Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of Twilight

Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

Part1 of 2:  Story in Place and Living in La La Land

Why two parts? Because discussing landscape in film covers a lot of ground! And because something that feels like a giant buckyball coated with glass shards has been scraping around under my left eyelid since yesterday and I can’t concentrate well enough to tie the bow at this point.

Followers of the Twilight books and the movie have recently descended on the little town of Forks, Washington, which now finds itself at the center of a genuine tourist boom.  Fans of Twilight have decided they want to experience for themselves the place where it rains an average of 121 inches a year.  Its near-constant overcast skies and the atmospheric green gloom of the mossy, fern-filled forest has intrigued them, because through that landscape they feel a little closer to the world of Twilight.  After all, it was this landscape that drew the Cullen “family”, good vampires all, to live in Forks, where they could exist in relative anonymity, untouched by the sunlight which would expose them for what they were.

The landscape of the rainforest and the little town within it is an integral part of Twilight, and because of that, Forks has become a way to enter into the story through a real-world portal.  Some people may laugh at this kind of attraction, but I have to admit that I felt the same way when I discovered there was a real Ponderosa ranch up near Lake Tahoe, where the fictional Ben Cartwright and his four sons lived and had western adventures every Sunday night on Bonanza while I was growing up.

I made a pilgrimage to the Ponderosa ranch one spring break during college, first traveling up into the forested hills of Northern California’s gold rush country, then around the edge of Lake Tahoe to the ranch, which is conveniently open to paying visitors most of the year.  And let me tell you, walking into Ben’s log house and laying eyes on the same map above his desk that always burned up during the credits… tears came to my eyes.  I wasn’t alone, either.  I saw the reactions of the other people on our tour.  There was reverence, there, and by golly, a sense of coming home to something.

But most powerful of all to me was seeing the exact same meadow with its trees and the familiar mountain range where Ben and his sons rode up to center frame for their individual credits, smiling and ready for anything their wild west television world had to offer.  There I learned that Ponderosa pines and snowcapped mountains were as much a part of Bonanza to me as Little Joe or Hoss.    

Further north, up here in the great Pacific Northwest, there is a certain kind of heft to the surroundings, a dark, lavish power that genuinely affects perception.  You slow down to wind through forests on many of the roads just outside the major city enters.  There are always shadows at the edge of even the open places—mountains are visible from almost everywhere, as are the trees, dark green evergreens or deciduous tangles that skeletonize in winter.  The trees are uncountable in their millions, marching into the distance, level upon level of them, covering the steepest slopes like a dark, rough bark upon the world.  Most months of the year it is rainy, or cold, and otherwise inhospitable to human outdoor life.  It is a good place to think and to write, but for the better part of the year, it takes determination and effort to get out of the house and stay out there in the woods—to feel at home in the great outdoors.

But within a movie, you can go anywhere in even the most difficult environments, strolling easily through mud bogs and over slimy moss, leaping boulders in the icy rain, playing among the tree tops during an arctic blast, just like a superhuman vampire.  That’s one power of film—to give you the ability to live in a landscape without suffering in the elements and shelling out hundreds of dollars for the right survival gear and travel arrangements that usually have to include a four wheel drive and stout, broken-in hiking boots.

There is a scene in Twilight where Edward is sitting with Bella at the top of a tree overlooking the vast expanse of the Columbia River Gorge.  In their magnificent, perfect, accommodating tree, they are atop a world of silver rivers and towering cliffs, the light behind them alive with clouds and mist roiling across a wild sky.  In the film world, the happy couple flew to their treetop haven in a few moments.  In the real world, we in the crew parked in a mud bog several miles away and took vans up a one lane road, then hiked through more mud for another quarter mile to the place where Edward and Bella’s tree had been placed.

The tree did not fit the place we chose for it.  Selected for its looks, height, foliage and branch strength, it had been cut down somewhere else and brought by truck to the lookout point, then it had risen from its premature death with the help of scaffolding, cables and other reinforcements.  Any branches that interfered with the action of the hero and heroine were pruned away and before filming, while the camera crew was setting up a crane below, I rubbed a mixture of mud and floor wax into the pale, raw wood where each branch had been.

