watching this day as co-star Hudgens does a techno-belly dance musical number in the cavernous night club set.
"You're literally working out of his imagination — it's all in his mind, the entire film. It's so epic in his brain that he's just our full resource. any question you have, you can go to him."
Which helps the cast with the film's extensive green-screen scenes. In the Montreal-filmed 300, Snyder put Gerard Butler and cast in a totally green-screen environment with nearly every background added digitally afterwards.
He built a real New York streetscape and interiors for Watchmen's moody superheroes. Sucker Punch has evolved into a mix of real and digital, with the night club built next door to the First World War trenches, a castle's partial facade — dragons to be added later — and the grim asylum hallways.
Snyder himself is a calm presence amid this logistical storm. He's alternating this day between the night club set, as a crane-mounted camera records Hudgens's lush dance in front of dozens of extras, and the wartime bunker where Browning is tangling with a mutant German officer.
"I'm surprised anytime someone says you can make a movie," Snyder says of the big-budget creative freedom given to him by Warner Brothers. "On the other hand, though it's fetishistic and personal, I like to think that my fetishes aren't that obscure. Who doesn't want to see girls running down the trenches of World War One wreaking havoc?
"I'd always had an interest in those worlds — comic books, fantasy art, animated films. I'd like to see this, that's how I approach everything, and then keep pushing it from there."
He put together an it-girl cast — Browning is graduating to grown-up roles after starring in Lemony Snicket, Hudgens takes an edgier turn after High School Musical, Cornish drew raves in this year's period romance Bright Star, while Malone has a string of intense indie roles — and hired a team of ex-U. S. Navy SEALs to get them into fighting shape. Training started last June in L.A. and continued through filming last September until this month.
Snyder had been working on the Sucker Punch story for six years, through filming of his other movies. For the shoot, he reassembled most of the Vancouver-based crew who worked on Watchmen.
"This one kind of lined up for me — I've got to do Sucker Punch, give it a shot, otherwise I'll just be the guy who talks about it a lot."
Malone and her castmates do their punching, kicking, shooting and swordplay in skimpy stylized costumes — nurse, French maid, schoolgirl, nun, harem girl — but the actor says the movie's theme is empowerment, not exploitation.
"Zack obviously loves his toys and his action, really cool things that can be awesome, but then he can be really sensitive," says Malone. "He directs a scene between two girls in a bathroom on the floor, and he's whispering, he's very attuned. You can be genderless as an artist — I think it's real ballsy of him to want to explore this aspect of sex, particularly after his last film."
Sucker Punch hits theatres in March 2011.
gschaefer@theprovince.com
