by Jerry Roberts
photos by Melissa Moseley/ courtesy of Screen Gems

The Mothman Prophecies is based on a nonfiction book by John Keel that chronicled the odd circumstances — including visions of a large creature, accurate predictions of tragedies and other phenomena — that affected dozens of people in 1967 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. These events culminated when the Silver Bridge, which carried U.S. Route 35 over to Gallipolis, Ohio, fell into the Ohio River, killing 46 people.

"We chose Pittsburgh, because there are so many bridges connected to towns," Pellington said in an interview between final mixing chores on the film, which enters theaters January 25. "We looked at every town and every bridge, the way into town and out. Some were too small, some too big. We went to the real Point Pleasant, and there's a sadness and a sleepiness to Point Pleasant. From the air, I could get a sense of how big it was. We were looking for a town with four to six thousand people. We continued aerial scouting, and we saw Kittanning."

There, a green, three-humped, steel-girder monster high on concrete pilings spans the wide Allegheny River, which, at Pittsburgh merges with the Monongahela River to form the Ohio about 120 miles upriver from Point Pleasant. An obvious key focus of the action in the film, the bridge figures prominently as another character, as background tableaux, as a set, as the climactic core of the film.

	Director Mark Pellington on the set of The Mothman Prophecies. Click picture for larger view.

"I said, wow, how cool. The Kittanning Bridge was unusual in that the bridge had the kind of construction we were looking for, as well as the way that you come into town and right up to the court house," said Pellington. "Plus, Kittanning felt contained, like it had a center to it, and there was a soul to the town. It felt sleepy and had a real defined color scheme. It was old and beaten up, but it still had character. With certain locations, you know that the elements will work, like the way the road came down the hill and curved onto the bridge into town. If a location will give you 85 out of 100 elements you are looking for, you just go with that arrangement."

Using the framework of Keel's book and the legend of the so-called "Mothman," an otherworldly harbinger of doom that has been recorded in several cultures, used in fiction and referenced in histories, Pellington and his screenwriters updated the story to contemporary times and used the fictional character of John Klein, a Washington Post reporter played by Gere, to create a psychological thriller that uses science fiction– and horror-genre elements without convention, without any creature-feature prosthetics, but with plenty of bridge special effects. It is documentary maker and music video maker Pellington's third feature as a director following Going All the Way (1997) with Ben Affleck and Jeremy Davies and Arlington Road (1999) starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins.

"The script, Richard Hatem's second draft, came to one of the Arlington Road producers, Tom Rosenberg," Pellington said. "I decided to pass and see if other things were out there. A year later, I had been attached to one thing that fell apart over casting and was eager to do another picture. They sent me the rewrite that they had done with a new writer, and something had changed for me. Six months later, in the late spring of 2000, they sent me another draft. I didn't know what was happening to the script with this third set of writers, so I said, 'Can I see all of the drafts.' I went back to the original writer's first draft, and brought in two friends of mine to do a rewrite.

"This was a director's polish, and these two guys didn't get Writers Guild credit, but they really contributed strongly to me just reshaping Richard Hatem's original draft and making it my own — and not only making it my own, but just shaping it to my sensibilities and thematic interests. I said, 'this is what I'm interested in making: this version of the movie.' We took stuff from different drafts. The producers liked it, and Richard Gere liked it. So the ball started rolling from there."

	Richard Gere in a scene from The Mothman Prophecies.

"Richard Hatem had done a great job as the architect who had taken that nonfiction book and weaved a cohesive narrative out of it. He took the best of the book, and formed a pretty striking screenplay. I didn't get screenplay credit and neither did my two friends. Any director has to be really heavily involved in shaping the script. I love that process. The Writers Guild did arbitration and gave Richard Hatem sole credit. My writer friends were fine with that; they understood, and it gave Richard credit that he richly deserves."

"Richard Gere always responded to the character of John Klein," Pellington said, "and he was a given. For other casting, the producers and Sheila Jaffe, the casting coordinator, and I would sit down and say, 'OK, who do we want for these parts?' Richard had worked with Laura Linney before and had a great experience with her on Primal Fear. She was right at the top of my list. We needed somebody who had to be strong, feminine, very real and down-to-earth. We weren't really playing up the romance angle. There had to be a connection between the two characters. She went for it.

