Dark City (1998)
In late 1989, Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas wrote the first script for Dark City, a fantasy concept that had percolated in his mind since he was a child deathly afraid of the dark. Proyas began having recurring dreams involving strange-looking bald men who came out at night and chased him with knives. In these dreams, the strange men would rearrange things in his bedroom and beyond, often altering reality itself. As a teenager, Proyas gravitated toward stories with such concepts from sci-fi authors like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, inolving characters who live in a world they think is real only to find out it’s actually an elaborate artificial creation or experiment. He became obsessed with the concept of unseen, strange beings altering reality amd running the world subversively.
Proyas is a fan of classic Hollywood movies that tell stories from the perspective of different characters rather than just one.. It began as a fantasy-laden detective story told in the manner of a Raymond Chandler novel with its many characters and multiple layers of complexity. The human characters were drawn from film noir archetypes, including a lonely detective and an innocent man wrongly accused of murder. Later scripts added a femme fatale. The characters are players in this world manipulated by strange men for unknown reasons. At this point, Proyas was writing without a full understanding for these strangers’ motivations, relating developments from an unconscious level. He felt his overriding theme concerned humanity becoming aware and then suspicious of the powers that control us our entire lives.
As he was finishing work on 1994’s The Crow, Proyas reevaluated Dark City, while further developing themes to include whether memories make us who we are, or if we have a soul or something more intangible that guides us. If an innocent person is implanted with memories of being a serial killer, will they begin to murder, or will they remain innocent?
Miramax, the production company behind The Crow, intended to produce, but they underwent unsettling management changes that found Proyas seeking greener pastures elsewhere. Producer Edward R. Pressman became attached in early 1994 but Disney soon took it, intending to release it under their Buena Vista banner with Andrew Mason producing. Production was slated to take place in Proyas’s native Sydney, Australia. However, Disney soon put it into turnaround. 20th Century Fox picked it up in mid-1995, announcing it as their first production Fox’s new Sydney Studios. However, as with prior efforts, initially positive enthusiasm waned when changes to the story unraveled the intricate plot until it became nonsensical.
New Line Cinema picked it up in April 1996 as part of a two-picture deal with Proyas, with the other film being a remake of Hammer Films’ classic Quatermass and the Pit. Due to another production with a similar title called Mad City, New Line asked Proyas for alternate titles. They tentatively retitled the projectto Shadows then Mystery Men (which is what the Strangers were called in early scripts) but they decided to retain Dark City when Mad City made little impact upon release in 1997.
They immediately began looking for talent in Australia and in Hollywood. New Line wanted a big star to play the lead role, but Proyas insisted that he be an unknown, becaue it was vital for audiences not to know throughout the film if he was a hero or villain. After many auditioned, Proyas settled on British actor Rufus Sewell, who gave a different vibe than a typical gung-ho American. Sewell, who had mostly been in more art-house films, like that he would be starring in a film that his working-class parents could bring up in the pub they frequented. William Hurt as also cast early, followed later by Jenniffer Connely and Kiefer Sutherland. Many Australian actors filled the remaining smaller roles. Proyas is an intelligent and demanding actor that frequently challenged Proyas to rethink motivations he’d cultivated for years. Connelly was chosen because she brought a lyrical quality to the role. The script called for a nude scene but Connelly had determined she’d done that too many times before and did not want to do it for Dark City. The actors could be challenging, particularly Hurt, btu Proyas insisted that everyone, including himself, be subservient to the story and their characters and not to worry about trying to get Oscar nominations.
At this point, Proyas realized that the script was more a surrealist fantasy than a viable film project so more screenwriters were hired to help refine that raw vision into something sellable for the budget to bring it to life. To make the story more accessible, Lem Dobbs came in and worked with Proyas for a year or two to flesh out the characterizations, followed by David S. Goyer after it moved to a new studio to add more action sequences and a science fiction underpinning to make it more relatable. Another nameless writer helped when it moved to New Line. There is no explicit origin for the Strangers, though it’s implied they’re insectoid parasites from another dimension, perhaps extraterrestrial, who control and animate human cadavers. Dobbs compares the Strangers to the Fates, controlling the lives of the citizens within this world. Proyas views Dark City more as a dark fantasy comic book premise for adults rather than straight science fiction.
