The Truman Show Behind The Scenes

Welcome to the Behind the Scenes section of The Jim Carrey Experience Truman Show site. Here you will find out about the Truman Show off the air.

Principal photography for "The Truman Show" began on December 9, 1996 in Seaside, Florida. In March of 1997, the cast and crew arrived in Los Angeles to complete the balance of filming on stage and local locations.

A unique series of challenges faced the filmmakers in bringing the world of "The Truman Show" to the screen. The unusual storyline, coupled with Weir's own vision, dictated a specific location which could become the almost-too-perfect town of Seahaven, a town completely enclosed within the world's largest soundstage.

Weir had considered using Los Angeles studio backlots to create Seahaven from scratch. "The town needed a feeling of having been purpose built, and built all at one time, as with any television or movie set," notes Weir. When certain logistical challenges rendered the idea impractical, Weir and production designer Dennis Gassner began scouting several areas along the coasts of California and Florida. Wendy Stites, the film's visual consultant, brought to Weir's attention an old article from an Australian architecture magazine about the planned community of Seaside, in Florida. When Weir and Gassner visited the town, they knew they had found Truman Burbank's hometown of Seahaven.

"It looked like it had been built for our show. I knew we could enhance it to create the ideal setting for Seahaven," notes Weir.

Built along a beautiful stretch of beach property in northwest Florida, Seaside is a 90-acre planned community founded by developer Robert Davis and his wife, Daryl, in 1980. Comprised of over 300 cottages used by year-round residents and vacation guests, Seaside features its own local post office, art galleries, antique shops, boutiques, bookstores and restaurants, all within walking distance of each home. The residents of Seaside conform to a unique building code, wherein each cottage is required to adhere to a neo-Victorian style of architecture - no ranch houses, no Colonials, no split-levels. Every home features a white picket fence, but no two fences on the same street are alike. And each of Seaside's streets lead to the ocean. The storybook cottages, which are all painted in cheery pastels, carry individual names, such as Eversong and Ain't Misbehaving, and feature porches, ample windows, and wide eaves.

"The script drove the design, but the visuals of the film's Seahaven really came from this community. It is a highly architecturally designed environment--a kind of neoclassical, postmodern retro world, and quite unique," recalls Dennis Gassner. "If I got stuck on an aspect of my designs, I could take a ride on my bicycle around town, and would always find something which would stir an idea."

Director Weir, whose previous films had all been set somewhere in the real world, either past or present, relished the opportunity to develop a look, environment and history for a fictitious, long-running television show.

"If you're going to create a world, you can imagine what it might be like in the future, or you can draw from the best of the past, which is what I saw Christof, the show's creator, doing," says Weir. "I always thought of the film as taking place around twenty years or so in the future, and that Christof, the show's creator, would have created an idealized environment for Seahaven based on elements from the past that he particularly admired."

"As we were preparing for the film," Weir continues, "Pouring over magazines and looking at clothing from various pre-war and post-war eras, I could picture every detail in the characters' lives. It was exciting. Together with screenwriter Andrew Niccol, Weir developed a meticulously detailed backstory for the television show from its inception through its 30th year, when the film takes place. This extensive chronicle of the show included bios of its creator Christof, the actors portraying Truman's friends and family, as well as portraits of the numerous behind-the scenes personnel required to mount this ambitious TV show. The elaborate fiction included references to memorable episodes over the years, postcards of favorite moments in the show, obscure characters from the program's past years, various bits of Truman Trivia and a catalog of products featured on the show, offered for sale and snapped up by its loyal international audience.

"I had to have a logic for myself as to how this would have come to be," explains Weir. "In order to direct everybody and to collaborate with the department heads as to how it would look, I needed to know for myself," notes Weir. "As with most films, there is a suspension of disbelief, a logic barrier, which you have to overcome in order to engage the audience."

Another challenge for the filmmakers was to develop ways of shooting the film in order to portray the various points of view dictated by the story.