The beauty of the landscape and the tree were manmade in one sense—we had arranged the tree and its stark, exaggerated height as if it hung directly above a blue abyss, the land far below it but still in focus.  In contrast, the real, natural trees at the lookout grew cautiously far from the cliff of the point, often bent and broken from the winds that blow down the gorge, and none of them hung out at the edge of a rocky crag that held no soil.  But this tree was a movie tree and didn’t have to follow the dictates of environment.

Over the course of my work on films, I’ve painted and sculpted a lot of trees.  Sometimes they’re made of plaster, sometimes fiberglass, and sometimes they’re real trees that just need some paint to look good, or they’ve been fitted with a prosthetic branch that has to be matched in color and texture to their real trunk.  When I worked on miniatures for Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, I spent weeks fabricating tiny California live oaks to various scales. Sometimes when you get to working on a great many trees, you start thinking like a tree, and you realize there are rules to how trees form.  Then it would get easier and easier to create your tree so that it looked right.

A few years after that project, while in my scientific, analytical mode of perception (a legacy from those years studying experimental psychology),  I learned about the mathematics of fractals, which produce forms like those found in nature, from the detailed musings of coastlines, to crystals, shells, flowers and, of course, trees.  As I saw the shapes that fractals produced, I felt the shock of recognition, and thought that maybe I had internalized something of this mathematical relationship when designing trees that “looked right”.

Occasionally I would work on sculpting not only trees, but also the rolling hills that the trees grew on.  Hills also have rules which change depending on what kind of hills they are.  In Hollywood I made many miniature landscapes that followed the rules of the Californian hills of Newhall, Chatsworth and the San Gabriel Mountains, which are the mountains where I grew up.  In fact, Hollywood itself was built at the bottom of their foothills.  Coincidence or a mystical connection?

It was more coincidence.  When I worked on miniature landscapes from drawings or photographs, they were based in those outlying areas, and even if they were supposed to be landscapes from another world, as in Army of Darkness, they picked up the major features of the locations where we would be filming the exteriors, which would be the places I mentioned above.  I grew up in those landscapes, but the task of reproducing them in detail was a new way of knowing them.  It led to a realization of how much I had internalized them, and why.

Where I grew up, in the greater Los Angeles area, we lived a half hour from downtown LA, but at different points along the borders of the metropolis, empty wilderness lies just beyond the outer suburbs. Up at the top of the street where I lived, the houses and things of man ended and the Angeles National Forest began.

I was firmly grounded in a landscape where I could walk into uninhabited national forest to sleep out there, even in January, with nothing but a cheap sleeping bag and still feel comfortable and at home in the dry sage brush and pines, the rustling cottonwoods and ephemeral streams.  When I got my drivers license I traveled through the mountain forests into the desert and camped out there, drinking in the silent distance and following the boulder-strewn paths though huge alluvial fans that had eroded outward from the sharp-shadowed mountains.

It was easy to live outdoors in Southern California, and easy to love it simply at face value, to be content to bask in the dry heat, knowing that water was a luxurious secret, hidden in canyons and all the more beautiful for its scarcity.  I don’t believe that I would have been outside so much if it had required waterproof raingear, constant insulation against the cold, and an acceptance of discomfort during my time outdoors.  Being at home outdoors meant I was familiar with my landscape in a deep, unconscious way.

When I was growing up, I would see movies or watch television and often recognize my landscape on the screen—the plants and trees I knew, the peculiar, steep slant of the slopes of the San Gabriel’s, the distinctive rock formations of Chatsworth and Joshua Tree.  Whether I was watching a western, a spy versus spy chase on winding mountain roads (they always used the Angeles Crest highway, which would later become a joke in the second Austin Powers film), or a B science fiction movie, that was my country up there, with its own colors of sunlight and shadows, colors I would put to use in matte paintings, and both vast and tiny landscapes when I went on to work in the Business.

Next Week: Evergreen Twilight: Landscape in Film: We Can’t Paint the Forest for the Trees

 Part 2 of 2: Meaning Out of the Wilderness: No Country for Old Paint