The shoot was set for 15 weeks at the newly opened Fox Studios at Australia’s Sydney Showgrounds. They preferred the city streets to be an indoor set because every scene took place at night. The original budget was $20 million budget but by the end it was estimated to cost closer to $40 million. Australian George Liddle designed the sets. Australia’s D-Films digital design shop handled the visual effects.
A scene of Murdoch breaking through a brick wall to reveal the city is floating in the vast emptiness of space is an existential metaphor for the void that we’re all floating in space alone trying to make sense of our own minds.
As for the Tuning, Proyas argues it isn’t magic so much as a very advanced psychological advancement among a race with a shared mind. Just as Arthur C. Clarke observed that, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishible from magic”, Robert Anton Wilson further promoted that advanced parapsychology is even less distinguishible.
Proyas says he didn’t make another film between The Crow and Dark City because the untimely death of Brandon Lee still shook him. He was offered several action movies that he thought were too stupid to consider. He offered his script for Dark City instead and they politely showed him the door.
The city was supposed to be represented as being built by the memories of the inhabitants, which is why the designs don’t make complete sense.
Proyas wanted to hearken to the 1940s because that’s when noir films were popular and this was a detective mystery. He also wanted to do a film where the stars looked glamorous and wore trenchcoats and hats. However, there are things from the 1980s that will also make an appearance. That’s because the city is construction from the memories of the inhabitants, who go back decades.
Originally the prostitute character was Asian but they changed it to avoid stereotypes adnot to open new questions.
Proyas thiks the only way Dark City was funded was because of the success of The Crow and that Dark City contained some similar elements.
The psychic battle in the climax was specifically meant as an homage to the Japanese animated feature, Akira.
Shell Beach is a fictitious place concocted by the Strangers to further manipulate the city residents into thinking that compliance could lead to a better situation.
There was an effort to avoid overt blood and gore to avoid an R-rating, but it still got that rating anyway. New Line offered the team a great deal of creative freedom after the initial discussions on what they wanted to achieve from the project.
Sewell calls it a Fritz Lang-style sci-fi film, with elements of Brazil, Barton Fink, and Jacobs Ladder. Proiyas wanted an actor that was a clean slate, someone most weren’t familiar with. Proyas auditioned about 100 actors from North America, Europe, and Australia. He chose Sewell because he has a real intelligence and carries a certain look that he could be dangerous. He’d seen Sewell in some English TV productions and a London stage play and enjoyed his energy, vitality, and sense of humor. He’s handsome enought to play a leading man yet idiosyncratic enough to be a character actor. Not everything is on the surface in his performance.
Sewell said the experience was weird. He’d come to Australia hoping to spend time at the beach enjoying the sun and sand but instead, he was in a dark hangar every day. He didn’t see a ray of sunlight until the weekends. Sewell said it was difficult to portray Murdoch because he was a blank canvas, unable to remember who he is, and not sure if what he does remember is real. He had to resist the temptation to play the part as if he were not a murderer because he didn’t know, so he played the role of someone who presumably could kill rather than as a sweet angel of innocence. He was like a child because he had no memories to root him, so he played him like a child who could go astray. He had aduot instincts and vocabulary but couldn’t remember any experiences them back it up. He couldn’t remember what his face looked like without a mirror or even his name.
Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos. He says Dark City was close to his artistic influences: Vasquez, Bruegel, and Bosch, plus the cinematography in F.W. Murnau’s films, especially Nosferatu. Lots of shadows contrasted by strong whites. Miniatures were used and painted matte backgrounds, with some CG enhancement. Psychic energy fuels the subterranean machines control the world above in a process they call “tuning”. Tatopoulos got the idea of moving and morphing the buildings of the cityscape while working on Independence Day and seeing the crew move building facades around for different city setups. Proyas says that he noticed how they would move one-third scale buildings on wheels for The Crow changing the background to represent different places in the city. They decided to repeat the technique for Dark City and as the buildings moved around, you couldn’t see the technicians moving them and Proyas thought it looked cool and they should incorporate that into the movie.
In test screenings, some viewers marked that they didn’t understand the movie. Changes were made, but people still didn’t understand it and fewer people said they liked it, so they changed it back.
Proyas enjoyed fantasy realms stating that he liked movies made for adolescent grownups, especially now that they were becoming mainstream.
Sutherland and Sewell were mischievous when appearing together and would often intentionally mess up their performances to tease Proyas.
