Public Servant Lifestyle

Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey duel with dragons - and each other - in a post apocalypse Britain.

Reign Of Fire

In present-day London, 12-year-old Quinn inadvertently wakes an enormous fire-breathing dragon from its centuries-long slumber. Twenty years later, much of the world has been scarred by the beast and its offspring. The dragons are extremely intelligent, highly evolved… and they don’t like sharing the planet.

As a fire chief, Quinn (Christian Bale) is responsible for warding off the beasts, and keeping a small community alive as they eke out a meager existence. Into their midst comes a hotshot American, Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), who says he has a way to kill the beasts and save mankind –a way Quinn’s never seen done. Directed by Rob Bowman (The X Files), Reign of Firefuses a medieval past with a post-apocalyptic future in this exciting tale of adventure and survival.

Origins Of the Project

In the exciting new film Reign of Fire, several talented and pedigreed filmmakers combined their talents to create something new: a post-apocalyptic dragon film.

“The great thing about Reign of Fire is that it provides a very realistic scenario, a grounded scenario, for a very fantastic notion,” notes director Rob Bowman, who had previously directed and produced countless memorable episodes of television’s The X-Files, as well as the highly successful 1998 big-screen adaptation of the television series. “To me, projects like this one work the best when you have something realistic for the audience, to ground them in reality. If you show them real people who are dealing with real problems, and then show that it’s because of the dragons, then the audience will be as afraid as the characters are.

“It seems like there are a lot of special effects films that just throw their effects at you, like an all-you-can-eat banquet,” Bowman continues. “I wanted to do something different: take a big idea – a big, special-effects movie (we have over 130 visual effects shots), but restrain ourselves a little bit, and make it more about the people on the ground than the dragons in the air, then we could really make a great movie.”

“We’ve all talked a lot about creating as much reality as possible,” says Christian Bale, who plays Quinn, the stern, resolute leader determined to keep his charges alive. “That was what I wanted to do from the very beginning, and when Rob explained his vision, it was as if he’d read my mind. I couldn’t wait to come on board.”

“The dragon fights are spectacular, sure, but you also give a damn about the people on the ground,” says Matthew McConaughey, who plays Van Zan, the hotshot American leader who calls himself a dragonslayer. “If the movie had a cartoon style instead of a style based in reality, I think that might get lost.”

“Reign of Fire is like nothing you’ve ever seen before,” notes producer Gary Barber, who serves as producer of the film along with his Spyglass Entertainment partner, Roger Birnbaum, as well as Richard D. Zanuck and Lili Fini Zanuck.

“It’s visually exciting and clearly unique,” Birnbaum continues. “The fact that it starts off in present day is one of the key elements to making the story work.”

“What’s appealing about ‘Reign of Fire’ is its originality,” adds co-producer Dean Zanuck. “No one has ever seen dragons matched against modern battle equipment like tanks and helicopters. With its uniqueness, it really stands out from the pack.”

“The type of movie I grew up watching – the movies I loved as a teenager, learning to make movies – were always realistic,” Bowman concludes. “It’s easier to be swept away. I mean, as an audience member, once you come to the movie, you’re willing to suspend your disbelief – you want to see the dragons. It’s up to me to keep their trust.”

The film, shot on location in Ireland, combines state-of-the-art digital effects to present an original vision of a world decimated by dragons. “With all the varying elements – from the casting to the locations to the production design to the CGI to the practical effects – I can honestly say that this has been one of the biggest films I’ve ever worked on,” says producer Gary Barber.

About The Story

The film opens in present-day London, where 12-year-old Quinn, exploring his mother’s construction site, accidentally awakes a centuries-old dragon, who proceeds to destroy everything in sight.

Twenty years later, much of the world has been destroyed by the dragon and its offspring. Quinn is now a fireman – a most important job in a world where everyone watches the sky for flames. Quinn, with his confidant, Creedy, oversees the castle and a small group of humans eking out a meagre existence. The dragons attack often, and the number of humans is dwindling. “Every time you see a dragon, you know there’s every chance that you’re going to be dead within a couple of seconds,” says Gerard Butler, who plays Creedy.

Quinn’s methods are to wait out the dragons – if humans can survive as the dragons die off, they will be able to start anew in future generations. “The dragons are getting hungrier – they’ve pretty much decimated the planet and there’s not much left for them to eat,” Bowman notes. “So every time there’s a person running around, it’s extremely dangerous. You’re 150 lbs. of steak. You don’t go outside unless it’s absolutely necessary, and when you do, you keep one eye on the sky.”

Enter Denton Van Zan, a hotshot American who claims to have a way to kill the beasts. Quinn doesn’t believe it… until Van Zan and his ragtag group of 'archangels' demonstrate their skill. Van Zan has come to Quinn’s castle to recruit manpower for an attempt to kill the original dragon in London – a bull from whom all the dragons originate.

