I missed Escape from Tomorrow at Sundance. While everyone assumed it would never show again, let alone be released, I had a feeling it would be a Fantastic Fest type movie. By the time of this festival though, Producers Distribution Agency had planned the film’s release in October. Shot surreptitiously in Disneyland and Disney World theme parks, the film tells the story of a father who starts to unravel on a family vacation, obsessing over a group of French tourists and encountering another mom at the park. Director Randy Moore (who prefers Randy to the credit Randall) and cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham were in Austin to show the movie at Fantastic Fest, and we sat down with them after their screening of the new cut of the film.
Some spoilers about the technique and format of the film follow, but you’ll want to know when you do see Escape From Tomorrow.
CraveOnline: Lucas, did you have the most dangerous job on the film, shooting secretly in Disneyland/world?
Lucas Lee Graham: Certainly the easiest to spot of all the filmmakers because I was always pretty much front and center with the camera. I’ve never been at Disney World and felt like I was in danger. I don’t know if danger is the right word. One of the most intense jobs.
Is the Disney disclaimer at the beginning new, or was that in the Sundance version too?
Randy Moore: No, that’s new. It’s Post-Sundance.
Is that how PGA is able to release the film, with that disclaimer?
Randy Moore: I think that helps.
But you still used a little of the Disney font.
Randy Moore: There’s a little font in there.
You did change the “It’s A Small World” music though, right?
Randy Moore: We did, we did.
Lucas Lee Graham: Did Abel [Korzeniowski] write the music for that?
Randy Moore: Yeah, yeah. Our composer wrote the music for that. Which as someone who rode “It’s A Small World” for at least six hours of one day to shoot that scene, I actually really like Abel’s version of the music better. It’s more obnoxious than the actual song which I didn’t think was possible, but I think he pulled it off.
When there is a scene on a ride, do you get in line, shoot the scene, get in line again and shoot more of the scene?
Randy Moore: Yes, yes. Sometimes we would actually get to the front and there’s a chicken line for the kids who freak out and don’t want to go on the ride after their parents have been waiting in line with them for hours. They’re like, “No!” So we would take that and then go back because we were trying to get as much film time in as possible. These poor kids would come to Disney World and not be allowed to ride the rides, probably every kid’s worst nightmare.
Lucas Lee Graham: There’s a spot, like a lot of the lines like Buzz Lightyear’s, are huge. They go from one side of Tomorrowland to the other. You can’t start the scene shooting here and then shoot the rest of it at the end, so you have to wait as it cross sections back over and over again and shoot it in the middle. So you get there, you’ve got to wait for a minute, then you’re like okay, here comes the other close-up. Then you shoot it and then go back around the end and you shoot it. Then you get to the front and it’s like, well, we missed at least a medium shot so let’s do it again. Then if the light changes, you do the whole thing again. It was a pretty brutal aspect of it.
Is that the scene where they “close” the Buzz Lightyear ride, or at least you made it look like they closed it?
Randy Moore: It actually closed.
Lucas Lee Graham: Serendipitous.
Randy Moore: We were getting off the ride I think and they closed it right behind us. The guy picked up the phone and literally said, “Sorry, space rangers.”
Lucas Lee Graham: Well, that was added, the “Sorry, space rangers.”
Randy Moore: Oh, really? It’s so embedded in my brain now that I think it really happened that way. Yeah, they closed the ride right behind us.
Are there some green screen shots in there where you have a plate shot of the Disneyland crowd in the background?
Randy Moore: Yeah, throughout the movie there are a lot of green screen shots.
How did you decide what you needed to do green screen and what you could shoot in the park?
Randy Moore: Before we even went in the park we knew what our green screen shots would be and what we were going to do on location. Every shot in the film, especially every shot in the park, we had a shot list. We went through it religiously.
Lucas Lee Graham: I feel like there’s three styles of green screen in the movie. The first style is the green screen that we just couldn’t do any other way, and so that’s the stuff we really tried to hide and make it organically feel like part of the part. Then there’s scenes in their entirety that are green screen that we wanted to have kind of a surreal feel. When he’s talking to the woman on the park bench, we wanted to control that scene but we also knew that we were missing some perspective by putting the submarines in back of them. We kind of wanted it to have that rear projection film like old Disney movies, so there was that. Then there was the third aspect of green screen which was there are some times we were like trying to get a scene and we felt like we weren’t getting it in the park so we took it onto the stage and shot it there on the green screen. An example of that is the Land Pavilion where she spits in his face. That was a scene we shot in the park.
Randy Moore: That was actually a hybrid because some of it was green screen and some of it was actually [at the park.] We did shoot the whole scene in the actual rotation, but I think the performances, the actors needed to do it more so we went back.
For some of those you have a foreground prop like the trashcans. How did you get a Disneyland trash can?
Randy Moore: We just had a production designer make one up.
Lucas Lee Graham: Sean [Spillane] literally built those. Some of them look so good you can’t tell the difference.
