Special effects for The Gift
The crazies were building this tower to the sky - this tower to the other universe - and at the very end of the season we needed an actual tower.
We had seen pieces of it which we built here - which were always at ground level - but now we needed this huge imposing tower. So, in one of the neighbouring areas of Los Angeles called Vernon (which is very industrial), we found a company which had what looked like a huge oil derrick in its front yard.
It was used for testing oil drills or something like that. We went to them and had to get permission to get up on this thing, which was again problematic. It had been there for years and they had to have an engineer check it structurally and say it was safe and all the local authorities had to sign off.
The Art Department went down and covered this thing with the rubbish and stuff that [the crazies] were building this out of and then we had a platform at the end of it. One of our characters - I won’t tell you the name - has to be marooned on a diving board which comes right from the top of this thing, but we were down on the ground and we had to shoot up and so we made a model of this particular character.
She had a long skirt on, and when we put it up there, we put it up there days before we had to shoot it. It sat up there for days and of course, when you’re on the ground and you just happen to look up, you see a plank with this girl marooned on the end of it.
Because the wind was blowing her dress, she looked like, not only was she up there, [but] she was moving!
We called the local Vernon police department, who were quite casual about the whole thing and said "Look, if you get complaints about a lady…"
Also, we were concerned about traffic, [drivers] suddenly being distracted by seeing that thing up there, but they were quite casual about it. They said "Okay, fine, fine, fine" and they never told us they had any complaints or anything, but when I went out there, and was miles away, I looked up and I saw this poor woman up there billowing in the breeze and thought "We are so lucky it hasn’t caused accidents or something". That tower continues on into the sixth year, which we’re doing now.
