Seraphim's Blessing

The high altitude set for "Serephim Falls" above Taos Ski Valley, New Mexico. Photo courtesy Lorey Sebastian/Icon Entertainment Intl.


I had an opportunity to sit down for a chat with director David Van Ancken on the evening of Nov. 22, 2005 at the Edelweiss Hotel in Taos Ski Valley. He and his crew from Mel Gibson's Icon Entertainment are shooting a new period western in the mountains above Taos, New Mexico. It is called "Seraphim Falls" and it stars Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson and Anjelica Huston. It is scheduled for release sometime in 2006.

The story is set in a period shortly after the Civil War. A Confederate colonel is unwilling to forget the wrongs be attributes to a Union soldier and, despite the cessation of hostilities, decides to continue pursuing him across a mythical west.

While Neeson and other crew members bellied up to the bar to unwind after a day's successful shoot, I found a table with Van Ancken and publicist Blaise Noto.

Q: Is the location working for you? (shot the ending of the movie today, Nov. 22, 2005)

David Von Ancken: The location’s fantastic. It’s the only place in the state with snow. We’re here at 12,000 feet. It’s incredibly beautiful watching the sunrise every morning. And everybody’s responding to it as if it were build to the story.

Q: You’ve done a lot of television work and this is your first feature film. Does this mark a change of direction for you?

A: I think I’ll do both. I rather enjoy doing good quality television, but, having written this and having the chance to work with such a talented group affords me a chance to control more than in television. With any luck, hopefully that will yield something, especially for the people involved.

Q: You’ve got two Irish actors as leads in a film set just after the Civil War. What went into the decision to cast Liam Neeson and Pierce Brosnan?

A: It was just chance. As I was writing this with my writing partner (Abby Everett Jaques) we were talking about certain people, then there’s a certain soulfulness to certain actors that this script needs. Because, what I was going for, in telling the story, was essentially very little dialogue. You know, stripping away the white noise of conversation and getting back to a, not just a period piece in terms of costumes and what type of guns you have to carry, but the fact that people didn’t talk too much in 1868. These guys are certainly not talky individuals, as characters.

Q: They don’t play Irish.

A: No. But, anybody from that period of time most likely came from Europe. Liam (Colonel Morsman Carver) is playing, sort of, a middle southerner. Pierce (Gideon) is playing a Union officer, so, two halfs.

Q: Would it be wrong to call this a “chase” picture?

A: You can call it whatever you like, but it’s really a — the action is visceral, and action is what we’re shooting on top of this mountain. Literally falling down the mountain from the top of the snow, into this desert in Lordsburg, where we were last week. So, it has specific, and I think very authentic action elements to it. And what I was trying to go back to and what we every day try to practice is the world of as limited CG as you can have, perhaps none. Ideally, no computer assisted chase sequences, but rather in-camera and in the bodies of these two great actors. If you throw them at something that’s real, they will throw back a performance at you that is fascinating. And we have been practicing that for the last 28 days or whatever it is. Yeah, it’s a chase movie, but it’s much more of a movie about finding out what’s important and when to let go of things so you don’t destroy yourself.

Q: How long have you been working on the script?

A: I researched the script for about six months, and wrote it in about three or four. Then, tweaked it for a couple of months, so over about a year.

Q: Was there ever a chance someone else might have directed it, instead of you?

A: No, I was offered a lot of money for it, at one point, by some element of a studio, with the proviso that I would not direct it. I decided not to take that route. I didn’t really write it to sell it. I wrote it because it came out of a frustration from reading a lot of scripts that I thought ‘I can do better than that.” And, eventually, someone said “Do that.” And, eventually, someone like Bruce Davey at Icon saw this sort of energy we could put behind this and make this both a very high impact action movie that actually says something. I’m not going to define what it says but if each person who’s involved with this has come to me and said, “This means this to me.” And none of them are wrong. Ultimately, I wrote it for a reason. It says something about anti-war. It says something about two men finding themselves with no more energy left for hatred and they somehow have to survive, and ultimately help each other, even if they’ve spent the last 90 minutes trying to kill each other.

At this point, producer David Flynn joined us.

Q: The visuals in this movie sound as though they were designed to be a character itself. I’m sure your choice of cinematographer had a lot to do with that.

