All of this fit perfectly with Winterbottom’s preferred way of directing. “I like to be on location,” he says. “For me, the story never really coheres until you know where you’re filming, because the interaction between the characters and the environment is crucial. Most of my films are observational in some way, so without a sense of the place – and how the characters react to each other within that space – it’s hard for me to tell who the characters are going to be. To build a completely artificial futuristic world on studio sets would not have worked, for me or for the film.”
So out of an imaginative extrapolation from contemporary urban reality, Code 46’s vision of the future was born. “We said, ‘Let’s imagine that climate change means areas that were once fertile are now desert, so the area around Shanghai is a desert,’” says Winterbottom. “‘Let’s imagine that the ozone layer is depleted and people are afraid to go out in the daytime, so they work at night. Also let’s imagine that because of these changes, living outside of a controlled urban environment is very hard, so everyone wants to live inside the city.’ Which means the cities are even more densely populated than now. And in order to control that urban space you have to have some kind of privatized visa system which gives permission for some people to live in the city – but only those who have the official papelles, which are printed in the office where Maria works. Meanwhile the disenfranchised people who have no papelles live in the desert area, al fuera, beyond the city limits.”
Filming on location in Shanghai, Dubai and Jaipur might not seem the cheapest way of envisioning the future, but Winterbottom worked closely with Tildesley and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind (both of whom worked on In This World). Having scouted the locations in advance, they were able to shoot quickly and efficiently. Filming almost exclusively with available light, they were able to react to the sights, sounds and textures of the urban settings.
Not that these spaces always seem as familiar as they should. The film makes extensive, inventive use of “creative geography,” often matching the exterior or exit of a building in one well-known city with the entrance or interior of a building in a different city. “We thought the most interesting thing to do,” says Tildesley, “would be to try to fool the audience by taking the most interesting bits from each location. You’d have the impression you were walking out a door in one city, but you’d actually end up walking out into a completely different place, somewhere else entirely.”
Initial plans to give the film’s interior sets a distinctly futuristic look (in particular the Sphinx insurance agency offices where Maria works) were later scaled back so as not to detract from the emotional core of the story: the love affair between William and Maria. “At one point,” says Tildesley, “we were going to have all sorts of screens with big pictures of natural beauty, seascapes and stuff, which would help Maria and her fellow workers get through their day. But as the design of the film evolved, we realized it might be distracting to have lots of sophisticated interiors with screens and all sorts of stuff going on.
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