Proyas says a main theme is of how humans are increasingly becoming pawns and guinea pigs at the whims of government, media, and corporations, who persistently contol and manipulate us. It’s difficult to break away from their control, but it’s important.
Mr. Hand reveals they fashioned the city on stolen memories from different eras and different pasts. The revise and refine it each night in order to learn, much like a scientist who studies lab rats through a series of ever-changing tests. The goal is to find the secret of the individual human soul so they can avoid evolutionary extinction caused by their collective mindset.
The film explores how much of who we are comes from our memories. With different memories, we become different people. Our individual memories make us unique.
The role of Dr. Schreber was originally intended to be a much older character in the mold of Ben Kingsley. However, Proyas was excited about the possibility of including the 31-year-old Sutherland in the film due to their initially easy rapport and his interesting ideas for what to do with the role. The inspiration for Schreber’s physical ticks and speech patterns (Proyas described Schreber as a mix of Peter Lorre and Ben Kingsley) came to Sutherland as he was reading he script in an airport hotel waiting for the shuttle. He wasn’t a sci-fi fan, but he found this story intriguing.He felt it was the kind of movie his father, actor Donald Sutherland, would have been great in. Kiefer told proyas that Scheber would be more of a tragic figure if he were younger. Proyas was skeptical but Kiefer wore him down. Sutherland came up with the idea of a facial disfigurement but after wearing the prosthetic 14 hours a day every day, he wished he hadn’t suggested it and avoided roles that required such things in the future.
Exteriors were shot in a part of the city of Sydney knwn as The Rocks, which had architecure dating back to the 1920s.
Goyer observes that the Strangers are what humaity coul dbecome if we lost our souls. They had reached a point in their evolution in which there was nothing left to do. They were literally dying of boredom seeking to manipulat humans to find the mojo they were missing. They’re like vampires, but sympathetic, tragic ones longing to continue to evolve and reorganize like humans do, which feeds the soul.
The filmed ending differs from the original story. The early drafts featured a bleak ending where the Strangers won. However, as they continued to revise, Proyas became disenchanted with the sour ending and determined that humans should find a way to triumph in this world where individuality is suppressed. Murdoch had to win by taking away the power of the Strangers.
Proyas had Richard O’Brien in mind for the Strangers, having admired his work in Rocky Horror Picture Show. He wasn’t sure he’d be interested. After signing him, he cast the other Strangers to fit in O’Brian’s eccentric mold. O’Brien jokingly came up with an idea doe “Dark City: The Musical” and a song about necrophilia.
Alex Proyas directs and co-scripts this science fiction mystery-thriller with film noir leanings, along with co-writers Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, which has its champions who think it is truly something special, including Roger Ebert, who proclaimed it the best film of 1998. Though I personally find it too uneven in its execution to agree, I will give Proyas credit for crafting a masterfully visual experience that contains some pretty nifty, philosophical sci-fi concepts worth pondering. That it beat the similarly premised The Matrix to the punch by over a year is at least worthy of some respect.
After a superfluous and all-too-revelatory voice-over intro (objected to by Proyas and removed for the director’s cut), Rufus Sewell stars as John Murdoch (originally Jonathan White), who wakes up one day with amnesia in an non-descript hotel room with a butchered woman, immediately having to go on the run as the prime suspect in a series of murders of prostitutes around the city — but he can’t remember if he did it. In addition to the police force, Murdoch is also hotly pursued by a shifty psychologist named Dr. Shreber (Sutherland), a tenacious detective, Frank Bumstead (Hurt), a woman claiming to be his philandering wife, Emma (Connelly), and a spate of pale and creepy-looking, trenchcoated Nosferatus (or so they appear), who are looking for Murdoch because he seems to possess abilities above and beyond what normal men have, which makes him a danger to them. As Murdoch seeks to get to the bottom of who he is and what’s going on, he discovers that there’s an even bigger mystery, which is who everyone else is, what kind of city they all reside in, why is it being controlled by these shady creatures who seem otherworldly, and just why does it always seem to be nighttime?
I realize that many people have their own theories as to what Dark City is all about, but at the time I originally saw it on DVD in the late 1990s, was it is just some trippy story built on reveals. A recent re-watching of it gives me a different feeling, and I wonder how many people see the movie as I do: a metaphor for the Hollywood filmmaking process. In a sense, the entire city is like a studio lot, in which buildings are repurposed or changed at regular intervals, and its inhabitants are re-cast into ever-changing roles at the whim of the “Strangers”, who are like the studio heads (interestingly, all male and all white) who are using their characters to create their own stories, all set in this gloriously old-time Hollywood era full of damsels, killers, and cops.