David Flynn: This is really a question for David (Von Ancken), but, yes, the environment is definitely the third main lead in the movie, absolutely.

Q: Tell me about your choice for director of photography.

Von Ancken: John Toll was very high on our list and I was really excited (to get him). Many people came together for this and I feel very lucky and we work hard to make it worth everybody’s collective energy every day, but John Toll specifically read the script and came at us. He is an available-light master, as far as I’m concerned. He’s done a lot of great work where he uses very little, besides a white bounce board. People have showed up on our set and said “Where’s movie set?” There aren’t fifteen 18K lights. There are just four guys holding a white bounce card and four guys holding a four-by-eight piece of black cloth. He’s all about removing light. He sees the world and he takes light away, as far as I’m concerned. I mean I’ve never talked with him about it, but that’s what I watch. And we’ve just come from dailies and they look fantastic every night. What David Flynn just said is kind of the mantra that I was thinking while writing it. The more removed from civilization we were taking these guys, the more the environment and nature were elevated as a character. We bring them through, what I find, several very interesting characters from Tom Noonan to Anjelica Huston (who has relatives living in Taos), but the reality is the third lead in this movie is the world in which they walk, run.

Q: This is a depiction of the mythic west.

A: I think any time you take two men and strip down what drives them to the primal essentials you have a myth on your hands. And what we did very carefully was take them into the wild, away from — there’s no town in this movie, there’s nothing, there’s a railroad camp, but it is basically hell. And, once you go into nothingness, and you’re left with just the person you’re looking at or yourself, there’s a mythic element there.

Q: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in making this movie?

A: Have you looked at the top of this mountain? At 4:30 in the morning it is dark and cold. Last week we were in boiling hot and cracked Lordsburg. It is all about the weather.

Flynn: There’s one small set that’s an interior, but the whole movie’s shot exterior. For anybody scheduling or budgeting a movie for that, it’s a huge challenge.

Von Ancken: We have a 46 day schedule and we’re carrying three days or cover with us, meaning we have a set, that we haven’t shot yet, on purpose, that is our only insurance policy. On a normal movie with 45-58 (days) would have half inside, at the very least. We just went into it and we’ve been very lucky in New Mexico because when we need for it to be sunny, it’s sunny; when we need it to be cold, it’s been cold. The snow situation scared us but, here in Taos, we found snow at above 10,000 feet. With any luck, Monday it’s going to snow here. The vistas we’ve found could play for the eastern Rockies. They could play for Nevada. They could play for the Alps. The stuff behind Taos Ski Valley is just fantastic looking.

Q: What’s it like working with Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson?

A: It’s very simple. They’re very dedicated, talented, immensely watchable individuals and they come to this project — I’ll say I’m lucky again, and I’ll probably say it five more times if you keep interviewing me, but they come to this project with an incredible degree of concentration and an incredible degree of devotion for no other reason than the project itself. And each of those actors feeds off the other because each of those guys realizes the other guy is vested in this and the other guy is there. Their performances are concentrated and very authentic characters. So, what is it like to work with them? It is an absolute fucking dream. That’s what it’s like working with them. And you can quote me on that. I’ve shot 150 days in the last year, on a lot of big TV shows with a lot of name actors, and these guys are unbelievably focused, driven and committed. I think all of us, from every PA up to the producers to Flynn, to myself , we notice this every day with them. It does not go unnoticed for five minutes on the set.

Executive producer Stan Wlodkowski also sat in for a moment.

Q: What went into the decision to shoot in New Mexico? You could have shot in Canada or …

Stan Wlodkowski: We looked at Canada and to be honest with you New Mexico has a great film incentive program, which gave us a big reason to come here, but also you have an incredible variety of locations. This is a western that begins in snowy mountains and ends on the desert floor and there’s not a lot of places where you have those two things within five hours driving distance of each other.

Q: It kind of showcases New Mexico’s features then?

A: We are an absolute advertisement for beauty of New Mexico. A few days ago, we were shooting 80 degrees in Lordsburg and today were shooting 20 degrees at the top of Taos Mountain. You don’t get that kind of variety in many other places. So, it happened to have exactly what we needed for this movie. It also happens to have a very strong film community in Santa Fe with some wonderful technicians, which we were glad to take advantage of.