Films involving angels are nothing new in Hollywood. The best of the bunch - reissued for the big screen last Christmas - is the James Stewart 1946 weepie It's A Wonderful Life. More recently we had John Travolta in Michael, Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black, and of course Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait. Now comes City Of Angels, set naturally in Los Angeles, although the key library scenes were filmed in San Francisco, which is enough to tell any film buff worth the name that it's based on Wim Wenders's Wings Of Desire.
When Brad Silberling heard that the remake rights of the 1988 cult classic had been bought by former studio head Dawn Steel, he was horrified. "Remember this was the woman who brought us Flashdance. She was a very populist thinker. She came out of marketing, to the point that she was intimidated by anything esoteric.
"She didn't enjoy Wim's movie. She had no relationship with it. All she bought was the idea: angel falls for mortal woman." Silberling's jumping off point was very different. A youthful 34, he first started making movies when he was 11 with his father's Super 8 camera, then came university where he read English literature, finally, film school where art house movies were - naturally - essential viewing. He still remembers where and when he saw Wim Wenders's elegy to postwar Berlin. "It was one of those great rare experiences where people actually sat still when it was done and sat and thought and eventually made their way out."
However, Wings Of Desire is hardly mainstream viewing: its meanderings and longueurs would never be accepted by cinemagoers weaned on Hollywood simplicities. Yet, although flagged as a romantic drama with Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage (Ryan as a heart surgeon, Cage the angel who first comforts her, then wants more) the sugar frosting on City Of Angels is veil-thin. Silberling has somehow maintained the integrity of the original conceit and the result is a film Hollywood can be proud of. It's also making serious money. The story of how this near miracle was achieved should be required reading for every studio executive who believes that mass-market means lowest common denominator.
Brad Silberling's only previous experience was four years of high-profile TV and one feature. Although Casper had been successful at the box office he knew it hardly made him numero uno to direct a Wim Wenders remake. After reading the script, however, Silberling was even more convinced that he was the man to do it and persuaded Steel to see him. "She said `OK. You know who I want to direct this film? I want Sidney Pollack.' Then she reeled off three guys from her studio. She said `How could I possibly tell anybody that the director of Cas- per was doing my movie?' And I said `That's fine, but I'm going to do the movie. So when you're done with your little phone sheet there and feel good about playing studio head then we'll talk'."
Standing up to her, Silberling believes was half the battle. "I got what she was immediately and she got what I was and actually really responded to our differences. I was certainly not about to be just so type cast that I couldn't go off to do something I really cared about." Realising "that there was always going to be another name she could pull out of the hat" Silberling sat down and wrote, in narrative form "images and scenes that didn't exist in the script, including a thematic summation - which was sort of `this is the film I'm going to go out and make'."
Right from the beginning Silberling had been impressed by "how courageous" the writer Dana Stephens had been in her adaptation. "She took the real core conceit of Wim's film in terms of there being this population of angels who really celebrate our opportunities and our lives, took that and took the idea of the romance and just ran with it." Among the suggestions he put forward at his second meeting with producer Steel, was the pivotal love scene. "In Dana's first draft, when Nic's character Seth finally falls to humanity, comes to life, struggles to make his way to Maggie Ryan, it was sort of the famous one-eighth page `he throws the door open and they make love'. It was a very stock scene and because it's so much a romance with life as it is a romance between these characters you had an opportunity to literally experience that first sexual experience with him. And I am always bothered by stock love scenes in movies. Like why doesn't anybody talk? In this case why doesn't she try to elicit from him the experience, given that earlier in the picture he was always needing her to explain what things felt like, tasted like." Wenders's film was shot largely in black and white, giving physical expression to the angel's sensory deprivation. Silberling knew this would be hard to sell. "If Nic's point of view was our point of view through most of the film, the film had to be a journey toward vividness. I remember describing it in the position paper I gave to Dawn. It was literally to select a colour palate and without bashing everybody over the head, make the top of the movie more monochromatic. We didn't change the film stock, it's all design, it's colour choices, textural choices, even the sound - there are great silences or great focus to certain sounds - so that as the film progresses it seems like everything comes to life." Silberling's determination paid off. And his ideas were all followed through, helped, he says, "because Dawn didn't have a relationship with Wim's film", and although she, like others in her position in Hollywood he has come across, had "a pathological fear of art films, yet she had a certain esoteric pride in being involved with something a bit different and a little unusual".
ALSO different and unusual was Silberling's attitude to the writer Dana Stevens, who remained the sole writer. "Unlike most of the films that we see these days where there are two or three credited writers and nine others you never get to see - it seemed like an opportunity to have an old fashioned, one-to-one and I tried to have her there when we were shooting. And I bugged her if she didn't show up on set. I gave her a hard time." And what about Wim Wenders in all this? Until Silberling was on board, all communication had been long distance. "I thought this was crazy, obviously this has to be close to his heart, it's his film." The two directors met one Sunday afternoon before shooting began. Not only was Wenders very supportive, there were also serendipitous connections, such as having originally wanted the trapeze artist (his mortal) to be a doctor, rejected because he couldn't afford the location. They didn't see each other again until Silberling took Wenders to an out-of-town screening. "He gave me this big hug and he was so relieved and so was I. And he said, `I feel so proud. I can't say I'm a father but I kinda feel I'm a grandfather here. I would never have made the movie and you would probably never have made the movie I made.' He just thought it was the greatest irony of the world, that his film would end with a sort of fairy-tale moment and the American one stole the European ending." From the moment that Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage were cast, the ending was never in question. "We made a little blood pact at dinner that none of us would be party to changing it unless we all suddenly wanted to. Because they could certainly kill me off, but they would need the actors to reshoot anything. And that held true."
Brad Silverling doesn't believe in angels. His producer Dawn Steel died of a brain tumour without ever having seen a frame of the finished film. Neither had she seen Silberling's graduate film, made several years previously, when he was at film school. "It was the story of a mobile garage mechanic, a girl who also happened to be god's chosen messiah but really just wanted to be a mechanic. And she's about to lose her job because they all go to her to have their questions answered and their problems solved. This is how unconscious the process is. It was a few weeks ago when a friend of mine from film school saw my movie said `hello-o-o'. And I had never stopped to think, but it's the same fascination with divinity and humanity."
"And this girl, the messiah, basically tries to say to them all: `You have the power to help yourselves and make your own choices. You don't need me.' Until finally she has the courage to tell God that all she wants is to be a mechanic. And God says `Why would you think you have any less choice than anyone else? Go do it'."