They believed that they could adapt paint strokes onto film.

“ Joel Hynek ran Mass Illusions, which had adapted missile tracking technology. “I had a fairly big budget, but we didn’t want to spend a fortune on visual effects,” Ward recalled. We took it to ILM and they did a test, but we didn’t really respond to that.”īy the mid-1990s, visual effects had progressed in films such as Jurassic Park and its brethren Starship Troopers, but the photorealistic landscapes of Avatar and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland were still a decade from coming to fruition. I hadn’t seen anything done before that was at all like what I had in mind. “There wasn’t the technology at that time to realize a world of living paintings. With the device of painted materials secured, Warned next needed a visual concept for the myriad effects. Something could happen in his world which could affect one of her paintings.” “You would see something appear in his world in the afterlife – a stroke. “It would also give me a language through which they could communicate,” Ward said. Not only did the concept of painting inform Ward’s story approach, it would affect many aesthetic elements in the film. I thought, ‘What if you turned her into an artist?’ The Robin Williams character could discover an afterlife with her paintings – that gave me a whole language for the afterlife.” One day, I had an idea – the wife was a caterer. “I didn’t want to do it and put it away for a month. “I thought that there was no way of visiting that world,” Ward said, frustrated with his lack of progress. With Bass’s script in hand, Ward devised a method to render the afterlife which Matheson described onto celluloid. “The way I approached the film is I created a look long before anybody came aboard, and for two years in the script development with my screenwriter Ron Bass,” he said. Given Ward’s own art background - he recently had a solo exhibition in Shanghai and has had six exhibitions in 24 gallery spaces - his first pre-visualization concepts came naturally. Ron Bass did a draft which was very powerful with emotional truths about relationships.” “The producer who had adapted the wonderful Richard Matheson had had it for 20 years and had not been able to get it made. “I had the project sitting around for quite a while,” Ward said. Finally, director Vincent Ward made Matheson’s 1978 novel What Dreams May Come into a feature film in 1998. He was counted among respected authors in the genre, and until the moviemaking technology caught up to this artist’s vision, one project was thought to be impossible to properly realize on film.

What Dreams May Come Richard Matheson, writer of supernatural numerous stories died this year.

What dreams may come matheson