Time was something director Wells (The Prince of Egypt) could have used a little more of during this remake of the 1960 sci-fi classic. “The whole thing was a mad scramble,” he says. Eighteen days before principal photography ended, the director, great-grandson of Time Machine novelist H.G. Wells, had to give up the reins to Gore Verbinski (The Mexican). “I was at the point where I was going to start making mistakes and wasting money, in a big way,” admits Wells, who returned for postproduction. The story that emerged is both familiar—an inventor (Pearce) travels about 800,000 years into the future and discovers that mankind has evolved into dominant Morlocks and subservient Elois—and updated: The location was switched from London to Manhattan, and the Elois are not the blond, Aryan types they were in the original film. “We said, ‘If this is a remnant of the human race, take a look at the people walking around the Lower East Side and let the Elois reflect that which is ethnically mixed,’ ” says DreamWorks cohead of production Walter Parkes. Singer Samantha Mumba makes her acting debut as an Eloi named Mara, and her 11-year-old brother, who tagged along on her screen test, won the role of Mara’s brother.
All’s Wells That Ends Wells: The Wells family owns the literary rights to the story but not the film rights, so Wells was hardly a shoo-in as director. His name didn’t help his case, either. Parkes says, “It wasn’t, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had H.G. Wells’s great-grandson direct The Time Machine?’ It was, ‘What about Simon? Wouldn’t he be great? Oh my God, he’s the great-grandson!’ ”
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The Time Machine
Starring: Guy Pearce, Mark Addy, Jeremy Irons, and Samantha Mumba
Directed by: Simon Wells
(DreamWorks, March 8)
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Copyright © 2008 Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S., Inc.