Gregory Hoblit battles invisible effects on Hart's War - Shooting Stars - Interview

Post, March, 2002 by Daniel Restuccio

Hart's War director Gregory Hoblit belongs to a very elite club. He has found success directing television and feature films. Starting in local television in Chicago, he came to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, connected with Steven Bochco and served as a writer on Hill Street Blues, director/producer of L.A. Law and director on episodes of NYPD Blue.

In 1996 he directed the feature film Primal Fear with Richard Gere and Edward Norton, which earned Norton a supporting actor Oscar nod, He then directed Denzel Washington in Fallen and Dennis Quaid in the New Line sleeper hit Frequency.

Post had a chance to sit down with the director as he was putting the finishing touches on Hart's War (starring Bruce Willis) and preparing for the film's release.

POST: You have experience directing in both in features and television. How ore they similar?

HOBLIT: That's a big question. To begin with, or at the end of the day, they are exactly the same They need the same elements to be in place. You need scripts, an idea, material you want to shoot. Which hopefully is as articulate as possible on paper for everyone to see. You need actors to perform, or say the words or illuminate the script You need a location in which to shoot the action, the conversation or the picture that's being made, And you need all the equipment, everything that goes into to sewing it together.

POST: And how is it different?

HOBLIT: Where it starts to change, at least in the world of television to movies, is in scope and in size. In the time you have and the money you have in which to make something. It doesn't mean it's going to be any better. I think I can speak with some degree of certainty that the best television out there, from when I began in television with Steven [Bochco], to today is better than 90 percent of the movies being made.

In features you have people who enjoy the idea of going full bore and being completely consumed by a project. As opposed a my experience in television, particularly in series television, where the whole game is get a show up and get it running and the next five to seven years of your life are completely planned out. I'm more built to make movies... my personality, my need not to get stuck somewhere. Give me a foreign land to go to with a camera and I'll be there.

POST: The special effects in Hart's War are not obvious special effects. How did you achieve the "invisible" special effects in the film?

HOBLIT: What John Van Vliet, the visual effects supervisor, was great about doing is saying, "From here to here is visual, from here to here a mockup, from here to here is a special effect and from here to here is real," and making it all work. You look at the movie and it's pretty seamless. People who see that whole sequence have no idea that it's not pretty close to real. They go, you're kidding me, those aren't really airplanes? No. That really didn't happen? Wow! It's so well done and so well integrated and camouflaged that it appears invisible.

We have a train at the beginning of the movie -- one very specific shot, We didn't successfully cover the top of the train with snow, We needed snow on top of that so we put snow on, So we have CG snow blowing through this scene and on top of the train, People have no idea. They don't look at it as some kind of special effect because it was so well done,

When the plane comes down and crashes into the camp we did a lot of enhancing. We did do the blow up for real and we enhanced it where we could -- make it a little richer; add smoke, add fire.

POST: Can you tell us more about the dogfight scene?

HOBLIT: It is the one big CGI event in the movie, And as good as planes have been in prior movies, when I watched some of the flying sequences in Pearl Harbor I was well aware they were not real planes, I didn't want anyone for one second to think that those planes that were dogfighting and spinning around were anything but the real thing.

I was very pleased with the way those planes turned out, It's just a matter of storyboarding everything top to bottom very carefully. And sitting down with John Van Vliet and the stunt coordinator and the special effects guys and plotting out inch-by-inch, frame-by-frame almost, who had what responsibility so it would come together. Van Vliet was the guy who said, "This is how you do this," We took his cues from what he needed us to do to make it all work.

POST: How important was the post production in telling the story and how involved were you in the post production process?

HOBLIT: I'm as involved in posting this movie -- from everything my editor David Rosenbloom was doing to walking off the mixing stages at Skywalker Sound -- as I was in the making of the movie itself.

Every scintilla of organizing: the music, the visual effects, organizing the dubs, all of it. I mean, that's where you make your movie. You can plan it until the cows come home. At the end of the day you're sitting in a dark room, these days with an Avid and David. We're looking at what we did, both in horror and in joy depending on how successful or not successful it was, but that's it.