City in the clouds

The Weinstein Company presents The Giver press conference at Essex House on Central Park South Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Phillip Noyce, who directed Dead Calm with Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane - Rabbit-Proof Fence with Kenneth Branagh and David Gulpilil - The Quiet American with Michael Caine - and Catch A Fire with Tim Robbins, now gives us The Giver.

Following the press conference with Jeff Bridges (who paid tribute to Robin Williams), Meryl Streep, Katie Holmes, Taylor Swift, Brenton Thwaites, et al, I spoke with the director about his James Turrell inspiration for The Giver's abode. MoMA PS1, where Michelangelo Frammartino's Alberi was shown in 2013 is the location of Turrell's Meeting.

The Giver director Phillip Noyce: "He [Jonas] should be discovering home. the concept of home. It's in the book as a memory where he experiences Christmas." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Giver, screenplay by Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide, based on Lois Lowry’s wildly successful young adult novel, takes place in a world of the future where the quest for safety has strangled the possibilities of experience.

Phillip Noyce put the tale on the screen with a significantly aged hero. Jonas, the book's 12-year-old protagonist, is played by 25-year-old Maleficent prince Brenton Thwaites and has a love interest (Odeya Rush) who triggers his perception of colours. His parents, played by Katie Holmes and Alexander Skarsgard, are perfectly content with the medicated status quo, if perfectly and content even register on their limited scale.

In John Wells's August: Osage County, Meryl Streep's performance as Violet Weston, makes your blood run cold. She is the matriarchal lynchpin, a center of ill will and revulsion who has woven a large and perilous web. Violet's violent mood swings, the horrors on and off medication, create the perfect monster. In 2013 she said, "It wasn't the most joyous experience, from my point of view it was hard to feel that way about everybody…. You can feel very disembodied, in the whole process it's important to make a connection beyond, outside the set."

In The Giver, Streep saw herself as the undisputed boss. "Well, I like to be boss… I felt that the Chief Elder wasn't taking her medication."

G is for Meryl Streep: "Well, I like to be boss… I felt that the Chief Elder wasn't taking her medication." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Jonas is the chosen one, as he is being told by the Chief Elder (Meryl Streep) in hologram form at a big benevolent Hunger Games meets graduation meets Harry Potter's sorting hat ceremony. He shall become Receiver of the community's memory and take over from Jeff Bridges, the Giver.

In this land with no recall, the inhabitants are controlled by their voluntary morning shot of a substance that induces a variation of colorblindness and emotional frost. They live comfortably and don't feel much. Their professions are mapped out for them, families are designed rather than chosen by affinities. Animals and fluctuating weather have been eradicated.

Noyce, who directed man and nature so impressively in Dead Calm and Rabbit-Proof Fence, took on the challenge of light and memory in The Giver.

Anne-Katrin Titze: The Giver's house at the end of the world has a fantastic window - all you see is sky. It made me think of James Turrell's installation Meeting.

Phillip Noyce: We saw the Turrell exhibition in Los Angeles.

AKT: And after that you created the window?

PN: Yes. Turrell was a big influence on the design of the Giver's quarters.

Jeff Bridges remembers his friend Robin Williams and the "amazing time in New York we had shooting The Fisher King." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

AKT: Have you seen his installation called Meeting at MoMA PS1?

PN: Yes, I have.

AKT: Was your direction concerning the light and the sky in the other areas also influenced by Turrell?

PN: No, just the Giver's quarters.

Earlier on, Noyce explained how the self-contained model world was informed by a variety of influences. The novelist's childhood memories shaped the architecture of the film.

PN: Lois had conceived a certain type of community which was based on her experiences growing up in military bases all around the world. One of the places she lived was in Tokyo just after the Second World War, where she, like Jonas, would leave the walls of the base and venture out into the madness that was post-war Tokyo. And most of what she told us was growing up on Governor's Island surrounded by water. When you read the novel, you can see those two influences.

The geometric composition of the society's layout can be seen from above - high on a mountain plateau, surrounded by clouds, the flat world finds its visual embodiment. Wars and suffering have been stamped out like the Elephant, whose likeness remains as a "comfort object" for babies, a fluffy toy that comes with the legend of once having been a very fast hippo with five legs.

Lois Lowry on The Giver: "It was 21 years ago that I wrote the book." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

PN: I was on holiday in Cape Town, South Africa and took a shot of my son on top of Table Mountain. I was coming out on the plane and looked at it and I looked into his eyes and up at those clouds and thought, 'wow', that could be Jonas dreaming about going to the benevolent version of Elsewhere. That became one of the ideas that we explored which combined two of Lois's ideas or experiences to a set of communities on top of a mesa that's surrounded by a cloud bank, that was a barrier to the outside.

On what inspired him to shoot in South Africa.

PN: Going to shoot the film in South Africa was a big decision because it meant that the quality of light, the vegetation and everything would look just a little different than most of the rest of the world. So the world looks a little different - it looks a little familiar but there's something new about it. The color schemes, as I said, were inspired by Lois's unbelievably visual writing.

Katie Holmes on what family represents in The Giver: "It was challenging. We needed the reminder not to touch each other. It is something that you do as a mother." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

How the look of sameness came to be.

PN: Ed Verreaux was our production designer. We sort of had to make up how those houses would look. Starting with the military style, houses of the Fifties that Lois had imagined, going right through to mid 21st century egalitarian housing that might be built. We passed the designs around, including to [Lois]. She chose the same ones as the rest of us. A lot of it, of course is CG. A lot of the buildings were not built when we actually filmed - they were built much later. Designed by Ed Verreaux and then built by our CG team. All in the name of Sameness, and all in the name of being a supposedly egalitarian world free of conflict.

The Weinstein Company will release The Giver in the US on August 15.