In the exciting new film "Reign of Fire," several talented and pedigreed filmmakers combined their talents to create something new:  a post-apocalyptic dragon film. 

"Reign of Fire" fuses a medieval past with a post-apocalyptic future in this exciting tale of adventure and survival.

Gregg Chabot and Kevin Peterka conceived Reign of Fire during a backpacking trip across England, Scotland and Ireland. Both graduates of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, they devised the story and drafted their first screenplay, then handing it over to screenwriter Matt Greenberg, who received a B.A. in Medieval Studies from Yale University, where he found an interest in acting and became heavily involved in theater. 

After training for a year at Actors Theatre of Louisville, one of America's premiere theater companies, Greenberg went on to study at The Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Greenberg performed in regional theater in New York before launching his writing career in 1993 with "The Killing Box," a supernatural thriller set during the American Civil War. Greenberg recently served as creator, writer, and executive producer of the Sci-Fi Channel's "The Invisible Man," one of the network's first original series and is currently adapting Neil Gaiman's comic book "Books of Magic" for Warner Brothers. His other writing credits include "Halloween H20:  Twenty Years Later", the sequel to the 1978 horror classic,

"The great thing about 'Reign of Fire' is that it provides a very realistic scenario, a grounded scenario, for a very fantastic notion," notes director Rob Bowman, who had previously directed and produced countless memorable episodes of television's "The X-Files," as well as the highly successful 1998 big-screen adaptation of the television series. 

"Right from the beginning, we wanted Rob Bowman," says Producer Roger Birnbaum.  "We're huge 'X-Files' fans, and we knew for this movie that we needed the guy who made us want to believe." "The most important thing that Rob brought is a template - from his work on 'The X-Files' - of extraordinary events set in a realistic tone.  It's fascinating to watch him get interesting yet realistic performances from all of the actors.  When we talk about movies we like, we talk about movies where you care about the characters more than the special effects - 'Jaws,' 'Alien.'  And Rob has brought that sensibility here." 

"To me, projects like this one work the best when you have something realistic for the audience, to ground them in reality.  If you show them real people who are dealing with real problems, and then show that it's because of the dragons, then the audience will be as afraid as the characters are."

"It seems like there are a lot of special effects films that just throw their effects at you, like an all-you-can-eat banquet," Bowman continues.  "I wanted to do something different: take a big idea - a big, special-effects movie (we have over 130 visual effects shots), but restrain ourselves a little bit, and make it more about the people on the ground than the dragons in the air, then we could really make a great movie."

"We've all talked a lot about creating as much reality as possible," says Christian Bale, who plays Quinn, the stern, resolute leader determined to keep his charges alive.  "That was what I wanted to do from the very beginning, and when Rob explained his vision, it was as if he'd read my mind.  I couldn't wait to come on board."

"The dragon fights are spectacular, sure, but you also give a damn about the people on the ground," says Matthew McConaughey, who plays Van Zan, the hotshot American leader who calls himself a dragonslayer.  "If the movie had a cartoon style instead of a style based in reality, I think that might get lost."

"What's appealing about 'Reign of Fire' is its originality," adds co-producer Dean Zanuck.  "No one has ever seen dragons matched against modern battle equipment like tanks and helicopters.  With its uniqueness, it really stands out from the pack."

"The type of movie I grew up watching - the movies I loved as a teenager, learning to make movies - were always realistic," Bowman concludes.  "It's easier to be swept away.  I mean, as an audience member, once you come to the movie, you're willing to suspend your disbelief - you want to see the dragons.  It's up to me to keep their trust."

what do dragons look like?
"The first reaction I had when I finished reading the screenplay was, 'Wow, what do the dragons look like?'" says director Rob Bowman.  "And the answer was, we wanted to make them as vicious, as organic, and as scary as we could."

The job of turning Bowman's vision into a living, breathing beast fell to visual effects supervisor Richard Hoover and co-supervisor Dan DeLeeuw.  Both are veterans of effects-heavy films;  "The thing that Rob told us at the very beginning was that he wanted to make a dragon that was stone cold real," says DeLeeuw. 

"It wasn't enough to portray something evil and malevolent," Hoover notes.  "If the environment and the beast don't jibe - if they don't seem like they can be part of the same world - well, the audience is so sophisticated that they're immediately taken out of the picture.  Rob presents our real world in the movie, so we worked hard to create a dragon that could fit into our world."

To do that, Bowman, Hoover, and DeLeeuw borrow elements from nature.  "We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we wanted the audience to respond to the dragon," Bowman says.  "We designed it to move on the ground like a leopard, with the sound of a cobra about to strike; the skin of an alligator, but the spine of a serpent.  The idea was that the audience would then bring pre-set reactions to the dragon - that they would have the subconscious reaction, 'Jeez, I've seen that in National Geographic' - and be naturally, innately, afraid."

The dragon has a compact, lithe body, with enormous, folding wings, allowing it a graceful flight through the air.  "There was a whole process where we figured out how we wanted it to fly," Bowman notes.  "Did we want it to flap, or fall out of the sky, or glide through the air?  Okay, we want it to glide.  Well, then, you can't have a large torso and small wings - the wings have to catch enough air to support the body.  And that's when the serpent design of the torso came in."

