I watched Stepmom for the ...
Question: I watched Stepmom for the 2,000th time this weekend and then read up on the Internet about where it was filmed. I love the house they live in and found that the real house and land are in upstate New York, but that the filmmakers only used it for exterior shots. For everything inside, they built this huge, elaborate soundstage. My question is, why spend all that time and money to make a soundstage that looks like a house when you could just use the inside of the house? Do they just love spending money? And why are scenes shot out of sequence?
Answer: First question first: It may seem as though, having found an attractive house whose exterior says what you want it to say about the lives of the people who live in it, that it would be cheaper and easier to use the real interiors as locations, rather than building a soundstage. But on a big-budget Hollywood movie, it generally isn't, for one of two reasons or a combination of both. First, you may adore the outside of the house and the way it fits into the landscape, but the inside may not be at all what you want. Maybe the ceilings are low, and while in real life they feel cozy and warm, on film the rooms look cramped and oppressive. Maybe the living room with the fantastic fireplace overlooks the front yard when, for the purposes of drama, it would be better if it overlooked the dramatic ocean view out back. Building a soundstage lets you fit the rooms to the needs of the story. In real life, switching, say, the relative positions of the living room and the eat-in kitchen is a major undertaking, especially if the production company doesn't own the house, which they usually don't. Location scouts go out looking for houses that can be leased for specific scenes, and the agreements with the owners (who are generally relocated to a hotel for the duration of filming) generally specify that when they come back, their homes will look the way they did when they left.
And those are just the aesthetics — the other issue is practical. If you want to do a smooth pan from one room to another that follows characters laterally (rather than tracking them from behind, which imparts a very stalkerish feel to the shot), then you need a cutaway wall. Not practical in a real house, but if you build the rooms on a soundstage, you can put up partial walls wherever you need them. Many soundstage rooms don't have ceilings, because that’s where cinematographers like to put the lights for an even, natural-seeming look. It's much easier to hang lights from a series of rods suspended over four walls than to figure out a way to bolt them to someone's real ceiling and not trash the place in the process. Homeowners also usually prefer that you not bolt tracks for a camera trolley to their hardwood floors, enlarge their windows, rip out their bathroom fixtures, or strip the wall paper from the hallways and replace it with contemporary textured concrete. And this is where the big-budget part comes in: If you're an indie filmmaker with limited funds, you work around the issues that come with real locations. If you've got a Hollywood budget, you don't have to. That may sound as though it's the same as "loving to spend money," but it isn't necessarily — if you've spent millions of dollars to hire Julia Roberts because you think she's the exact right person for the role, why cheap out on the other aspects of the film when you have the funds available? If you build a set, it gives you control: You won't lose power because your lights overloaded the circuits, your sound takes aren't ruined by banging pipes, you don't lose two days' shooting because it's February and the boiler blew, and even if you could get the high-priced talent to work in a house with no heat, you'd see their breath in every shot. So now you're paying a huge union cast and crew to sit in their hotel rooms and watch TV until the boiler's fixed. Money buys you control, control keeps you on schedule, and ultimately staying on schedule keeps you within your initial budget.
As to the second question, that's all about money, too. Let's say your movie includes two sequences set in Morocco. One takes place near the beginning of the story and the other near the end, after the characters have gone through hell and high water. It would be easier on the actors if you shot in sequence, rather than shooting their happy, lighthearted courtship and their resigned, older but wiser reconciliation back to back. But from a financial perspective, you only want to pay to take the cast and crew to a location once, so you shoot all the scenes on that location together and then pick up and go to the next place. If you're renting a house, you do all the scenes that take place there, and then you leave. If you're building an elaborate set, you shoot everything that happens on it in one go. When you see a credit for "second unit director," you're also seeing the result of a financial decision: Say your story involves a farm and it's important to see the passing of the seasons through the growth of the crops. Do you keep the principal cast and crew on the farm just so you can catch the cornfields at different stages of growth? No. You shoot the scenes in which the cast and the crops appear together (faking the background if you have to), then you send a smaller, less pricey second unit to pick up footage of ripening corn and waving fields of golden wheat. It's always about the money, and when it isn't, it becomes a notorious cautionary tale, like the behind-the-scenes sagas of Apocalypse Now (1979) or Cleopatra (1963) or Heaven's Gate (1980).
Oh, and Nancy — after 2,000 viewings of Stepmom (1998), you've probably strip-mined its riches. It might be time to move on to another movie. Just a thought.