Proyas called the Strangers demented scriptwriters who were creating and revising the world, peopling it with characters and situations. Just like the Strangers, the real screenwriters continued to revise their script, experimenting with different protagonists, plot points, genre conventions, and endings. The early scripts had the detective as the protagonist. Because he’s so logical and what happens makes little sense, he feels he is losing his mind as he pursues Murdoch. However, Proyas eventually liked the Murdoch character, called John Walker in earlier drafts, more because he was being chased throughout, and his emotional stakes were higher than the detective’s analytical observations and decided to tell the story from his perspective. He hired Lem Dobbs because he was an American who could fill the script with appropriate American expressions of an older era. Dobbs also brought in period locations, like the automat, which is a relic of the past that seems futuristic, providing the best of both worlds they were looking to achieve. He liked the notion of following individual characters who converge their destinies into one cause. He encouraged Proyas to redefine the nature of the Strangers from being insects controlling the empty skulls of human cadavers, something Dobbs found disgusting and done too many times before in gory films like those done by David Cronenberg. Then he brought on on David Goyer to help inject more action and film noir elements. Goyer concocted the motif of spirals throughout the story, from the rat maze that serves as a metaphor to the scars carved into the bodies by the killer. The spiral was meant to serve as a symbol of the search for the human soul.
As the title would imply, the look of the film is dark, so make sure you have good projection, or a bright TV set, if you are to undertake it and expect to see what’s going on. It’s quite similar in this fashion to Proyas’s previous film, The Crow, which features similar lighting and emphasis on set design, as well as the same cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski (Crimson Tide, A Perfect Murder). Others will draw comparisons to other sci-fi classics like Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Brazil, which all featured dark, gloomy and Kafka-esque cityscapes with much more going on underneath the surface that feels dense and oppressive. Proyas says he was much more visually inspired by Metropolis than modern takes.
I realize some viewers are taken away by the film, but, while I will admit to finding it somewhat nifty in parts, I can’t quite rave as strongly. First, it is very uneven in its performances, with plenty of hamming from its cast all around, especially with a cartoonish turn by the most well-known of the film’s stars at this point, Kiefer Sutherland, who sputters, stutters, wheezes, and limps around the film as if playing in a movie for high camp value. The movie also overdoes the style quotient, to the point where it plays more like a slew of cut scenes to a video game that looks like it would be more fun to play than to watch, especially as a handful of sets get used and reused in this movie even though we’re supposed to be exploring the environs of a very large city. It’s loopy and trippy, but with no characters to care about or root for, and a story that’s merely a series of dizzying plot points that tease the mind but do little to make you think the movie is anything but an elaborate puzzle box. If the Strangers, as the aliens come to be called, want to learn about what it is to be human, it certainly doesn’t seem like they’d glean much from the sketchy representatives found in their very city.
Proyas’s artistic vision is the real attraction to Dark City, which often times feels like a graphic novel come to life (hearkening back to The Crow yet again). It’s a mystery at its core, but one with multiple levels of intricacy, such that it will either fascinate you into a repeat viewing shortly after, or cause you to check out early and never bother to return. Even if the labyrinthine plot loses you, there’s still a great deal to see and admire as the pieces of the puzzle eventually start to come together, even if the finale is full of a little too much bombast and silly head-to-head (literally) confrontations for my personal taste, particularly in the explosive showdown. While it did end up in cinemas a year before The Matrix, the Wachowski opus, which also featured a man who wakes up to realize the world he lives in is all a fabrication, proved to be so popular and inclusive that Dark City has probably been relegated to no more than cult film status for its small but vocal collection of fans.
Qwipster’s rating: B
MPAA Rated: R for violent images and some sexuality
Running Time: 100 min. (director’s cut runs 111 min.)
Cast: Rufus Sewell, Kiefer Sutherland, Jennifer Connelly, William Hurt, Richard O’Brien, Ian Richardson, Bruce Spence, Colin Fiels, John Bluthal Mitchell Butel, Melissa George
Director: Alex Proyas
Screenplay: Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, David S. Goyer