Dark City

PRODUCTION

ALEX PROYAS (Director) is a member of the latest generation of Australian filmmakers to burst upon the world since the belated Australian New Wave of the Seventies was inaugurated by the international success Peter Weir's aptly named The Last Wave.

Since then Australia has not only produced a score of world-class filmmakers who regularly work in Hollywood, it has also become the center of a thriving home-grown film industry, as exemplified by Proyas's return to Sydney, his home town, to undertake the daunting technical and logistical challenges of Dark City, which required the building of fifty elaborate, highly stylized sets at Sydney's new American-financed Fox Studios.

Born in Egypt, Proyas has lived in Sydney since he was three. Admitted to the Australian Film and Television School at the young age of seventeen, he attracted attention with his short film Groping, made during his first year, which won the Most Outstanding Short Film Award at the 1982 London Film Festival, the Greater Union Best Short Film Award at the Sydney Film Festival and the Boomerang Award at the 1982 Melbourne Film Festival. In 1987 Proyas made his debut feature, a post-apocalyptic western called Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds, which also won festival awards but was not distributed in the United States.

Proyas first made an international reputation for himself as a sought-after maker of music videos and commercials. He founded his own Sydney-based production company, Meaningful Eye Contact, during his second year of film school, and subsequently signed with Propaganda Films in Los Angeles, then with U.K.-based Limelight Films, before re-signing with Propaganda in 1990. His videos (for INXS, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac, Joe Jackson, Rick Springfield, Cutting Crew, Colin Hay and Yes, among others) and commercials (for a diverse list of international clients including Nike, Coca Cola, Pepsi, American Express, Swatch, Nissan, Kleenex, Phipps, Castrol, TDK, Hitachi, Verve, Philips and Dunlop) have won numerous awards all over the world.

"I always intended to do features, but I still do ads between features," says Proyas. "It pays the bills, and it's fun. It's done in a month, and you get to look at a bunch of very exciting new images for a short time, so you don't get too sick of them."

Proyas's breakthrough as a feature director was the 1994 adaptation of James O'Barr's cutting edge punk comic-book novel The Crow, which will always be remembered as the last film of Brandon Lee, son of the legendary Bruce Lee, who lost his life in a gunshot accident during the last weeks of filming. Devastated by Lee's death, Proyas returned to Australia with the intention of abandoning the film, but came back a month later at the insistence of Lee's family to finish it. The resulting film was not only a commercial hit, but a critical success for its star, who achieved the posthumous staus of a legend in his own right for his haunting portrayal of a man who returns from the dead to avenge his own murder.

Dark and intensely morbid, The Crow was proclaimed "a triumph" by Playboy and "the best film of its kind since Batman" by the Chicago Tribune's Roger Ebert. "The visual brilliance of The Crow is a marvel," wrote Rolling Stone's Peter Travers.

The film echoed a vein in Proyas's short-form work that was best exemplified by his black-and-white short "Eyeball" for MTV, in which a man's eye pops out when he sneezes, rolling around the room and knocking against a Victrola that begins whining "I've Got My Eye On You." (A Backstage article cited as another example of Proyas's Edward Gorey-esque humor a spot for AC Delco car care entitled "Opera," which brought "new meaning to opera's infamous 'fat lady' time test, to highlight the longevity of AC Delco car parts. At the end we see the singer, covered with cobwebs, still dutifully singing.")

Proyas is currently writing a screenplay for a comedy "set in the real world" that he is enjoying as a rest after the two years of "sitting in rooms with writers" creating the rules for the completely invented world of Dark City and ways of communicating them economically to an audience. But science fiction fans should not despair: As part of his two-picture deal with New Line, Proyas is also committed to do a new version of the climactic film in Hammer Films' legendary Quatermass series, created by esteemed science fiction writer Nigel Kneale: Quatermass and the Pit, about the origin of Evil.

ANDREW MASON (Producer) began his industry career in the early Seventies as a film editor in documentaries and commercials. Within a couple of years he was producing and heading a highly successful commercial production company. He then ran a large Sydney film laboratory for two years, before forming Australia's first visual effects company. He worked as visual effects supervisor on films including Playing Beattie Bow, One Night Stand, Burke and Wills and The Time Guardian and as optical effects supervisor on Vincent Ward's The Navigator.

Mason returned to producing in 1990 and joined forces with Alex Proyas at Meaningful Eye Contact, producing numerous music videos and commercials directed by Proyas. In 1993, Mason served as visual effects supervisor and second-unit director on The Crow. With Proyas he recently formed Mystery Clock Cinema. Dark City is the company's first production.

LEM DOBBS (Screenwriter) has written Steve Soderbergh's Kafka, Hider in the House starring Gary Busey and Mimi Rogers, and The Hard Way starring Michael J. Fox and James Wood.

DAVID GOYER (Screenwriter) has written the upcoming Blade for New Line Cinema, The Crow: City of Angels, The Substitute, Puppetmasters, Rainbow Warriors, Pet Semetary II, Kickboxer II, Death Warrant and Liberator. His television credits include "Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD" and "Enemy" for TriStar.

DARIUS WOLSKI (Director of Photography) was nominated for an ASC Award for his work on Tony Scott's Crimson Tide. He most recently worked on Scott's The Fan. Additional credits include Alex Proyas' The Crow, Peter Medak's Romeo Is Bleeding and Evelyn Purcell's Land of Little Rain.

PATRICK TATOPOLOUS (Conceptual Designer) has a string of illustrious design credits to his name, including Roland Emmerich's Independence Day as production designer and special creature effects creator, Stargate (special visual creature effects) and the upcoming Godzilla; Demolition Man; Last Action Hero; The Bodyguard; Dracula and The Doors (conceptual design and illustration). He won an Emmy for his creature design work on Fox Television's "Space: Above and Beyond."

GEORGE LIDDLE (Production Designer) is one of Australia's leading designers. His film credits include Mushrooms, Rapa Nui, 'Til There Was You, Fred Schepsi's A Cry in the Dark starring Meryl Streep, The Time Guardian, Playing Beattie Bow and Bullseye as both production and costume designer. His television credits include the miniseries "Tracks of Glory" and "Which Way Home" as well as the American televison film "Trouble in Paradise."

LIZ KEOGH (Costume Designer) has over sixteen years experience in designing, coordinating, manufacturing and creating costumes for films. Her feature film credits include the award-winning The Dark Room for director Rolf de Heer, Careful He Might Hear You, Robbery and Passion Flower. Her television credits include "It's a Knockout," for which Keogh produced 200 costumes every two weeks. Keogh has also designed numerous television commercials in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., including several for director Alex Proyas.

DOV HOENIG (Editor) has edited such films as Michael Mann's Heat, Last of the Mohicans, Manhunter, The Keep and Thief; Batman Forever; Alex Proyas's The Crow; She's Out of Control, Garry Marshall's Overboard; and The Fugitive, Under Siege, Code of Silence and most recently Chain Reaction, all directed by Andrew Davis.