The Sky's The Limit

It'

s not often you get to see so clearly how money is the only difference between genius and insanity. If Paramount hadn't given first-time director Kerry Conran $40 million to make the action movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow (opening Sept. 17), Conran would still be filming his brother acting out scenes in front of a blue screen in his apartment, then staying up all night turning that footage into a giant-robot movie on his Macintosh. He would have been that guy in your IT department you go to only when no one else is around.

From 1996 to 2000, Conran, 37, lived with a weatherman's 14-ft.-tall blue screen clogging up his living room. "It was absurd. You just had to look at it and laugh," he says. It was, to put it kindly, not the kind of thing you want a woman to see when she comes over on a first date. "That assumes you have a date," says Conran. "I was working nonstop on this thing." After four years of monklike devotion to the dream of making a Bruckheimer-size sci-fi flick without leaving his apartment, Conran had completed six minutes.

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Lucky for him, a friend of his brother's wife worked for producer Jon Avnet (Risky Business, Fried Green Tomatoes). Avnet liked the six minutes of robots so much he put up his own seed money and persuaded Law, Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Giovanni Ribisi to sign up for a vintage-looking film about a pilot and a tagalong reporter saving the world from an evil genius. "It's a rare chance we get to do something completely original artistically," says Jolie. "People use blue screen to cheat or enhance a little, but he had a film in his head that could only be done with all the newest technology. We made a whole new type of film, mixing old and new styles. It's a piece of art with its own unique texture."

The only arty texture stuff the actors got to do was minimalist theater in front of a blue screen in a Van Nuys, Calif., warehouse, stooping when Conran yelled "Duck!" and pretending they were interacting with everything from dirigibles to a desk to a shaky hologram of a digitally resurrected Laurence Olivier (another actor voiced his new lines). George Lucas and others have created scenes in front of blue screens before, but Conran was the first to try to build absolutely everything nonhuman on the computer. It's the anti — Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Conran leaving holes for the actors, who ran from one piece of tape on the floor to another as cameramen were instructed to tilt and rotate by exact degrees at precise moments. That, it turns out, does not make for happy cameramen, who have creative ideas of their own.

Making a movie without any sets might radically change filmmaking, but Conran didn't set out to do that. He created a new use for animation-rendering software because it was the only way he could make the Raiders of the Lost Ark — style movie he wrote as an ode to 1940s comic books. Going to Nepal, having a zeppelin dock at the Empire State Building, re-creating 1939, even shooting at Radio City Music Hall were all too expensive for a novice director. So he got pictures of those places and that period and turned them into 3-D models on a computer. "A lot of the decision to make this all blue screen was economic. Were that not the issue, I don't know if you'd do it," he says. "Because the one dirty little secret is, it's very labor intensive. It requires a devotion that's not healthy or sustainable." Forget the lack of dates: in the past two years Conran has seen only one movie. And yes, it had Star Wars in the title.