"The fundamental situation that we had to face was that movies are shot with concealed cameras, so that in a sense there was no way that you could convey the idea that Truman was being filmed under surveillance," says Weir, who worked closely with director of photography Peter Biziou. "So I began to do it by suggestion, so there was a reference for it, via all sorts of wide angle lenses and cameras in odd positions unusual for a dramatic movie. We would also shoot through oval or circular "masks," to give you the feeling that these hidden cameras are built into various parts of the landscape." Special "cameras" were hidden in more mobile and surprising places - in a ring which Truman wears, another in his wife Meryl's necklace and the "buoy cam," which bobs along the surface of the water, ready to capture Truman should he venture offshore.

Production designer Dennis Gassner worked closely with Weir and Biziou on the concept of the hidden cameras scattered throughout the town for surveillance purposes. "This concept became inherent in all of the design elements of the film," says Gassner. His designs for the town incorporated certain touches into the architectural styles of various buildings which were decorative, but also, to serve the story, functioned as small viewers through which the script's miniature hidden cameras could "shoot." Gassner designed a tall, elegant sculpture piece which stood near the entrance of the OmniCam Building, the nerve center of "The Truman Show." Gassner notes, "The sculpture actually had three purposes. It was representing an art piece; but it also served the purpose of housing yet another surveillance camera, as well as acting as a sentry of sorts for OmniCam."

The story elements of "The Truman Show" required an extensive integration of film and video. While Weir and company were documenting on film the action of the movie itself, Weir called upon video supervisor Rick Whitfield to direct a second shooting unit, specifically for the extensive video coverage of Truman's life.

"About halfway into the film, as the story unfolds, the movie-going audience will begin to realize that Truman Burbank's life is being broadcast to a worldwide audience, and will begin to see parts of the show on television screens, viewing Truman as he is seen by the fictitious show's TV audience around the world, as well as in Christof's control room where the TV show's large staff monitors his comings and goings," explains Whitfield. "So we were a separate second unit, a video unit, documenting the TV show portion of the film that you see on the television sets viewed by the show's global audience of viewers, as well as the extensive video which appears on video screens in scenes at Christof's control room, where scores of employees monitor Truman's every movement via banks of video screens, as well as a giant video screen at the rear of the control room."

Visual consultant Wendy Stites came up with the concept for the highly original look of the wardrobe. Working in close collaboration with costume designer Marilyn Matthews they set out to create the clothing to reflect Truman's world. Wendy Stites took her inspiration from a variety of sources including Norman Rockwell paintings, Cocteau, a book containing "Everyday Fashions of the 1940s" and photos of Cocteau and of Jimmy Stewart.

"In developing the wardrobe for Truman Burbank," notes Wendy Stites, "I kept in mind that Truman is the only person on 'The Truman Show' who dresses himself - the others are all dressed by the wardrobe department of the television show - so his look should be a bit different, not quite as polished. In essence, it's a mixture of styles put together in funny ways. I had come across a wonderful photo of Jimmy Stewart. I could visualize Jim Carrey as Jimmy Stewart here because the character of Truman does personify a lovely fellow walking innocently through life like many of the characters which Stewart played."

"Our challenge was to avoid making the costumes too cartoonish and also not to make them too tied into a specific period of time," says Marilyn Matthews, who notes that they also avoided certain colors which seemed too contemporary (like orange, turquoise, purple and lime green) in favor of reds, yellows and black and white checked patterns.

Stites and Matthews worked hard to keep the styles and colors consistent with the overall vision of the film's look, and ended up having the majority of the costumes made to order rather than purchasing existing pieces.

The film's collaborators have worked together to create an original, unpredictable world for "The Truman Show." Like a thrill ride with a deceptively gentle start, "The Truman Show" whips its audience through sharp drops and corkscrew turns. Weir continues, "When the secret is revealed in this film, it is all the more frightening in that the antagonists are not villains in true gun-toting, bomb-planting sense, but simply people out of touch with reality, and that, therefore, makes them all the more terrifying. There is an overwhelming feeling of tension as you head into the last 20 minutes of the film, and, hopefully, the audience will enjoy the journey."