Production Companies Warner Bros. Pictures, Village Roadshow Pictures, DC Comics (Vertigo), Lonely Film Productions GmbH & Co. KG., Donners' Company, Branded Entertainment/Batfilm Productions, Weed Road Pictures, 3 Art Entertainment, Di Bonaventura Pictures
“If I could create one lie that I could tell for the rest of my career, I would say that it was entirely my decision to hire Francis,” Goldsman candidly confesses. “This guy is the real thing – he’s so good he’s scary.”
Contrary to the producers’ expectations, considering Lawrence’s background, he did not approach the material from a visual perspective. “His talent with visuals was certainly apparent but when we had our first meeting he talked for two hours about the script and the characters and never once mentioned the look,” recalls di Bonaventura. “Usually, when directors are making the transition from the video or commercial world they lean heavily on the visuals because it’s what they’ve been doing, so this was already staggeringly different than anything I had experienced in more than 13 years at the studio. More than anything, we were impressed with his ability to analyze the fundamentals of a scene.”
When it came to the imagery itself, Lawrence was more than prepared. “Francis arrived at our meeting with his drawings. In this business, of course, that means instead of coming in with your resume, in a suit and tie, you arrive in flip-flops with your 25 sketches of hell,” Goldsman remembers. “I was immediately taken by his idea that heaven and hell coexist with our world, and that when you pass from this spot in our world you should be in this exact same room in hell. He was very specific about the geography. It was a brilliant idea, it gave the unimaginable a new imagining and completely captured what the movie was about.”
Lawrence sought to present the landscape of the underworld in a new way. “I thought about the ways in which I’d seen it depicted in art, in the paintings of Bruegel and Bosch, or so often in an abstract way, like a black oily void. The images were nothing you could relate to. I wanted to give it a recognizable structure. So when Constantine is in Angela’s apartment and he momentarily crosses over into hell, it’s the hell version of her apartment that he’s in; when he goes out into the street it’s the hell version of Los Angeles. That makes it an environment that people can easily imagine touching and seeing.”
He went on to provide detailed descriptions of the various demons and spirits that inhabit the story and offered casting choices that proved right on the mark. “What was interesting,” says Stoff, “is that a tremendous number of the ideas Francis proposed in his very first meeting came to fruition.”
The director’s willingness to imagine things in a fresh way was the perfect approach for a story in which nothing is clearly black or white and the characters are anything but conventional: a hardened police detective looking for hope in the paranormal; an angel representing God on Earth while promoting a personal agenda; a priest unable to perform exorcisms; an entrepreneur who runs a nightclub for both sides….and in the middle of it all, a hero who doesn’t want to be a hero. As screenwriter Frank Cappello describes, “Here’s a guy who has his problems with God. Loathes the devil. He fights the most hideous demons and yet he cannot escape his own bad habits, like smoking, which is literally killing him. Ultimately he’s a man trying to save himself, not the world.”
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