As fans (and hate-watchers) of Lost will undoubtedly remember, Damon Lindelof is ever fascinated with the mysteries of time and space. His latest project is no different. When he started to conceptualise some ideas for the Tomorrowland story, he began by thinking about how the future has been viewed over the years.
“I was really interested in this idea of what the future was in the post-war period. Particularly the ‘50s and ‘60s, during the Space Race. We thought about the future in this very optimistic way,” says 46-year-old Lindelof. “But something had shifted in my generation, born in the ‘70s, and in the generations that followed. The future is something that we look upon post-apocalyptic. There’s going to be a war; the robots are going to take over; there’s going to be zombies or global warming is going to create tidal waves and all these things. I was like, ‘What happened?” I’d wanted to recapture that optimism, of a future that we have to look forward to.”
Then Lindelof was given access to a box that had been discovered accidentally in the Disney archives — the contents of which peaked his curiosity even more. Lindelof recalls. “The box had all this weird stuff in it that related to the inception of the Tomorrowland part of Disneyland and the 1964 World’s Fair, which Walt Disney was heavily involved in. The box contained all sorts of fascinating models and blueprints, photographs and letters. I began to imagine that they were a guide to a secret story that nobody knew but what would that story be? It felt to me that the most obvious answer was, ‘What if there really was a place called Tomorrowland that was not built in a theme park, but existed out there somewhere in the real world?’ That became the jumping-off point for the story.”
When recruiting his dream team of co-writers, it turns out that being a crazed fan can sometimes pay off, as Lindelof enlisted Jeff Jensen, whom he met while working on Lost.
“Jeff has this amazingly imaginative, creative brain,” says Lindelof. “As a journalist working for Entertainment Weekly, he would watch Lost every week and come up with these crazy theories that were so inventive that I often found myself wishing that I had been smart enough to make the show about what Jeff thought it was about. So I brought him in and then we ended up writing a detailed story draft and got Brad Bird involved.”
Brad Bird, known for his directorial work on The Simpsons, The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Mission Impossible:Ghost Protocol, had exactly the type of artistic vision and eye for adventure that Lindelof admires. The Tomorrowland writer admits that when he had an opportunity to meet Bird, he “accosted him and gushed all over him”. But, just like a meet-cute in a film neither cinephile would ever be involved in, it then emerged that Bird was a big fan of Lost.
“So whenever we would run into each other, we would talk about each other’s projects,” says Lindelof. “Finally the opportunity came along for us to actually collaborate on one and it’s been one of the most creatively satisfying experiences of my life.”
The serendipity and enthusiasm between Lindelof and Bird was infectious. When they approached their dream lead actor George Clooney, their vision for the project caught his attention – particularly when they pitched the film by asking him “’Did you ever wonder why we stopped dreaming about the future? That’s what our movie’s going to be about.”
George was interested and asked us to send him a script when it was finished. We crossed our fingers and did our best job of writing it, infusing our tailor-made character with a sense of curmudgeonly humour and a heroic quality — all of which we think George embodied. Happily for us, he liked it!”