I'm going to eschew my traditional format in favor of just letting some pictures do the talking. I will give you a little back-story first, though. We have a scene in the Nick Chopper flashback where we see the old woman making her deal with the Wicked Witch of the East. Since the flashbacks are all location we knew this would have to be too, but we struggled with the where.
One day a couple weeks ago I was driving out to an appointment I had down here, and not being a local I had my GPS guiding me. It took me a weird route and along the way I saw this amazing cemetery on a hill, with a bunch of great dead oak trees in a circle at the top. I thought, "man, that would be an excellent place to shoot a movie," but I never thought it would be ours until we were spitballing places to film this sequence.
Sean and I met Marie, our resident witch actress and make-up survivor, at Norm's around five o'clock. She got into costume and then he got her all made-up, and we headed out to the location. Which we DID secure permission to film in, by the way. We weren't about to guerrilla a graveyard. We also brought with us a few extra goodies Norm had prepared earlier.
Holy crap, trying to outdo Return to Oz in the nightmare fuel department, are we? Seriously, I'm a little concerned you guys might have gone a tad overboard on your witch. That thing looks like Michael Meyers and Anne Ramsey had a baby. And it's developed a taste for blood. I'm literally nauseated when I look at that photo.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, it's more obscured than this in the film. We're also giving it a cool blue color grade to hide the artificiality of the lights that makes the blood less recognizable. It's still going to be scary, but the following scene will also temper it a good deal. We don't want to traumatize any children. Unless there's a therapist out there who wants to cut us in...
DeleteI actually like to read a bit more about what the scene is for, I know what the scene is from but I'm curious as to why it's the way it is - how almost gory it is.
ReplyDeleteMy interpretation is that there appears to be some sort of animal sacrifice going on... either to the witch herself or as part of the witch's spell.
DeleteApologies, I tried fielding this one on my iPod while I was in bed and the result was a veritable pummeling of my patience, so I booted up the laptop and am trying again.
DeleteSam -- as you know Baum wrote that the old woman promised the WWE two sheep and a cow to prevent Nick and Nimmie's marriage. As originally scripted, the WWE was holding a lamb, which she slaughtered off-camera, hinting at ritual sacrifice or some dark magic.
However, we couldn't get any actual livestock to film this scene with, and creating any with CGI was going to be prohibitive, especially given how many more important creatures we need to create.
Meanwihle, when Norm saw my design for the WWE and we explained the scene to him, his mind went to Elizabeth Bathory and the whole "bathing in blood to preserve youth" motif. Norm postulated - and we loved this idea - that if practicing the dark arts had withered and dried up the WWW to the point of being a wretched, bloodless hag, then perhaps it was doing the same to the WWE, who, being more vain, tried a dark spell to preserve her youth, resulting in this horrible demon-baby thing.
When we knew we couldn't get real livestock, the natural way to preserve the idea was to show the aftermath of her sacrifice, and from there it was a short jaunt to the final version, which I shan't spoil here, but essentially this was our way of representing the "two sheep and a cow" that we just couldn't shoot for real.
2 sheep and a cow? I do not remember any of that from Baum's book and I have red it at least 8 times.
ReplyDelete2 sheep and a cow? I do not remember any of that from Baum's book and I have red it at least 8 times.
ReplyDelete