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Which isn't to say Conran was exempt from commercial concessions. Told foreign distributors wouldn't go for black and white, Conran redreamed his film in tinted faux Technicolor, which gives Sky Captain a vibrant yet dated look. The live-action components were shot over 26 days last year on a single soundstage in London. No ''real'' locations were used, no ''real'' sets were built; the only ''real'' things in Sky Captain are the actors and the props they touch. A typical day had the actors shuttling between three bluescreens, pretending to be in snowy Nepal, the jungles of a monster-inhabited island, and Radio City Music Hall. Conran then decamped for L.A., where he supervised up to 100 computer animators in assembling Sky Captain's dense images. (Several outside F/X companies also provided assistance.) From crafting a surreal cameo by the late Sir Laurence Olivier out of photos, news footage, and digital scratch, to sampling a scene from The Wizard of Oz (a substitute for Snow White, which Disney declined to license), to creating Jolie's Flying Fortress, nothing wasn't a daunting challenge. Perhaps the most anxious moment in post-production came when Conran's computers struggled to render a plane chase through the skyscraper canyons of Manhattan. ''We had to build New York in 3-D, but it was too big. The computer almost gagged on it,'' says Conran. ''That was bite-your-nails time. I don't know if we would have recovered.''
While the world of today waits to weigh in on Sky Captain, Conran is moving on to something right in his retro wheelhouse: an adaptation of A Princess of Mars, the first in the old ''John Carter of Mars'' series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This time, real sets and real locations, and instead of 10 years, he promises the film in two. Says Conran, ''It's gonna feel like cheating.''
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