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When Universal greenlit the film, everyone involved understood that it had to be made for a reasonable price. Producer Barry Mendel describes Serenity as an “underdog movie. We’re lean and mean,” he says. “There’s no bloat on this movie. They gave us a certain amount of money and said, ‘be ingenious, be smart…figure it out.’”
For his feature directorial debut, Whedon chose to populate his crew with a mix of trusted longtime collaborators and some of the big screen’s most sought-after, behind-the-scenes craftsmen. Film editor LISA LASSEK had teamed with him on a number of episodes of Buffy. A natural fit for Whedon, he brags, “She can work an Avid like Vladimir Horowitz.”
Having often used several of Clint Eastwood’s films to describe the physical and emotional terrain of Serenity, Whedon jumped at the opportunity to work with Oscar®-nominated director of photography JACK GREEN ASC, who shot Eastwood’s Unforgiven, The Bridges of Madison County and Bird, among others.
“Everything had to be a little bit grander for the film,” says Whedon. “We had to amp up everything we had done to a much greater scale. I wanted desperately for this to be wide screen, because it’s a drama with a large cast, it’s a space epic and a bit of a western. All of that just cried out for wide screen. But you need to put something in that’s epic in scale.”
To design the universe of Serenity, the filmmakers brought on production designer BARRY CHUSID, who previously oversaw Earth’s destruction in the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. His primary task would be to incorporate and maintain a feel that fans of the show would instantly recognize while crafting a world that could capture the imagination of people who had never been there before.
Executive Producer ALISA TAGER comments, “Barry made everything so much more rich and more textured. He did an amazing job establishing the ship—the one thing that had to be nearly exact. Anybody who knew it from the show was going to recognize it immediately. When the cast came on, they had an immediate emotional reaction…a feeling that they were back home again.”
Chusid built Serenity’s interiors on soundstages on Universal’s sprawling back lot. He fit many of the sets with removable walls to create an all-encompassing environment that could be manipulated to accommodate Whedon’s vision for a lengthy opening sequence. He felt it vital to introduce the audience to Serenity by taking viewers through the whole of the ship in one continuous take.
Whedon’s mandate to Chusid and all the production heads was to make his imagined world, in which both Chinese and American cultures are dominant, utterly realistic. “This future is unlike the future that we normally assume,” comments the film’s costume designer, two-time Academy Award® nominee RUTH CARTER (Amistad, Malcolm X), who sought to reference visual themes from the series but find new ways to express them. “I think we assume it’s something in the Matrix-y vein, where everything is completely original and new. But I think this sci-fi hearkens back to civilizations that deteriorated, as well as those worlds and cultures that advanced.”
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