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Assembling a Cast of Thousands: A Conversation with Kathleen Kennedy
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Long-time producer for Steven Spielberg, Kathleen Kennedy has dealt with aliens, ghosts and synthetic humans (1982's E.T. and Poltergeist and 2001's A.I. Artificial Intelligence). She has dealt with an array of simulated animals and weather conditions--small (1984's Gremlins and 1990's Arachnophobia), large (the Jurassic Park series from 1993-2001) and digital (1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and 1996's Twister). She has also developed some of the biggest "star" and prestige pictures, including The Color Purple (1985), Schindler's List (1993), The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and The Sixth Sense (1999).
In a Harold Lloyd Master Seminar held at AFI on March 10, 1993, Kennedy uses one of her most challenging producing projects, Empire of the Sun (1987), to illuminate the producing process. Here, Kennedy unveils the mysteries of producing. |
 pielberg's Empire of the Sun was in development for years. Going to make a movie in China was pretty daunting. Now it would be almost impossible, I think, to do what we were attempting to do. Sometimes it's kind of good to stumble into these things naively, which we did. |
I happened to run across a wonder woman by the name of Janet Yang who is now running Oliver Stone's company, and Janet is Chinese but born in the US. Her father is from Shanghai and her mother is from a small village outside Beijing. Janet used to distribute a number of Chinese films in the Pacific Northwest and had recently started working for MCA. |
So I went up and had a chat with her about the difficulties of shooting a film in China. She said if we had patience and were willing to spend a minimum of a year going back and forth to China meeting and talking to people, we could probably get this done. |
We spent a lot of time in Beijing and then progressively made our way to Shanghai. We worked a lot with the people who ran the Shanghai film studios, which was a fascinating process because China, on and off, has had a thriving film community. So it's not that the crews are inexperienced. In fact, they are very experienced, but their equipment is extremely dated and their process for making films is very dated. |
Overall, when you approach big, huge, daunting pictures like this you just have to break it down into bits and pieces and trudge along, and eventually you figure it out. Even though I've been lucky enough to be involved in a lot of movies, virtually every movie I walk into introduces something I haven't done before and something I have to learn. In virtually every script we pick up that Steven [Spielberg] is going to direct, there's something in it that nobody has any idea how we're going to do. |
On crowd scenes
Empire was complicated, obviously, in that we had the language barrier to deal with right off the bat. We probably spent about five or six days trying to get one crowd scene. We had 5000 extras. |
We coordinated our shoot with the way the factories were set up. In the factories they have group leaders and they break people down into various groups of 25 to 100. The Chinese A.Ds [Assistant Directors] we were working with really accessed the method by which we could organize the large crowds. |
One of the most difficult issues was wardrobe, and this is a good lesson if you're ever working in foreign countries. It's really helpful to first try to understand how people live and work and what the immediate problems are that you can't change--like the fact that we have thousands of people who did not have telephones. So it wasn't the normal course of being able to give people a call, or a callsheet, or anything like that in terms of telling people where they were supposed to be at what time. |
So we really had to access and understand methods that were already being used in the country. We got to the point where we sent them home with their wardrobe, which the A.Ds convinced us would be okay and, in fact, turned out to be great. They would be responsible for taking their costume home, cleaning it and showing up in it the next day. |
And we came up with incentive programs: we would give them something--a small gift--to ensure they would show up two days later. So it was a process of listening to what we were told would be helpful in insuring that these people would come back day after day after day. |
We also had one of the best A.Ds in the business, David Tomlin, who's worked on any of the major crowd scenes you've seen in big movies. What he does is a pretty standard process of dividing people up by months of the year they were born in and activating people based on simple commands. |
It's also a matter of having massive numbers of people coordinating things with bull horns screaming and yelling. |
On passion and producing
I would rather spend most of my time really developing material and working on what I think is the biggest part of a producer's job, which is 75 percent of the work that precedes the point at which it gets to the floor. Because at that point you really should be turning it over to the director. And if you've done the job as a producer, most of the movie should be done and you're there to troubleshoot. |
And if I need to be on the set--because I want to take a creative role in what's going on there--then I like to have the ability to make that decision based on how passionate I feel about the material. I think it's fair to say that if you're going to make more than one picture at a time, you're going to have varying degrees of passion for the things that you have become attached to. |
It's very easy to get excited about something in the initial stage. But you must realize that often you've got to maintain that level of passion for sometimes two, three, four years--and it's really tough to do. I find that plays a big part now in my decision-making, as to what I go forward with. |
Facing problems on the production set
On Jurassic Park a hurricane hit Kauai, and the whole experience was something of a metaphor for producing. |
At first we were just on hurricane watch, but then four o'clock that next morning the phone rings and the production manager says, "Come downstairs immediately. We're going to be hit dead center." |
And I said "Oh," which is my continual response. And I'm hearing the hotel staff moving furniture and everything, so they're clearly serious. |
I went downstairs, and sure enough, we had a fax come in from the weather service that said, "Warning! Warning! Warning! Dangerous storm on the approach, winds exceeding 175 miles per hour," and then they tell us the storm is going to hit somewhere between three and seven o'clock that night. |
The airport is closed and it's clear we're not going to get anybody out. So we just begin the process of shifting into gear of how to organize people for a hurricane instead of how to organize people for a movie. This is a metaphor for organizing a whole picture, really. |
That's the way you have to think--"How do we prepare people? How do we keep them calm? What resources do we have?" Clearly, being on an island in a hurricane with a movie crew is not bad. I mean, you have generators, you have lights, you have food, you have water. Because you're on location you've got all these things. So we were, actually, in a funny way, much more prepared than anybody. |
On the impact of digital technology
Jurassic Park was one of the biggest breakthroughs in special effects since Star Wars. We used to sit around, looking at script saying, "That's really an interesting, wild scene but you could never do that in live action. Maybe you could do that in animation." The technology is bringing those two worlds together. We're getting to a point where you can do just about anything. |
The good news is that writing is still the most important element. Good storytelling, good characters--nothing will take the place of that. But what's exciting is that there's this whole other element of effects that, in fact, is less costly and infinitely more interesting in terms of worlds that you can create and arenas you can play in. |
As far as production costs, I don't really see the cost of movies coming down significantly until the technology and presentation somehow come together. When you get to a point where a movie can be distributed, whether it's going to be fiberoptics, satellite--who knows where this is going to end up?--when you can take the whole process of filmmaking through some kind of digital procedure, then I think the cost will come way down. |
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