Time sure flies. 100 years ago H.G.Wells wrote his classic sci-fi novel "The Time Machine" and was dubbed "the man who saw tomorrow".  The latest screen adaptation by John Logan, who wrote "Gladiator", is brilliantly brought to life by Wells' great-grandson, director Simon Wells, who directed the animated "The Prince Of Egypt".

"Most of my work has been in animation, but I have always had an interest in branching out to the live action arena and the action adventure genre," says Simon Wells." When I read that DreamWorks was developing 'The Time Machine,' of all things, I went to Jeffrey Katzenberg to throw my hat in the ring, so to speak. A while later, I met with Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald and they said that my take on the story was the way they wanted to go."

Their collective take on the story was also reflected in the screenplay by John Logan, who had just scripted "Gladiator" for the studio.

"Walter Parkes came to me and asked how I would feel about working on 'The Time Machine,'" Logan remembers. "I thought about it for all of two seconds before saying 'yes.' It wasn't till about five minutes later that I said to myself, 'what have I done?,' because not only is the novel such a respected classic of literature, but also the George Pal movie is beloved by so many people, including myself."

From the start, we wanted to return to the spirit of scientific discovery in the novel," the screenwriter continues. "H.G. Wells was also very concerned with evolution, futurism, class-consciousness and socialism, and those philosophical and sociological tenets are all through the book. I think Wells' The Time Machine was the first time anyone had presented so intellectually and in such an exciting way the concept of time travel. And the amazing thing is that he takes the reader on that journey. I believe that's why Wells didn't give his time traveler a name--so you can be the time traveler and witness both the wonder and the horror of what the future might hold. Because, for Wells, both futures were a possibility; the thing that would make the difference is how we individually acted on it, which is why I think the story deserves to be told again."

While much has changed in the more than 100 years since his book was written, H.G. Wells' vision of the future and the notion of time travel itself still hold a great fascination for audiences.

"There was a time back in the early 1960s when movies like '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' and 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' absolutely fired our imaginations, and the granddaddy of them all was George Pal's 'The Time Machine.'," says producer Walter Parkes. "Today, we have technologies that allow us to recreate a world as imagined by H.G. Wells in ways they couldn't, which is exciting. Yet, there is something about the basic story of this man in a waistcoat, tie and jacket climbing into that beautiful, hand-crafted Victorian machine and traveling to the future that is as compelling today as it was then."

"I can vividly remember going to see George Pal's 'The Time Machine' when it was first released. It was everything you wanted in a movie as a kid, and I must have seen it three times that first week," says producer David Valdes. "The whole concept of traveling through time was so fascinating, and it turned me on to science fiction as a genre. I can honestly say it was one of maybe three films that propelled me ultimately to become a motion picture producer."

"I saw the first 'The Time Machine' when I was nine, and it blew me away, and I became a great admirer of George Pal," says Executive Producer Arnold Leibovit. " Years later, I made a film tribute to his life called 'The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal,' which was a real eye-opener about his extraordinary career as a filmmaker. I'm most proud of this new incarnation of 'The Time Machine' because, with today's technologies, we were able to go beyond the original without losing the spirit of the original. This film is more of an homage, affectionately recalling some of Pal's memorable emotions and images."

In telling the story again, the filmmakers did make some changes to it, beginning with giving the time traveler a name: Alexander Hartdegen. Once he had a name, he had to have a face, which became that of award-winning Australian actor Guy Pearce. Interestingly, though purely coincidental, Rod Taylor, who starred in Pal's version, was also an Australian.

Guy Pearce reveals that he had had a fascination with time travel since seeing George Pal's "The Time Machine" as a kid, noting, "Time travel would be the most extreme sort of travel one could endure. It's the ultimate escape--rather than confronting life's trials, it's much easier for us, with the ability of our imaginations, to run off into fantasies of the future or memories of the past. What I was keen to get across was the idea that heading into the future for Alexander was a heightened and very tangible form of escape. I don't believe he knows what he's truly looking for when he hits the accelerator and watches the time dial rapidly move forward; he just feels he doesn't belong in the time he's in…something that infiltrates all of us at various points in our lives. Alexander, however, through the creation of his machine, has managed to turn what essentially doesn't exist--the past and the future--into a reality."

The motivation for Alexander's journey is borne of a tragedy in his life, which is a story wrinkle unique to this telling of "The Time Machine." Logan explains, "In adapting the material for today's audiences, we felt it would be more exciting, more interesting, to create an emotional context for Alexander's building the time machine. We began to think about what would compel a man to go to such extraordinary lengths to break the boundaries of time."

Realizing that love is perhaps the strongest emotional motivation there is, Logan created the part of Emma, Alexander's beloved fiancée. A calamity involving Emma drives Alexander to be consumed by a single mission: to invent a time machine and return to the day of the tragedy in a desperate effort to alter the past.

A futuristic cataclysm propels him 800,000 years forward in time, where he finds himself among the cliff-dwelling people known as the Eloi. Two of the Eloi--Mara and her young brother Kalen--bring Alexander into their home and become Alexander's friends and teachers in this strange, new world.

In the new world Alexander meets the Morlocks, ferocious cannibalistic creatures who emerge from their subterranean world only to hunt down the Eloi. Centuries of evolution have separated the Morlocks into castes of spies and hunters, led by an unexpectedly brilliant, yet terrifyingly human-like ruler, called the Uber-Morlock.