"The character of Gordon (a Point Pleasant local who had seen visions) was tougher. There were four or five guys that I auditioned who had read the script, and Richard and I had both worked with each of them. I tried to see who could put the most unique chemistry between those two characters. That was Will Patton. As for Debra Messing, (who plays Klein's wife) we didn't want someone who would be too young for an older male figure, and we wanted somebody smart and who had not been overexposed in movies. Within 20 seconds of meeting Debra, I said, 'That's Mary Klein.' There's a huge preponderance of great over-60 actors who could have played Alexander Leek. Someone suggested Alan Bates, and he was great."

The cast rehearsed for more than two weeks. "I love rehearsal. But don't over-rehearse. I just use it to get the text down, let the actors contribute their ideas continuing to refine the script, let the dialogue coach talk; I don't get too heavily into blocking, save that for the location. We took Richard and Laura up to the town and let them go out around town to get the feel of Kittanning.

Pellington's father, Bill, played 12 seasons for The Baltimore Colts, including the Johnny Unitas-led team's World Championships of 1958 and 1959. In that same team planning strategy, Pellington gave everyone in the cast and crew his "manifesto," his pre-shoot written version of what he believed the film should be.

I let the cast in on storyboards and visual references — and I've got this manifesto, which is a very open, impressionistic, almost dream-level kind of scene-by-scene collection of notes of shots, ideas, feelings," he explained. "I give it to everybody so that I can get this idea out of my head. I'm very much like, 'Here, here's my head, here's what I see,' and I share it with everybody, from the actors, production coordinator, DP, to the gaffer, the costume designer and everybody across the board, so we can all see the same movie."

There have been many famously exploded and bombed bridges in movies, from David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and beyond. But the bridge in The Mothman Prophesies goes down on its own. Special effects guru Gene Warren matched the Kittanning Bridge on down to rusting rivets and flaking paint. He matched the cars, the river and the lighting of cinematographer Fred Murphy, whose other visions of down-country Americana include October Sky, Hoosiers, The Trip to Bountiful and Heartland.

"Gene is a top-notch visual effects model maker, builder and shooter," Pellington said. "He made tons of stuff that, in a way, is Old School in that it's not done very much anymore," thanks to computer-generated graphics. "This was a huge challenge and he sacrificed a lot across the board to really bring this to life in a way that felt real. In the dailies of his footage, you would forget that you were looking at a one-sixth-scale model. You think you're really watching a bridge coming down. Fred worked very closely with him so it would all match.

"Fred's an amazing artist," Pellington said. "In the interview, I showed the DP candidates images and talked about my ideas to see how they responded to my energy and me to theirs, and it's a connection. You are going to be working together for a long time with that person. You look at their previous bodies of work. I wanted a classicist, someone who understood the real classical lighting techniques, but was open to experimenting and trying different tricks. There was a connection I felt and a spirit and a twinkle in his eye as I was talking about the movie. He pushed me, and I pushed him. He was very patient and wise, helping me keep my cool on the shoot as I got nervous about how I was going to do something."

	Laura Linney, Lucinda Jenney and Will Patton in a scene from The Mothman Prophecies.

"Richard Hoover was the production designer. The first two weeks we spent together we designed the movie. Then I spent another two weeks later with him and Fred, in which we designed the movie scene-by-scene and shot-by-shot and collaborated to come up with the realization of my manifesto, my document, the visual and textural bible for the script.

"For this film I watched Philip Kaufmann's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for its creepy feeling. We didn't want to make a creature movie. We wanted more to make a movie about perception and fear. I love the films of Roman Polanski, David Lynch, Kubrick, Sydney Lumet, Billy Wilder, Cameron Crowe. I didn't go to film school, I just fell into movies out of music and design and music videos."

Pellington's affinity for music and the story's eerie elements led him to hire Frenchman Claude LeTissier as the sound designer on the picture, even before he hired Murphy. "The sonic elements in the screenplay were one of the reasons I wanted to do this. The composers, Tomandandy, I've worked with for 15 years. Their style of submerging the music, which is very textural, and the sound designer, who is very musical, I thought made an interesting merger. There are not enough movies that explore sound in interesting and dense ways. Filmmaking should be an exploration."

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