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Visual effects experts deliver a post-nuclear United States where wild animals prowl dramatically blasted terrain.
The Postman, the first film directed by and starring Kevin Costner since his multi-Oscar-winning Dances With Wolves, takes place in the ruined U.S. of the future, a desolate badlands in which nature's delicate balance has been torn asunder by a nuclear holocaust. Only a man with no name, masquerading as a mailman, can put things right.
In Costner's post-apocalyptic vision, lions prowl the barren American desert, where the once-flat landscape is now strangely dotted with mountains and pine trees, and skies blaze in a perpetual nuclear sunset punctuated by sporadic flashes of lightning. The director initially hired Tricia Ashford, fresh from her pivotal role as digital effects supervisor/producer on Independence Day (see AC July 1996), to handle the low-key, highly realistic effects. Ashford, in turn, brought in effects cinematographer Phillipp Timme, another ID4 vet, to shoot the various elements needed to transform The Postman's contemporary Oregon and Arizona locations into a post-war wasteland of the future. "When we started, the main direction involved a lot of location and background enhancement, changes in the skies, subtle things like that," Timme recalls. "We planned to gather a library of background plates, sunsets and clouds, because it was very hard to pinpoint the specific shots they would be needed in. While we were shooting the elements, most of the plates they would be going in hadn't been shot or were just being shot."
Ashford's decision to shoot the elements before the background plates ran counter to conventional wisdom, but she felt that this strategy was necessary in order to meet The Postman's December release date. "It's something Tricia chose to accept, and it's understandable given the fact that [Warner Bros.] wanted to open in December with less than three months of postproduction," Timme opines. "I understand why Tricia went that way, because it was very hard to lock down specific shots. That seems to be the tendency these days: you get storyboards that usually come with a little note that says, 'Don't take these literally/ It's very hard to shoot things for a specific boarded shot if that shot changes when the first unit finally films it. We were trying to...