EW: Did the studio support your approach?
JA: Enormously. And not least of all because they wanted to make this for a very low number! But when we completed the movie,
[Paramount chairman] Sherry Lansing said, ''I want you to think bigger on a couple of these sequences -- and money is not an
object.''
EW: This is the notoriously stingy Paramount Pictures?
JA: This is Paramount Pictures. I'm not sure you should even print it, because they'll deny it. But I mean, I was asked to go back to the drawing board and think of sequences that were bigger, bolder, and more visual.
EW: The sequences you're referring to include the Golden Gate Bridge melting into slag and the Colosseum exploding. Was there
concern about how these scenes would play post-9/11?
JA: Yes, but first, we're making an end-of-the-world movie. You need to see events of global scale happening. I could blow up a
mountain range, but it doesn't have the same effect as seeing a beloved city destroyed. Yet we were very careful about images of human suffering. There's no blood in the film. There's no evisceration. We were careful to tell our story in a way that hopefully maximized the poignancy of the event but minimized the images of human suffering.
EW: ''The Core'' was supposed to come out last fall.
JA: With the additional ideas we put into it, the film would not
have been ready to market to its full potential. There were at least 15 F/X shots that benefited from that extra time.
EW: Now the film arrives in the aftermath of the Columbia
tragedy, and there's a scene in which a space shuttle is forced to make an emergency landing in a Los Angeles riverbed.
JA: It was a shock because we felt personally involved. I'd been
on a real shuttle and worked with three astronauts in the making
of this movie. When the Columbia disaster happened, we thought
seriously about what we should do. We finally felt that in our sequence, you not only see the crew surviving, but many other lives saved by their heroism. We thought the sequence stood as a testament to what these guys do.
EW: What options did you consider?
JA: One: Cut the scene completely, which was out of the question. It was too integral to the story. Two: Change it in some way.
Again, out of the question because there was nothing we could do to alter the fact that fundamentally the shuttle was in a crash-landing situation. And the third: Delay the release. And again, NASA made it very clear [that] their show would go on. We felt our show needed to as well.
EW: How might a war in Iraq affect the release?
JA: There are no changes in the works in terms of releasing or in
the content. [Paramount confirms that ''The Core'' will open as
scheduled.] We all feel that, in a paradoxical way, there is something in this film both for those who feel strongly antiwar and for those who feel pro-war. There is a certain meditation on the nature of heroism. But for those who feel, as I do,
profoundly against this...there's an inspirational message about how much damage the world does to itself when it develops weapons
in preparation for global conflict, and about the healing that can be achieved when it pools its resources. The film stands as both a relevant comment and, in a funny way, an escape. It is, after all, a highly entertaining roller-coaster ride.
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