The Uber-Morlock was not entirely an invention of John Logan's. "The Uber-Morlock is the brains behind the whole outfit," says Wells. "He exerts a form of mind control, which, incidentally, I discovered was an idea in one of the earlier versions of H.G.'s The Time Machine. He elected to remove it from the final published book, but we've reinvented it here to serve as a singularly worthy adversary to Alexander."

"I wanted him to be a surprise, that he not be what the audience expected," says Jeremy Irons. "He was originally written as an archfiend, but I'm always interested in the good things about evil characters and the bad things about good characters…the shades of gray. The Uber-Morlock had to fulfill a certain function, but within that frame we tried to push the envelope as much towards tickling the audience's amusement as making them uneasy…to make them question their beliefs and the beliefs of their hero about the object of his quest, the possible futility of his quest and maybe the human condition."

Creating the characters of the hunter Morlocks and spy Morlocks was more about design than casting. Coming from the world of animation, Simon Wells was no stranger to fashioning characters on paper. The director did the initial character sketches and then passed them on to the studio of renowned, multiple Oscar®-winning special effects makeup artist Stan Winston.

Simon Wells and Oliver Scholl could also let their imaginations run wild in the design of the Eloi and Morlock habitats. "My background in animation was extremely useful in the conceptual process of imagining a world that simply doesn't exist. I'm used to starting with a blank sheet of paper and creating a whole world from scratch," Wells says. "I come from illustration and he comes from animation, so we spent hours together, literally throwing drawings back and forth," Scholl offers. "To have a director who understands designs and loves to play with them is a gift from my point of view."

Despite the collaborative process, ideas for the Eloi's world were not jelling until DreamWorks principal Steven Spielberg made a suggestion. Scholl recalls, "Steven mentioned it would be interesting if the homes of the Eloi were about going towards the sky, towards the light, towards freedom, in contrast to the Morlocks who exist in darkness."

Wells adds, "Steven threw out the notion that the Eloi should try to get as far away from the ground as they can and that they enclose themselves in a kind of cage at night to be safe. Oliver did a tremendous job of bringing those ideas together. He went away and overnight came up with a design of swallow's nests perched on the cliffs--things of the air rather than of the earth."

High above a riverbed, the Eloi village was built entirely on the sheer side of a cliff with interconnecting bridges and walkways. The village was primarily erected on the massive Stage 16 at Warner Bros. Studios, which is 98 feet high from floor to dome. The cliff face superstructure, complete with a working waterfall, stood 65 feet tall, and was constructed of steel beams with a foam exterior and tubular steel "huts" and walkways made to look like bamboo. The waterfall was achieved using a 650,000-gallon water tank with an eight-inch irrigation pump that drew the water up to another 350-gallon tank at the top. A spillway was then created to send the water cascading down to the "river" at the base of the set.

For the cast and crew, the height of the cliff dwellings was no illusion. Walter Parkes laughs, "If you look at some of the early outtakes, you can see the actors kind of glancing down as they do their lines. It was disconcerting for them at first."

Without question, the design centerpiece of the film was the actual time machine, which Parkes says, "is a direct descendent of the time machine in the first movie, down to the handcrafted leather barber's chair. It was very important for us to honor certain aspects of George Pal's movie, but none more so than the time machine itself."

Simon Wells acknowledges, "We all have a great affection for that first movie, so from my earliest meetings with Oliver Scholl it was a given that we had to have spinning discs. All time machines have to have spinning discs," he smiles. "We experimented with a number of different materials. Then I remembered that in the original book the Time Traveler is referred to as a professor of physical optics, which inspired the idea of using fresnel lenses--the kind used in lighthouses--to form refractive petals."

Wells then turned over the approved concept sketches and illustrations to computer designer Tim Wilcox, who was able to render a fully three-dimensional digital model in the computer. When it was completed, the time machine stood 10 feet, 6 inches high, and weighed in at approximately 6,000 pounds, but its impact on the cast and filmmakers was immeasurable. "I don't think anything prepared us for finally seeing the actual time machine," Wells states. "It was one of those occasions when tears come to your eyes. It was three tons of aluminum and polycarbonate, but it sure looked like brass and glass. It was beautiful and just awe inspiring."

For the filmmakers, remaking "The Time Machine" begs the question: If a time machine really did exist, would you go?

Not me," says Logan, stating, "As a writer, I would rather imagine it than do it. Dreaming about the future is a real human need; I wouldn't want to lose that by seeing the reality. Time travel may well be coming someday, but I won't be taking the ride."

Guy Pearce shares his trepidation. "I really don't know what I would do. I guess we can't learn anything until we venture. But isn't one better off venturing into the depths of the present moment where life unfolds naturally, and the future and the past remain in their true form--illusion?"

"For me, this question always brings up the eternal time travel paradox: If you went back in time and strangled your grandmother, you wouldn't be born, so you couldn't go back and strangle your grandmother…," Simon Wells muses. "Even if you could travel back in time, you can't alter the things that have happened to you because they are what made you who you are, and that, in turn, informs the decisions you will make in your future."

"I think time travel challenges one of the basic tenets of our existence," Walter Parkes reflects, " which is that we live in the present. I think that fearfulness would ultimately keep me off of the time machine, but, as the Uber-Morlock tells Alexander, we all have time machines. The ones that take us back are called memories and the ones that take us forward are called dreams. Maybe somewhere in there is the elusive thing that makes us fascinated with time travel."