The New World movie starring Colin Farrell & Christian Bale
Colonial Jamestown Settlement, Virginia Panorama Quicktime VR Movies: The New World Official Site
Production Design: Rebuilding Lost Worlds With Jack Fisk
"Walking onto one of Jack Fisk's sets," says his New World colleague, costume designer Jacqueline West, "is like walking into Caravaggio's studio. It's like going back in time."
"Terry gave me the script for The New World about a year-and-a-half ago," says Fisk, who admits that "although I live in Virginia, I didn't know that much about either the Indian or Anglo cultures at that time Jamestown was settled...just what I had learned in history class."
Fisk was about to embark on a crash course which would result in the most authentic depictions of life in early 17th century North America, both Native and Anglo, yet seen on film.
"I got excited because I knew that the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown Settlement was coming up and thought that it was a story that should be told, about both cultures," notes Fisk. "To create James Fort, I studied all of the writings of the colonists, primarily the Jamestown Narratives, what remains of their eyewitness accounts." It was also a boon for Fisk, his Virginia-based art director David Crank and construction coordinator Richard Blankenship that simultaneous with their development of the sets, Dr. William Kelso and his team of archaeologists at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, including curator Beverly (Bly) Straube, were continuing to discover artifacts and information at the actual site of the fort just a few miles away. Fisk and Dr. Kelso soon created a friendly bond which had the two teams exchanging information. "Archaeologists are like detectives who investigate and put things together," notes Fisk, "so I was fortunate the Jamestown Rediscovery Project was happening so close to where we were shooting. In researching James Fort, we all worked from the same written materials, but the archaeologists are working from real things they find in the ground. Some of the information that Dr. Kelso gave me at our first meeting encouraged me to alter our original design of the fort."
The parcel of land owned by the Menzel family utilized for the building of James Fort was on the banks of the Chickahominy River, rather than the nearby James, the original site. Nonetheless, topographically the real and the reel locations resembled each other tremendously. What's more, the filmmakers discovered another perfect location, for Werowocomoco-Powhatan's capital city-a five-minute boat ride away from the site of the fort in the Chickahomy Wildlife Management Area. The filmmakers and Richmond based locations manager Charley Baxter helped to secure the cooperation of the Virginia Film Office and the Virginia Division of Game and Inland Fisheries, and paying great attention to environmental concerns, these two primary locations for The New World began to take form.
For art director David Crank, building the fort was like a dream come true. "Having grown up in Virginia, I built James Fort out of Popsicle sticks in fourth grade," he recalls. The unique task facing Fisk, Crank, Blankenship and their team is that for all intents and purposes, the environments that they were required to design and build-whether James Fort, Werowocomoco or the John Rolfe farmstead-needed to essentially be three-dimensional and as real as possible because of Terrence Malick's style of filming. "Terry is one of the few directors who doesn't look at drawings," Fisk notes. "He just says, 'Whatever you build, we'll come in like a documentary crew and shoot it.' Terry likes to film almost on a found object, so the more complete it is, the more he can use it. He doesn't really like the idea of just shooting a bit of a set or a wall in one direction. And since Terry doesn't like to light his scenes, he changes his direction according to the sun, so we needed to create an environment where he could move around accordingly. Terry likes things to be real, and it was fun to build the sets in as real a way as possible."
The building of James Fort required the huge structure to be erected on the banks of the river, with a large expanse of fields planted with wild grasses and fennel just beyond them. In the northern part of the Menzel property, another field would represent the original landing site of Captain Newport, John Smith and their band of some 100 settlers as they scan the terrain and begin to build their fort. "We were extremely lucky in that we chose, at Jack's instigation, to build things as close to the way we think they were actually built," says David Crank. "It was a lot of hands-on labor."
"I wanted to build out of local materials so that the clay, and the wattle and daub, looked right," explains Fisk. "But unlike the colonists, we had the wood delivered on trucks, used chainsaws for cutting it and had hydraulic forklifts for lifting the board. The colonists had to cut posts that were 12 to 15 feet high off the ground and another three feet underground for the palisades, needed to dig 1200 feet of trenches to put the posts in and then had to strip the posts of all their leaves and branches. That had to have been a superhuman task in 1607."
Nonetheless, Fisk and the New World construction crew resisted as many Hollywood tricks as possible, using the building of James Fort as almost an experiment in historical research...which often matched what was being discovered by Dr. Kelso and his team at the Jamestown Rediscovery site. "On one of his visits, I showed Dr. Kelso that I put the saw pit down by the water outside of the fort walls," adds Fisk, "because the palisade blocks all the wind and it gets stifling inside. For such physical labor, the breeze off the water makes it more pleasant. Shortly thereafter, the Rediscovery team found evidence of a saw pit in almost exactly the same area of the real fort. It made us feel great, especially when Dr. Kelso said that sometimes common sense is the best guide for archaeologists."
