By Mike Szymanski
April 27, 2001
From the outside, it looks like every other massive airplane hangar,
but in the middle of it there's a bubble held up by air, like a giant egg. It's
the L-4 Bio Lab. Through a series of intense air locks and past a few
stern-looking guards, select visitors are escorted across the sand floor to a
room with lots of red warning signs.
RADIATION! WARNING!
A peek into the laboratory windows, where scientists are in shielded white
glass-enclosed uniforms, visitors see that they're dissecting things that look
like brains and worms, and tentacles. A truck-sized drum base is in the middle
of the bubble. That's where these worms end up. These worms become monsters that
are examined on that big drum, called a Vepo-Lock.
It's Evolution.
This is a recreation of the set that was built at the edge of the Grand
Canyon in Arizona. The final interior shots are being handled closer to home, in
a Boeing aircraft hangar in Downey, Calif. just outside Los Angeles.
Off in a corner David Duchovny, in black jeans, a black jacket and a scruffy
growth of beard, leans up against a faux metal cabinet and almost slides off it.
He laughs hysterically, slapping the back of young Seann William Scott, the lead
from Road Trip. This is no X-Files, Duchovny's less than serious.
Yet, Duchovny's got a beautiful red-head at his side nonetheless, just like
Scully. This time the serious red-head is multi-Oscar nominated Julianne Moore
who's dressed in tan pants and looking rather dour.
Through the glass doors storm the Governor of Arizona in a green
suit, also appearing rather serious after receiving the news that his entire
state is pretty well in the toilet due to an alien invasion. He looks a bit like
Dan Aykroyd, only bigger.
Well, he is Dan Aykroyd, and the man directing him, Ivan Reitman, is
responsible for making Dan's famous Ghostbusters films. Suddenly, Reitman
and the others see that visitors have entered the set and so he puts on his
public relations hat.
"There's not been a good science fiction comedy around for a long time," says
Reitman, standing defiantly in a turtleneck sweatshirt just outside the
Decontamination Area Control Room. "Well, come to think of it there's never BEEN
a sci-fi comedy before. This is the Ghostbusters of the Millenium!"
Never in Ghostbusters or Mars Attacks or any other movie even
remotely considered a sci fi comedy has there ever been such attention paid to
scientific detail. Here, there's a changing room for Haz Mat suits, and big
yellow containers, a wall of RAD 11 warnings as well as the governmental
instructions for incinerating deadly objects.
"This is where it's all going to happen," Reitman says.
That means, the nastiest aliens ever to invade the planet are landing right
there on the drum next to Ivan Reitman. That's why he's compiled the likes of
the woman who tracked down Hannibal Lecter and the guy who fights aliens on TV
almost every week.
"I produced Beethoven about 10 years ago and I knew David (Duchovny)
from that," Reitman says, recognizing Mulder's comedic talents even back then.
"I thought he was a good looking guy, he's got this wonderful wry, ironic sense
of humor. He's smart as hell and he should do a comedy."
It took this long to land a comedy that's just right for Duchovny.
Reitman (PICTURED RIGHT) laughs, "He was on TV for seven years where he plays
someone smart, but actually not very funny at all. So most people don't realize
he has that as part of his personality. I called him as soon as I had the script
and just started talking to him about it because I thought that his baggage
actually would be useful baggage on one hand, but at the same time he would be a
totally different character than the world is used to seeing him."
And after all, Duchovny knows his way around aliens.
Producer Dan Goldberg, who's worked for three decades with Reitman, helped
compile the impressive cast of alien-busters.
"We saw some clips from Orlando (Jones) on MAD TV that were very
funny," says Goldberg, mentioning the actor who was also in Bedazzled and
The Replacements. "Sean William Scott we did Road Trip with and
Julianne Moore, hey if you can get Julianne Moore she's one of the great actors
of the world."
Duchovny jumped at the chance to dye his hair a bit blonde and take
on the role of the community college science teacher who tries to save the
world.
"It's different and that's why I wanted to do it, because it's a totally
different performance style for me," Duchovny says. "The fact that there were
aliens in it was kind of a drawback, but it's just a superficial coincidence."
He analyzes his own attempts at getting a laugh by saying, "Comedy's
challenging because there's really only one criteria and that's if people laugh
or not. In drama - people like it a little or they like it a lot, but you don't
have to cry to like it. In comedy, if people aren't laughing its not successful,
so you're really putting your ass on the line."
Playing against his TV type is important right now, although he doesn't think
he's destined to playing dour detectives who chase aliens.
"Is the great casting director in the sky going, 'Hmm? He did The
X-Files and now he's done this. That's all he can do?' Gosh, I hope not,"
Duchovny smiles.
"Ivan hears everything," explains Duchovny, (PICTURED LEFT)who
jumped at the project because he could work with the man responsible for
Animal House. "He can hear in the tone of your voice whether or not he
thinks you're relaxed. In the morning I won't be totally relaxed and he'll come
to me and he'll talk to me about the voice and things you wouldn't expect."
The director was also an attraction for Jones, and so was science fiction. "I
was a chemistry major in college and I think that kind of automatically makes
you a fan because you can pick out all the stuff that doesn't make sense. It's
like, 'Uh-huh, right! Wrong element buddy! The periodical chart doesn't look
like that!' I haven't done one before, so it was nice to do this one," Jones
says. And, he says he always knew Duchovny was funny.
"I think I first saw him on Larry Sanders and then on Saturday
Night Live and I thought, 'This guy's really, really funny and I wonder when
he's going to do a comedy.' And this was it," says Jones as he looks over at
Moore who is sipping from a bottl of water.
"And, I get to stare at Julianne Moore all day long and Seann William Scott.
I was a big fan of his in American Pie, so I'm pretty much, I think, like
a pig in s--- right about now. It's all surreal in a sense."
Seann first met Reitman and has gotten along swimmingly with his
partner-in-alien-busting, Duchovny. He jokes that he'll have to find a serious
role now in order to break his streak of comedies, lest he get type-cast.
Reitman, who has a porcupine fish dangling from the camera monitor he uses,
insists with a straight face that this comedy is based on scientific fact. The
one-celled organism from outer space is a very real possibility. He's had a team
of scientists and creative artists put together the monsters who fell from a
meteorite. They're computer-generating the creatures and figuring out how they
move, and how they evolve.
Producer Goldberg insists that $70 million movie actually twists
science only slightly to make their comedic points. Single life cell forms could
come from meteorites from distant galaxies and impact the world as we know it on
Earth.
Dream Works is distributing the film, which will have a Columbia Pictures
international release. The story focuses on what happens when a billion years of
evolution happen over a period of a few weeks.
"It's about alien spores that float through space and populate a planet,"
Goldberg says. "It's called pan spermina."
