Stargate Special Edition | DVD Start Menu, Production Notes
These are the production notes as presented on the Stargate Special Edition DVD.I selected the Production Notes option from the menu after allowing the DVD Start Menu audio to play once completely. After going through the production notes I went back to the main menu.
I initially thought of adding a snippet of the audio from the intro of the movie itself because the production notes have no audio while you scroll through to read them, but decided to keep it as is because the sharing of this is intended to be as close as possible as if you are playing it on your own DVD player connected to the television.
Although you can paus the video to read the production notes, I've typed them up below:
Production Notes
Even in film school, Roland Emmerich fantasized about directing a science-fiction film set against the background of the ancient pyramids of Egypt. Ten years later when he cast Dean Devlin to act in Moon 44, Emmerich realized one of the pieces he needed had materialized.
Devlin was a writer as well as an actor. Because of their friendship and mutual admiration on Moon 44, Emmerich brought Devlin into his company, Centurion Film Productions. Devlin had a sci-fi project of his own min, one that he described as "Lawrence of Arabia in Outer Space."
Almost simultaneously the tow partners saw a retrospect of Egyptian Epic, including The Ten Commandments, El Cid, and Spartacus. The moderator of the event was Charlton Heston, who said films like those were far too expensive to make today. Challenged, the duo began writing Stargate.
The adventure caught the imagination of Le Studio Caanal +, who along with its French parent company, Canal +, had helped finance several films, including Cliffhanger and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Le Studio Canal + brought the project to Executive Producer Mario Kassar, and Stargate launched.
Stargate took months of careful preparation by a team of conceptual artists unrivaled in the industry. Conceptual designer Patrick Tatopolous came aboard to create the looks of the alien life forms. Production designer Hernert Gross assembled a team to create the designs for sets, including landscapes, vehicles and props for the palace.
Before production commenced, Peter Mitchell Rubin, who had created a computerized system of storyboarding, spent weeks turning blueprints, sketches and verbal descriptions into realistic images. With the computer Rubin provided filmmakers with three-dimensional storyboards that could display depth of focus and lighting.
In such a way, Rubin placed cameras in "sets" that had not even been built. Next he added his team's renderings of the characters in action to composite. The results astonished the filmmakers. Said Devlin: "It was almost as if we had a test shoot of the film before we had started filming."
Costume designer Joseph Porro had the daunting task of clothing thousands of people for a story that spans ten centuries. With no research available on fashion in 8,000 BC, Porro simply had to guess. "I don't know if it's accurate," he admits, "but I hope it's pleasing to the eye." Porro's costume designs for Abydos had to blend the style of ancient Egypt with the unknown of something Alien. The problem emerged that nowhere in the world could he find these material. Consequently Porro's team set out to make everything by hand.
For the slave population in the city of Nagada, Porro and his staff manufactured four-to-five thousand garments all inspired by those of ancient Bedouins. The costumes of Ra's palace required a different approach: airbrushes, latex paints, and intricate embroidery were applied to bilks, linens and velvets to give the fabrics an otherworldly effect.
Porrod ornately embellished palace costumes with hand-made beads and jewels. He and his team created every piece of jewelry as an original; they individually designed every bead, every scarab and every ornament. Porro even sculpted crude sandstone versions of the jewelry for wear by the film's many extras.
No ordinary soundstage had enough capacity to hold the magnificent main chamber of Ra's Palace; so the filmmakers decided to build the chamber themselves. It found home in the same cavernous come in Long Beach, Californie, that had once housed the famous Spruce Goose. The completed set measured over 300 feet long, 60 feet wide and 40 feet high, and was sculpted, engraved, painted and polished in its entirety.
A rare tool known as an "anarouter" created the engraved hieroglyphics. Ordinarily used for sing-making, the machine was able to do the engraving of 100 workers in one day. One of only nine in the world, the anarouter utilized in Stargate marks the first-time ever use of such a machine in film.
After scouting locations in the United States and Mexico, Emmerich and veteran location manager, Ken Fix, chose a barren are surrounding Yuma, Arizona. This area would serve as the desert landscaping for both planets. Chosen not only fir its vast sand dunes, Yuma had the good fortune to be in close proximity to Los Angeles.
Beyond temperatures of more than 125 degrees, the desert locale produced enormous hurdles. Tons of equipment needed transport across soft surfaces. For this feat the filmmakers employed a hone-combed, rubber-like material called "geoweb." When rolled onto the sand and wetted down, the geoweb formed an instant road.
Keeping the sand dunes pristine during a day of shooting proved nightmarish. The slightest mar or footprint meant the dune lost its perfect look. To make matter worse, the film shot during the height of dune buggy season. Crews were often forced to move to another dune to avoid capturing tracks on camera.
Crews also combated "sand prints" by using giant jet fans and helicopters to blow sand back to its original condition. In the end nature demanded a less technological solution, and a brigade of persons with brooms-dune sweepers-were kept on constant call.
Filming for the Giza dig site and 8,000 BC locations completed at the Ft. Yuma Indian Reservation. From there the filmmakers moved to Imperial Valley's Buttercup Valley, where they battled dust, scorpions and rattlesnakes. In the end the full crew numbers approximately 450 people, and the full cast contains over 15, 000 extras.
Due to the extreme heat of the region, costume and make-up departments were required to arrive on set at 4:00 AM before temperatures soared. In an effort to keep hydrated, crew, cast and extras found themselves consuming between 12,000 and 15,000 gallons of water each day. To keep the beverages cold, the producers brought between 8,000 and 12,000 pounds of ice on set every day.
to create the unique language spoken in Stargate, the filmmakers called on the expertise of Stuart Tyson Smith, PH.D., a research associate at the Institute of Archeology at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Smith linguistically assembled the form ancient Egyptian could have become after thousands of years.
James Spader, whose character is a linguist as well as an Egyptologist, found Smith invaluable as a dialect coach and technical advisor. For his part, Kurt Russel quipped, "I quickly went over the script and said, 'now wait a minute, I don't have to say a word of this ever, do I?'"
The actors had a great time on the set. "Roland runs a fun set, and I think that's an important aspect of making a movie," said Russell. Regarding Russell, Spader said, "If you're going out to the middle of the desert and you want to keep your head, he's a great guy to have along."
Principal photography completed the last week of December 1993. Phase two began with a model shoot in the Santa Clarita stages. During this time a 6.6 degree earthquake rocked the studios. Luckily no one was filming, but the earthquake leveled the stage and destroyed several models, causing a shooting delay of several weeks.
Audio: Exactly as presented on the DVD itself.
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