"I didn't want the dragon to breathe fire," Bowman points out.  "I mean, if fire came out if its mouth, it would burn its mouth.  So how were we going to do it?  Well, it turns out there's an African beetle that blows two opposite chemicals out of its rear end, and when the two touch, there's a flame.  That's its defense mechanism. "Then, I was watching a nature special about cobras - it showed this cobra spitting, and I thought, 'That's how we'll do it,'" Bowman continues.  "The dragon has glands that squirt out the opposite chemicals, and they touch about 15 feet in front of the mouth, and that's where the fire is. "The biggest thing - and the thing I had no idea about when we started this process - was that you're basically building an animal from the skeleton on up," Bowman says.  "I thought it was much simpler - draw the dragon, the guy puts it into the computer, and you're done.  No.  You have to build every bone, every muscle, every gland, every toenail… it took me nine months to make one dragon."

finding the right actors to fight the dragons

To cast the film's four main roles - the hotshot militant, Van Zan; the tough, resilient Quinn; the strong, beautiful Alex; and the resolute, sarcastic Creedy - the filmmakers looked for actors who could reinforce the vision of lending as much reality to their roles as possible.  In each case, an actor was cast that was not, perhaps, the first that one would think would suit the role, but in the end, played the part pitch-perfect.

"Everybody has a picture in their head of Matthew McConaughey," says executive producer Jonathan Glickman.  "We wanted to twist that a little bit.  We definitely wanted an American for the role - and Matthew's about as American as you can get - but he's also playing a different type of role than he's ever played before."  In fact, Van Zan's head is shaved, he is covered with tattoos, and his body is rippled with muscle.

"I don't like to call Van Zan a dragonslayer - it sounds too much like a wizards-and-warlocks movie," says Bowman, "but, I think if you were to ask this guy what he does, he'd say, 'I kill dragons.'  He's very matter-of-fact in that way."

"We always knew that in order to take on the dragons, Van Zan was going to have to be a beast himself," notes McConaughey.  "But the question was, how do we make him a strategist?  How do we make him a great leader of men? "I did study some personalities from history - Patton, for example," McConaughey continues.  "It gave me an idea about the 'never dig in, always plan offense' attitude.  Van Zan is a man who always and only does what's necessary."

"The thing about Quinn is that even if he does take a defensive position, he's not weak about it," Bowman notes.  "He's one of the last few people alive out of six billion, so there's got to be something special about him.  He's the tough schoolmaster, the taskmaster; he's got to be able to manage some extreme personalities in some very extreme situations. "I thought that the best kind of actor to play that would be a rising star, who maybe hadn't made a huge splash yet, who could take risks," Bowman continues.  "When I'd made my decision, I went to Germany to convince Christian Bale to take the part."

"When I read the script, I thought if it was done with a certain approach, with a certain amount of realism, it could work quite well," Bale remembers,  "but I had to be sure that the director shared my view, so I just wanted to listen to what Rob had to say.  And he's very straightforward; I asked him about the kind of movie he wanted to make, and it was as if he'd read my notes.  We were completely on the same track.

"I think the basic difference between Quinn and Van Zan - apart from the fact that Quinn's not psychotic - aren't that great," says Bale.  "They become adversaries in the movie, but it's less that they disagree about what they want - survival and defeat of the dragons - and more that they can't agree on the means to achieve that goal."

"Izabella Scorupco plays Alex Jensen, who's really the odd woman out," Bowman notes.  "She's the pilot, and because she never leaves the chopper, she's got a much higher life expectancy than anyone else on the crew.  Not only that, but as the one who gives the rest the thumbs-up to go, she's basically signing their death warrants.  She's extremely attached to the men on her crew, but every day, she tells them to jump, and every day, they die.  She's perpetually broken-hearted about that. "I thought it would be an interesting thing to take somebody who had a few extra points of good looks and knock them down a couple of notches," Bowman laughs.  "I put big circles under her eyes - poor girl, her mother's never going to recognize her."

"Not only is Alex a pilot, but she's also a scientist," Scorupco notes.  "She probably knows more about the dragon's biology and how they breed than anybody.  But she's also tough, without losing her femininity.

The final piece of the casting picture fell to Gerard Butler, who plays Creedy, the right-hand man to Quinn.  "Creedy is the guy who keeps Quinn honest," says Bowman.  "Creedy is the one guy who has Quinn's ear, who can tell Quinn that he's not seeing things quite correctly.  That's a pivotal relationship, and Gerry Butler plays it in a way that knocks Quinn off his gloomy self.  It was brilliant."

breathing life into the vision

Besides the visual effects team creating the dragons, several groups were responsible for presenting a vision of a world destroyed by dragons as true-to-life as possible.  This included the production design team, headed by Wolf Kroeger; the Special Effects team, headed by Dave Gauthier; and Nick Gillard's stunt team.

A 25-year movie stunts veteran who has recently coordinated the stunts for such high-profile action blockbusters as "Star Wars" Episodes I and II and Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow," Gillard faced an all-new challenge on "Reign of Fire" as he prepared for the Archangel sequence.  The film's central sequence, it follows several members of Van Zan's group as they jump out of a helicopter to try to kill a dragon.

"I try not to use doubles," Gillard continues.  "We make it safe for the actors to do their own stunts and only use doubles if it's absolutely necessary.  Matthew, Christian, and Izabella are all pretty physical."