“Stories are our dreams, really,” says actor Ewan McGregor, who plays the adventurous young Edward Bloom in Tim Burton’s fable-like family drama Big Fish. “That’s why we tell stories. They’re kind of what makes us interesting and connects us with one another from generation to generation. Without them all we’d be left with is politics and supermarkets. And what kind of a world would that be?”

Novelist Daniel Wallace says he was inspired to write Big Fish, A Story of Mythic Proportions in part by his own charismatic father and the fact that he had recently become a dad himself. "There are many similarities between my father and Edward Bloom. Like Edward, my father was an extremely charismatic man who sometimes used his charisma to keep people at a distance. It would appear as though he was being intimate with you when he was really just being charming."

The title of Wallace's novel about Bloom's adventures came from one of his father's favorite expressions. "Throughout his entire life, my father talked about leaving the small town in which he was born for the big city, because, as he put it, he didn't want to be a 'big fish in a little pond.' So he left Cullman, Alabama, and became an international businessman. But the title has other meanings as well. A fish can be real slippery; like Edward Bloom, you can never really get a hold of him."

"I also wanted to write the story of an ordinary man's life as though it was mythic," he continues. "And as I pieced the stories together, a whole life emerged, a life that was compelling and rich, magnificent and meaningful."

In his stories, Wallace consciously sought to pay homage to a noble Southern tradition, the interweaving of truth and fiction, fact and exaggeration. "Edward is a compulsive story teller and that's what Southern literature is about," says Wallace, "story telling, almost for its own sake. Folk tales and tall tales demand that the truth be stretched, a little or a lot. It's sleight of hand, a form of magic -- possibly the only real magic many of us have an opportunity to be a part of in our adult lives. It's the magic a child experiences while growing up, one that most of us unfortunately lose. Novels and movies bring us in touch with that sense of wonder."

Yet, Wallace never envisioned Big Fish being translated into a movie and it required the imagination of screenwriter John August (Go, Charlie’s Angels) to reshape the stories into a cohesive and emotionally compelling cinematic narrative. “Daniel’s tales had so many fantastic and distinct elements,” says August. “The father/son conflict is both universal and, at the same time, particular and unique. There’s also a great love story and an almost Homerian odyssey filled with incredible adventures. The book goes in so many different directions I knew it would be hard to reshape it as a movie, but that made it all the more exciting to try.”

When Wallace and August met, the author imparted some of the secrets behind his stories, about how he’d borrowed from such elements as classic Greek mythology such as the labors of Hercules, as well as his research on American fables that have been passed down from generation to generation. “The kind of stories we’re telling in Big Fish are almost like rituals,” August explains. “They’re tales that have been told hundreds of times, not merely to recount what happened, but what should have happened. They’re extreme versions of life, superlative versions of the way you’d like life to be. Edward has a need to tell these stories continually so that everybody will remember them and, in the process, remember him.”

Though Bloom’s hyperbolic recollections seem to be figments of an overactive imagination, there are elements of truth in them as well, August continues. “His son Will (Billy Crudup) is searching for the truth of what his father did, and because he’s a journalist, he’s looking for the factual truth, which is different from the emotional truth. Edward probably has never said a single true thing, but every story he told had a deeper level of truth behind it.”

One major creation of August’s was the character of Will, who serves only as the narrator of Wallace’s stories. For that, August drew on his personal experiences. While the dynamics of his relationship with his late father were not like that of Edward and Will, there was more than one common thread. “Every son looks up to his father, sees him as larger-than-life. But as you grow older, you start to see him as a man and not just your father,” says August. “There’s that strange moment when you realize he doesn’t always know what he’s doing and neither do you. I think it’s pretty easy to put yourself in Will’s place, knowing that your father has a thousand qualities you love, but several that drive you crazy.”

In Big Fish, Will learns he is about to become a father. At the same time, he learns he’s just about run out of time trying to connect with his own father. But he discovers that, despite outward appearances, Edward deeply loves his family and his wild stories contain real nuggets of truth. Will realizes that his own life turned out the way it did because his father challenged him to venture out and explore, which is how he ended up in Paris.

“The irony, of course,” August continues, “is that he ran away from his father’s storytelling only to become a storyteller himself. The only difference is that his father spoke his stories, while Will writes his down.”

THE BIG FISH JUMPS OFF THE PAGE

If there’s one thing that Oscar®-winning veteran producer Richard D. Zanuck learned from his legendary father and Hollywood pioneer, Darryl F. Zanuck, it’s to go with his instincts. “I know it may sound like a cliché, but he said that if a piece of material moves me emotionally, I should go with those feelings,” says Zanuck. “The script for Big Fish moved me to tears every time I read it. Not only is it a story about fathers and sons, but there’s a great deal of fun in it as well – giants, witches, circus performers. It’s very entertaining as well as being a metaphor for living life to the fullest.”

August initially approached Academy Award®-winning producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen (American Beauty) with his script. “What was so fascinating about the story was that we all have journeys in life, but Edward Bloom goes on his quests with more gusto that most of us would have the nerve to,” says Jinks, “and that’s what made it such a delight to read.”

“Also,” adds Cohen, “Dan and I were very much in sync with Edward’s belief that what is so powerful about stories is that they can teach you how to live a great life and maybe how to think bigger and dream larger.”

Jinks and Cohen were also in sync about who they wanted to direct the project – Tim Burton, to whom they sent the script. At the time, Burton was planning another project with Zanuck, a follow-up to their recent successful collaboration on Planet of the Apes. “But I thought Big Fish was one of the best scripts I’d ever read and so did Tim,” Zanuck contends. “And we wanted to do it right away.”

When August heard Burton was interested in directing the film, he knew he was the ideal choice to create that special blend of ingenuity and alchemy needed to bring the story of Big Fish to life on the screen.

