The idea of this rich, creative life that's living inside of this guy
who, on the outside, nobody would be able to tell it's there.
That, to me, is the element of the story that we wanted to translate to the movie.
What Steve came up with, which I thought was really unique,
was to have Walter be working at LIFE magazine.
He is the repository for
the most significant photographs that have been taken in the last 70 years.
It has resulted in Walter spending a lot of time
wishing himself into similar circumstances.
When that idea occurred to us, I thought,
"We have a chance now to put into the actual fabric of this character's life
"the source of his daydreams."
Walter?
This is the reception.
- You mean LIFE? - Yes, it says LIFE.
STILLER: Jeff and I worked together on Tropic Thunder,
and we really connected on that movie.
And when I read Mitty, I gave it to him
and told him I was really excited about what this could be,
and he was so integral in designing so many of the sequences.
It'll be hits of stainless with this...
I would say that the thing that started our approach was
wanting a timelessness to the movie.
There's definitely some period gestures in the movie,
and there's some contemporary gestures in the movie.
Buffering.
That was the whole part of trying to give the movie its own reality.
And we looked at a lot of references of the period,
LIFE magazine offices which no longer exist.
This is like the glass that they used. Really beautiful.
You know that one reference we have of somebody sitting behind...
That research of offices in the '50s and '60s,
those images were really, for us, sort of a touchstone.
When you see those beautiful and linear photographs
of people working with their sleeves rolled up,
horn-rimmed glasses and skinny ties.
I wanted to have that feeling for the world that Walter works in,
because it is going away.
There's a lot of approaches, a lot of things we're trying to do
with how we're shooting certain portions of the movie,
and where Walter Mitty is in his ark of self-discovery.
For me, that was an important thing,
to create that world that was very graphic and linear
in the first part of the movie,
and the camera being really still and hardly moving at all,
and then gradually, as he starts to connect with life and go out into the world,
the camera loosens up.
And we loosen up with him, and the colors become more saturated
and just go into his fuller life experience with him.
MANN: We took license when it came to what we call our division floor,
which is where Walter basically works,
and looked to a color palette.
There's a lot of emotion that can come out of colors,
so we've tried to operate within certain palettes.
It's a very carefully designed movie.
And there's a lot of painstaking blocking that went into how we constructed the set.
First we started with a huge model.
We had blocking meetings about the model and where certain scenes would take place.
MANN: So I would say maybe...
STILLER: There's one scene of him talking where he says, "You."
Yo!
Where's my thing?
STILLER: It could happen down here.
It literally can be like, he's gonna see him and Walter's trying to duck in.
Right? 'Cause we have doors back here and stuff.
It's in a silver bath.
It was really fun to design the office, the LIFE offices,
and his negative assets room,
which exists on a floor
that you have to take the elevator up and then go down the stairs
to some sort of mid-ﬂoor...
MANN: It had a bit of a laboratory quality to it almost.
Morning, Hernando!
STILLER: That being his son' of cave,
and where he actually felt the most comfortable.
MANN'. The mood was low,
we hung a black at the back of these archival shelves
that went 40 or 50 feet back,
and populated with myriad various archival boxes,
and ways to store these prints and negatives and all this imagery
that becomes the fuel for his daydreams which keep him sane.