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Francis Lawrence on I Am Legend
By Fred Topel | Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
I Am Legend
Lawrence Builds I Am Legend
"We did a lot of conceptual work on this world before we got started, while Akiva [Goldsman] was working on the script," said Lawrence. "What we didn't want to do is exactly what you're talking about. We didn't want to do the same grim world we see in movie after movie after a situation like this. And so we started to do research, and we talked to scientists and ecologists and people, and really started looking into what would happen to a city once the population disappeared. The truth was nature would start to reclaim the city. There have been since our film, not because of our film but since our film, there have been scientific studies, and we're sort of in line with the types of animals that would start to repopulate, the types of plant life that would start to repopulate. The air would start to get cleaner, the water would start to get cleaner. It actually would probably start to become a slightly more beautiful place."
While it is still recognizable as modern day Manhattan, there are a few details that distinctly set the film a few years ahead. "We did some kind of fun stuff too. There are certain things in Times Square, a bunch of the scene takes place around the tickets kiosk, where you can buy tickets for the Broadway plays, and that's actually not built yet. We got the designs from the city and actually built our set to be how it will look in the year when our viral apocalypse is supposed to happen. The city was really helpful. I mean, they let us shut down pretty much everywhere we wanted to shut down. I mean, you name it, we shut it down."
Vanilla Sky shut down Times Square for one Sunday morning, but I Am Legend's takeover was unprecedented. "40-plus days. We did six days alone up by Grand Central and the viaduct, and there's the whole chase through the city at the start of the film. That's 57th Street, 6th Avenue, Herald Square, Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, 42nd Street. All of those sections have to be, for a minimum of a day or two, shut down for a while. It was tricky."
Still, it's the dog that gets the biggest reaction from viewers. "The dog was fantastic. I mean, that was Abbey, and Steve Barens is the trainer. We all wanted a German Shepherd and he sent me some pictures and I saw some German Shepherds that he had trained, but their faces were very dark and I wanted a dog that felt a little friendlier, so he went searching and he found a dog, a two year old German Shepherd at a rescue, which was Abbey. So she had never been trained, never worked in film before and he only had a couple of months. So he started working with her, introduced her to Will, and I had to say she was fantastic. There was a rule on set that nobody could interact with her other than the trainer and Will. Everybody was dying to pet her because she was the most beautiful, friendly dog that I had ever seen, but nobody could touch her, except Alice told me today that she touched her all the time. What was great was when she was finally wrapped, and you know when an actor wraps, the crew gathers around, and she was finally wrapped and it was the one day that everybody could finally go and pet her, and she was very excited that she got all that attention from everybody that she had been dying for."
I Am Legend opens to theatres on December 14th.
For the trailers, posters and more movie info, go to the I Am Legend
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
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