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| Cover from The Gates of Paradise production package (The Inscription over the Gate of Hell, from William Blake's illustrations of Dante's The Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto 3) - this could take several minutes to load, thus you may be better off saving it to your hard drive and opening it from there). |
| The Gates of Paradise Part 2 As a starting point, Stephen knew his film was going to be about somebody being corrupted and destroyed by lust. However, rather than simply having this person seduced and killed, he felt that some kind of symbolic representation of death was needed. It was with this in mind that he hit upon the idea of using a gate. Stephen had previously made a film enitled Justification in which the gates of heaven had been represented as merely a green door in a corridor. In line with the thematics of the opening voiceover in The Gates of Paradise, his new film wold need to essentially portray the gates of hell, which lead him to consulting Dante's The Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost for depictions of those gates. William Blake had illustrated both poems and immediately upon seeing his painting of the Inscription over the Gate of Hell from Inferno, Canto 3 of The Divine Comedy, Stephen knew what he needed. He decided simply to use an old fortified castle door, and to have the doomed person enter that door at the end of the film. He also came up with the heavily ironic title of The Gates of Paradise upon viewing this painting. However, if the issue of death was going to be so heavy in symbolism, Stephen decided that rather then use a further and even more complex system of symbols to try to suggest that lust as advocated by Satan leads to some kind of eternal damnation, he decided that it may be a good idea to simplfy things and literally have Satan appear in the film trying to use lust to ensnare some specific person. This idea led to Stephen deciding that he would use the fairly common (if somewhat sordid) situation of people having sex in nightclub toilets as a springboard from an innocent lust-filled encounter to the infinte torture visited upon the hapless participant. Obviously, one of the people was going to be Satan, and if it was Eve who corrupted Adam in the garden of Eden, why not have Satan as a woman corrupting a man? Oringally this led to Stephen naming the two characters Adam and Eve, but this idea was rejected as being too on the nose (not to mention somewhat theologically flawed), and was instead replaced with the naming of the characters as Urizen Leland and Phillip Williams. Phillip's name has no real symbolic significance, but Urizen's name has triple connotations. Urizen is William Blake's name for man's false god who replaces religion with materialistc desire, while Leland is the name of the murderer of Laura Palmer in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, and the name of the scientist who creates the bacteria that wipes out 99% of mankind in Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. From there, the screenplay was written over the course of a few days, and Stephen began his preproduction work in anticipation for the November shoot. Preproduction: Unlike Admonition, The Gates of Paradise was not being made as an independent film, but was in actual fact being produced under the banner of DLIADT, using their equipment, and being made on their time. This meant that rather than simply putting a screenplay together, getting a cast, and going out shooting on days that suited everybody, Stephen had to actually compile a detailed production package, get the go ahead from the powers that be (wankers all), ensure his crew (wankers nearly all) were up to speed on what the shooting of the film would entail, and make the film on a specific day within a specific time limit. In and of itself, this would prove to be an excellent learning experience for Stephen (and Andy), and, despite frustrations in the postproduction period (caused in whole by the pillocks who run DLIADT), it was something which ran pretty smoothly for the most part. One of the most important elements of the preproduction period was designing the story boards, compiling a shot list and figuring out a shooting schedule. These three processes lead naturally enough from one in to the next, however the process of storyboard drawing is both time consuming and monotonous, and, if you cannot draw, extremely frustrating (not to mention pretty pointless). About the only good idea that drawing the storyboards actually produced was the concept of shooting Urizen from a low angle and Phillip from a high angle. Everything else was pretty worthless and was either changed on the day of the shoot, or was so obvious that it didn't need to be drawn in the first place. The shot list was merely a verbal description of each storyboard, while the shooting schedule was the order in which each shot would be recorded (as dull as this last process is, it is absolutely vital when working with a crew). on to the gates of paradise page 3 back to gates of paradise page 1 back to products links page back to home |
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| Last updated: 12 June 2003 |