For more information on Mark Twain, check out:
The Mark Twain House, Hartford CT
The official web site of the house where Twain lived his last days.
http://www.hartnet.org/twain/

Why did you decide to do a film about Mark Twain?

There are several reasons that inspired me to direct this project. We came across some spectacular photos of Mark Twain during our research for the film "ACROSS THE SEA OF TIME" at the California Museum of Photography/Riverside. We found many high quality 3-D photo negatives of Mark Twain. These stereo images were nicely staged and were taken in many different locations.

We realized that these photographs gave us the visual potential for another film. I started reading some of Twain's works and rediscovered his writing. Also, I rediscovered how brilliant and funny his novels were to read. Twain lived through and wrote about all the great things of the human experience in the 19th century. He personally experienced amazing depths of the history of the United States that included slavery, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution and the opening of the western frontier.

He lived through everything and wrote about it with great insight and humor. He not only experienced great moments in history, fame and financial success but also experienced great financial failure and poverty in addition to tragedy with the loss of most of his family members. As a writer and a director, I realized that you could not pick a better character for a film...he was a great legend.

What relevance does the 19th century have to people living today?

The people of today are still bringing the 19th century alive. In "MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA" we take a look into how people lived in another era; however, we also show that elements of the 19th century are still part of our world today. There are some places that we visit in the film such as Hannibal, Missouri and Virginia City, Nevada that, both physically and emotionally, have the same spirit and feel as in the Twain's time. There are also numerous examples of present day people who are passionately re-living history with old-time ballroom dances, brass bands, guitar-strumming quartets, Civil War re-enactment's and old-fashioned gospel choirs, steamboat rides on the Mississippi and steam train rides across the American west.

Instead of creating phony drama we use real people creating the things that Mark Twain would have seen or experienced. They all have connections to the past, including the gospel singers whose forebears were slaves.

Internationally, Mark Twain is universal. He is incredibly famous around the world, his stories are universal. Europeans are fascinated by America and I think he may be even more popular in Europe. We even have a good European scene with old stills of Europe from the 1890s.

In your research, did you find Mark Twain the man, everything that you presumed him to be?

People assume he's funny. I found him to be a lot funnier then I remember as a kid. His writing is very modern, craft and very intense. His irony and satire is very relevant to our lives to this day. I was kind of surprised, one assumes that people's humor 100 years ago would be kind of moth-balled and not relevant to today. He was very profound and enormously prolific. It was hard to compress his long life into a short film; however, we tried to touch on the key emotional buttons and tried to find the emotional shape of his life.

We trace the highs and lows, achievements and failures of his life. Twain was a perfect model for the full range of the human experience--he did it all. He was very poor as a child, yet grew up to become very rich and famous to be celebrated by kings, queens, and Presidents, only to return to poverty as an older man. One of the worst things that could happen to anyone happened to Twain, he lost his entire family before he died. His life is arguably the most complete of human experiences. Many people may live fulfilling lives but he also wrote about it beautifully. The photographic record of his life and times is very well documented.

Why do you think that Mark Twain has become such an important American literary figure?

Human beings have a very deep desire to know about the past; we are creatures of the past. Twain brilliantly brings the past alive, by reading a book you are able to go back in time and vicariously experience the life of your ancestors. Very deep feelings come from your parents and grandparents that are very profound -- you are not just the descendants of these people, you are these people. The film shows that they did not just live the 19th century, they saved it for you.

The characters he wrote about are either in all of us or people we know. His characters have felt and experienced things in their daily lives that we all have. Twain felt out of place in the 20th century and thought that he would be forgotten and that nobody would care. At the film's end, we show how wrong he was as cannons go off in a salute to him to prove that he has not been forgotten.

Have you learned from people in the film why so many people are interested in recreating the past?

People have a deep interest in history, that's why they flock to Europe and to Egypt to see the pyramids. Americans and Canadians swarm to these places to visit our ancestors abroad. There is a great deal of history in North America--and that's what this film is about. Rather than just compiling a bunch of historic facts, we touch upon the emotions of the human experience over time. The film takes the audience on a journey over two centuries through the human spirit and soul. The real history is the emotion, it's about the people. Such is the case with the Civil War, it's not just about dates in history, battle sites, and artillery but what really matters are the names and faces of the people who fought and those that lost their lives for a cause they believed in.

What has your working experience with the California Museum of Photography at Riverside, The Berkeley Center and Hartford been like?

From the CMP/Riverside, we found a good collection of 3D or stereo-optic photos representative of the 19th century and what he was talking about in his writings. Also, we contacted various centers for Mark Twain studies around the country and found several 2D photos of Mark Twain that we digitally transformed into 3D images for the film. Besides The California Museum of Photography, we used the photographic archives of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and several Mark Twain research centers including one in Berkeley, California; Hartford, Connecticut; and Elmira, New York.

Everyone has been really cooperative, they see the opportunity to bring Twain alive again. Everyone including the town of Hannibal helped. The town staged their 4th of July parade according to our needs. During filming, they allowed us to stop the parade for hours at a time to change camera set-ups. They even allowed us to arrange the parade route so that we could shoot against the backdrop of some of Twain's local haunts. They bent over backwards to help us out.

How much time was involved from conception to final shooting? Were any technical challenges were brought forth during filming and how have you pushed the 3D envelope since "Across the Sea of Time?"

The idea for "MARK TWAIN'S AMERICA" goes back to our first look at CMP in 1993 for "Across the Sea of Time." One of the first things we saw were over a half-dozen photos of Twain--we saw that we had the potential subject for another movie and happily we were able to do both.

This is my third 3D film. As a director, you are always pushing the limits as you better come to understand the framing for 3D. Also, we were faced with the challenge of taking 2D images from paintings and photographs and digitally converting them into 3D. You can't tell the 2D and the 3D pictures apart. I believe that this may be the first time this has been done on film.

IMAX® 3D is always one continuous technical challenge. It is especially challenging to film something that is happening naturally that you do not have much control over, such as the Civil War battles' re-enactments. You have to be careful not to miss any of the action since it takes 20 minutes just to load the camera. Each load only allows you enough film to shoot for only 3 minutes at a time. As a side note, in order to get an image that looks just like your own eyesight in a large format film, we use about twenty times as much film stock as a Hollywood film.