"Choosing locations is very important, and we were fortunate to shoot within seven miles as the crow flies from where the story took place," notes Fisk. "We built the perimeter wall of the fort in 30 days, and took another month-and-a-half to build the 11 or 12 four-walled structures inside. A lot of the carpenters were artists and teachers from Virginia, and they really got into it. And because of that, the work went faster. We put a 'Made in Virginia' sign outside the gates, each of which are 800 pounds, 12 feet high and five feet wide. We didn't use any hinges, just pins, carved out of wood, that actually worked better. Little experiments like that keep you going. Using natural materials that we found in the area was the key."
James Fort as seen in The New World is only 25 percent smaller than the original structure, and when completed, the rough-hewn fort and rustic structures within had the patina of age and an air and atmosphere of absolute reality. There was nothing clean or antiseptic about the fort, its muddy grounds peppered with pools of rainwater, its structures of earth and wood standing defiantly against the natural world that surrounds them.
If The New World's James Fort looked like what it was-a stark foreign invader on Native American soil-considerably more organically interwoven with its coastal forest environment is Jack Fisk's visual interpretation of Powhatan's city of Werowocomoco. As the Algonquian Natives of Powhatan's world kept no written records, Fisk, Crank and their staffs had to rely on sketches by Englishman John White, who traveled extensively among the Indians of North Carolina in the early 17th century, as well as John Smith's accounts and, importantly, Virginia Indian oral traditions.
Fisk's style of working, like Terrence Malick's, relies more on the winds of artistic imagination as it does on cold, hard facts. "Some of the design of Werowocomoco and the other Indian environments came from research, and some it came from...just spirits kind of telling me what to do. I felt a little awkward trying to recreate an Indian culture that was partially eliminated. The Indians were destroyed by the greed of the colonists for land. Once they discovered tobacco-which for the Natives was a sacred plant used ceremonially-and realized they could sell it, the colonists gobbled up every piece of clear land in Virginia and the Indians were moved to places like Ohio and Oklahoma. They just couldn't compete with the English in firepower or, ultimately, numbers. The sad thing is that because there wasn't a written language that recorded their history, we have to learn about their culture through what remains, and through archaeology. Just last year they discovered the site of the real Werowocomoco. I hope The New World helps create some excitement about the Virginia Indians, because it was a complete culture in and of itself, and different than Indian cultures which have been represented in other films. Part of our work is accurate, part of it is imagination, but I hope the feel of it is representative of a great culture."
Shaded by towering trees, the verdant, cool and pleasant land on the banks of the Chickahominy was a perfect site to build an Indian community that co-exists with nature, rather than imposes itself upon it. "The Indians were an agricultural community," Fisk notes, "and were wonderful hunters and fishermen. They took advantage of all the sea life from the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay."
What Fisk devised for Werowocomoco and other Indian backdrops are wonders of atmospheric production design, with the Powhatan dwellings seeming as if they've risen organically right out of the earth. The Native homes were constructed of natural materials, and based on the most contemporary research. "Unlike John White's drawings, which show the Powhatan houses as flat-ended buildings, latest archaeology has found they were all round-shaped, which we have done," notes David Crank. Both the smaller dwellings as well as Powhatan's imposing longhouse, are covered with matting which effectively protected them from the elements but could be rolled up to let in the air on good days.
In addition to the dwellings for Werowocomoco's inhabitants, Fisk and his crew designed and constructed ancillary structures that indicate the vibrant spiritual life of the community, including a hushed forest temple, carved wooden figures in a ceremonial circle and an extraordinary carving of a standing bear sculpted out right into a tree trunk by carpenter Michael Boone one day before shooting was to begin on that set.
A crucial aspect of the Werowocomoco sets, as in reality, were the fields of crops so meticulously tended by the Virginia Natives. "Times and crops have changed since the early 1600s," says Fisk, "and we spent some time researching and finding seeds for Indian corn and tobacco. We planted a three-acre field for the main Werowocomoco garden, and had a fantastic greens crew under Jeff DeBell. They planted environmental grasses that we believe were here at that time, and we were fortunate to be able in come in early spring and get the grasses to grow so that we could shoot them in late summer."
Corn, squash, melons and the sacred tobacco plants were assisted by the torrential summer rains which were to plague other aspects of the production.
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