“It’s not that the dragons are evil,” says Matthew McConaughey, who should know – after all, it’s the job of his character, Van Zan, to fight the beasts. “They’re more Machiavellian. They’re just doing what they have to do to survive, even if that means getting rid of mankind along the way.”
Quinn thinks that a run on London is a suicide mission and he refuses to risk the lives of his charges by committing such a foolish act. However, before long, Quinn is forced to confront his own inner demons and take a stand.

About The Dragons

“The first reaction I had when I finished reading the screenplay was, ‘Wow, what do the dragons look like?’” says director Rob Bowman. “And the answer was, we wanted to make them as vicious, as organic, and as scary as we could.”

The job of turning Bowman’s vision into a living, breathing beast fell to visual effects supervisor Richard Hoover and co-supervisor Dan DeLeeuw. Both are veterans of effects-heavy films; Hoover is an Academy Award® nominee for his work on the effects of the summer blockbuster Armageddon, and has also supervised the visual effects on Unbreakable, Inspector Gadget, and Jungle2Jungle. DeLeeuw has lent his considerable skills to such films as 102 Dalmatians, Bicentennial Man, The Rock, Mighty Joe Young, and Crimson Tide.

“The thing that Rob told us at the very beginning was that he wanted to make a dragon that was stone cold real,” says DeLeeuw.

“It wasn’t enough to portray something evil and malevolent,” Hoover notes. “If the environment and the beast don’t jibe – if they don’t seem like they can be part of the same world – well, the audience is so sophisticated that they’re immediately taken out of the picture. Rob presents our real world in the movie, so we worked hard to create a dragon that could fit into our world.”

To do that, Bowman, Hoover, and DeLeeuw borrow elements from nature. “We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we wanted the audience to respond to the dragon,” Bowman says. “We designed it to move on the ground like a leopard, with the sound of a cobra about to strike; the skin of an alligator, but the spine of a serpent. The idea was that the audience would then bring pre-set reactions to the dragon – that they would have the subconscious reaction, ‘Jeez, I’ve seen that in National Geographic’ – and be naturally, innately, afraid.”

The dragon has a compact, lithe body, with enormous, folding wings, allowing it a graceful flight through the air. “There was a whole process where we figured out how we wanted it to fly,” Bowman notes. “Did we want it to flap, or fall out of the sky, or glide through the air? Okay, we want it to glide. Well, then, you can’t have a large torso and small wings – the wings have to catch enough air to support the body. And that’s when the serpent design of the torso came in.”

The dragon’s body is covered in thousands of scales that use state-of-the-art computer animation to achieve a new level of reality. “What’s great about the scales is that they ride on the surface of the dragon’s skin,” DeLeeuw notes. “As the skin moves, the scales pull apart, the gaps separate, and the scales don’t deform or stretch.”

“If we had just painted them, it would have looked like a rubber suit,” Hoover adds. “Instead, they can tilt up, overlay each other, slide apart, and reflect light, just like a real reptile’s scales.”

“I didn’t want the dragon to breathe fire,” Bowman points out. “I mean, if fire came out if its mouth, it would burn its mouth. So how were we going to do it? Well, it turns out there’s an African beetle that blows two opposite chemicals out of its rear end, and when the two touch, there’s a flame. That’s its defense mechanism.

“Then, I was watching a nature special about cobras – it showed this cobra spitting, and I thought, ‘That’s how we’ll do it,’” Bowman continues. “The dragon has glands that squirt out the opposite chemicals, and they touch about 15 feet in front of the mouth, and that’s where the fire is.

“The biggest thing – and the thing I had no idea about when we started this process – was that you’re basically building an animal from the skeleton on up,” Bowman says. “I thought it was much simpler – draw the dragon, the guy puts it into the computer, and you’re done. No. You have to build every bone, every muscle, every gland, every toenail… it took me nine months to make one dragon.”

But the work of creating the dragon and making it look realistic wasn’t all done in front of a computer screen.

Hoover was on the set and would represent the dragon as Bowman constructed his shot. “Matthew and Christian would give their input, and I would give the dragon’s input,” he says. “I’d say what I thought the dragon would be doing… I tried to see the dragon as a character. Y’know, ‘where’s my close-up?’

“About a week after filming started, we showed Rob a piece of film that showed a dragon walking through a smoky, black, moody environment, so we all had that image in our head what that was going to look like,” notes Hoover.

“Once we had decided on the shot, I’d get technical,” Hoover continues. “For example, okay, the dragon is going to land and then sneer at Matthew. Well, with the dragon’s 150-foot wingspan, that’s going to blow up all this dirt, blow all these fires around. Sparks would be going everywhere. Matthew’s clothing has got to blow back. We had to do all that on-set and you had to think of all of them right off the bat, which is difficult, because there’s nothing there… but if you don’t do it, no one’s going to believe that the dragon did land there.”

“The true challenge of this picture has been in combining the physical and visual effects worlds,” says executive producer Jonathan Glickman.

More information available in DVD / Home Video