CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY 3D ... - Visual Hollywood

CIRQUE DU SOLEIL: WORLDS AWAY 3D (2012)PRODUCTION NOTESABOUT THE FILMFor writer/director/producer Andrew Adamson, tying a love knot around some of the best elementsof seven Cirque du Soleil live shows that play in Las Vegas was a journey into magical realism. Executiveproducer Cary Granat and Reel FX Inc. had been discussing the possibility of collaboratingwith Cirque du Soleil on a project for quite awhile when he approached Adamson about the idea ofcrafting and directing a Cirque-based feature film. Granat is the former CEO of Walden Media,which collaborated with Adamson on the first two films of C.S. Lewis' beloved The Chronicles ofNarnia series. Adamson is also a producer on the third film, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyageof the Dawn Treader."We had to find a natural, cinematic way into the world of Cirque," says Adamson. "I started thinkingabout the way Cirque live shows work. T here is a very dreamlike quality about them. A thinthread of narrative that weaves in and out of each but allows these acts to exist within the worldsthat are created. I thought this movie could do the same thing. I could find a narrative that threadsthese completely different shows together."I came to the idea of these two people who meet in a real-world circus. She's a young girl lookingto escape her life. She sees this aerialist and instantly falls in love with him, but when their eyesmeet he slips and falls. He drops right through the circus ring into another world and drags her withhim. They spend the rest of the film looking for each other in these worlds that exist in a limbostate, kind of a space between life and death, a world between worlds. Ultimately they come togetherin a dream fulfilling aerial ballet. An act that hangs in the balance between beauty and danger. "Like the live shows, the film eschews dialogue, using music and the marvelous expressions of theperformers to move the narrative forward. But it was never the filmmakers' intention to simply capturethe live shows. "What I wanted to do" says Adamson, "is take the audience to see these showsin a way that they hadn't seen them before, to get the camera in close and give a different perspectiveof what these artists do and show that perspective in high speed, slow motion 3D."Executive producer Cameron, whose company CAMERON | PACE Group shot the film with hisFUSION 3D camera system, says the film feels "as if you strayed into a circus in a dream. From thebeginning Andrew had a fairly clear vision of what he wanted to do and it continued to evolve. As aproducer, I kind of acted as his sounding board. The goal was to really celebrate the physical artistryof everything Cirque du Soleil is about, the design, the beauty and grace of those performances."Andrew had to walk a fine line working with such diverse elements from these shows. It was nevermeant to be about effects but to showcase the raw, pure physical human talent and their amazingability. While it starts in this sort of run down circus, it plays out as discovery of this other dimensionalcircus world they fall into, but it is still very much a circus. There are wires, harnesses andyou see it all, no effects hiding it. In seeing it, you experience the ingenuity of staging, costume design,the strength and agility of their talent that seem so effortless, so fluid. But the preparation andwork that goes into it is anything but effortless. What you see is pure Cirque."Adamson drew inspiration from such classics as Walt Disney's Fantasia, Lewis Carroll's Alice inWonderland, Peter Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet and his own personal experiences from watchinga traveling circus show in Mexico in 2000."It was a Fred Flintstone themed travelling circus. I remember the ringleader had a lot of years onhim, the lion had no teeth and one of the trapeze artists was a large woman wearing a star-spangled© 2012 Paramount Pictures3