What struck Burton about the material was its delicate balance between the epic scope of the tall-tales and the simpler, more intimate story about family dynamics. “I enjoyed the fact that it would go into moments of fantasy and then return to the poignant reality of losing a parent,” says Burton. “The challenge for me was to maintain that balance in the visualization of the story.“

Burton was perhaps the only person who had even a moment of self-doubt about his ability to do justice to the story. Zanuck certainly didn’t. “As he’s shown in films like Edward Scissorhands, Tim’s stories have whimsy and fantasy with great heart. And when you think of the wacky, almost surreal Ed Wood, you also remember Martin Landau’s moving performance as Bela Lugosi, which won him an Oscar® as Best Supporting Actor. Big Fish offered him the opportunity to go even further, to delve into the complex universal issues that resonate between fathers and sons and also to exercise his great gift for visualizing the exotic and bizarre.”

Burton’s enthusiasm was palpable – and infectious recall Jinks and Cohen. “One of the great things about Tim’s response was that he would point to scenes in the script and say ‘I can’t wait to shoot that,’” says Cohen. “He also brought imaginative and tangible ideas that John then worked into the script.”

Jinks adds “I’d say that one of the big selling points for Tim was that he is known as a great storyteller and this was a movie about great storytelling. If you look at such films as Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, they’re exactly the kinds of stories Edward Bloom might tell.”

Bloom’s storytelling was definitely an attraction for Burton, the director says. “Here’s someone who invents himself into an extraordinary person, someone who doesn’t have much use for ordinary life and needs to embellish it, make it exciting. His stories are what make his life exciting. They give him a touch of magic.”

THE BIG FISH CASTS ITS CASTING NET

With a highly regarded script, three acclaimed producers and a visionary director aboard, the casting of the central roles in Big Fish proved to be as effortless as it was fortuitous.

For the crucial central role of Edward Bloom, the filmmakers were searching for two world-class actors who could convincingly play the same character as a younger and older man.

For the younger Bloom, Ewan McGregor had demonstrated his versatility in films such as the romantic musical Moulin Rouge and the action epic Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. At the time they handed him the script for Big Fish, McGregor was working with Jinks and Cohen on the romantic comedy Down With Love. The actor says he related to the story in a personal way. “The first time I read the screenplay, it left me speechless. It was so moving, with a power that derives from essentially being about the relationship between a father and a son. It reminded me of when I left Scotland, which is a big deal for a Scot. I moved to London to go to drama school but really because I wanted to see the world. It’s similar to what Edward does. Sometimes you have to leave the familiar to find out who you really are. I think the film will resonate with everyone who’s ever done that.”

As a father himself, what captivated McGregor was the kind of man he would be portraying in Big Fish. “When Edward Bloom looks back over his life, he should be very pleased with what he achieved. He always loved his wife. He was good at basketball and baseball and fishing. He was a good circus employee, a good salesman, a really good soldier. And he rebuilt a whole town just for the sake of the citizens who live there. He is one helluva guy.”

To find the right actor to play Bloom in his later years, Zanuck says that a picture proved to be worth a thousand words. “In 1997, a magazine published side-by- side photos of Ewan and Albert Finney from 1963 when he starred in Tom Jones. He was about the same age as Ewan then. The resemblance was remarkable.”

“There it was, the same smile, the same dimple, the same sparkle in the eyes,” continues Cohen. “They looked eerily and brilliantly alike.”

Finney’s illustrious 40-year career, has included not only playing Tom Jones in the Oscar® winning film of the same name, but more recently portraying American attorney Ed Masry in Erin Brockovich, for which he was Oscar® nominated as Best Supporting Actor and Winston Churchill in HBO’s “The Gathering Storm,” for which he won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award.

Finney was captivated by Bloom. “The story for me contained all sorts of possibilities. There was all that wonderful, magic stuff, the kind of material that Tim does so well. Not only is he a wonderfully visual director, but he has a facility and ease with actors. It’s an ideal combination.”

In taking on the role of Bloom, Finney found a through line between the character’s journey and his life as a performer on stage and screen. “I’m very sort of earth bound as a person. I tend to look at what’s real, what’s logical. But through drama, I’m somehow allowed to go into fantasy, into a strange other world, to fly a little bit.”

Though they have no scenes together – for obvious reasons – off screen McGregor and Finney became fast friends. “I recall being blown away that I was actually going to meet Albert Finney,” confides McGregor. “The idea of playing him was almost overwhelming because he’s such a legend. Despite the fact that we have no scenes together, I spent as much time as I could around him. He loves acting still, and I like that because I do as well. So it was reassuring to see that after all these years he still has that passion.”

Finney, who shot his scenes first, recalls “We each had a scene where we were fishing in the river. So I said to Tim, ‘Better get Ewan here because he’ll have to do this too.’ So he did. Ewan had been doing a bit of fishing in Alabama, so I asked him, ‘How do we cast?’ And he showed me. I tried it and, well, it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Fortunately, the rest of the time, my work came first so he had to follow my lead,” Finney laughs.

Fortune also smiled on the filmmakers in the casting of the beautiful and loyal Sandra, the woman for whom time literally stands still for Edward. Sandra is portrayed by Jessica Lange (two-time Oscar® winner for Blue Sky and Tootsie) and the young Alison Lohman (who wowed critics in her starring role in White Oleander, which earned her ShoWest’s “Newcomer of the Year” citation).

“We got lucky twice,” says Jinks. “Who could wish for two better actors to play Sandra, and who could deny the similarities - the cheek bones, the smile, the same feminine physicality.”

For Lange, the power of Big Fish was in its evocation of the magic realism style of such giants of literature as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Rulfo. “It was a unique script for an American film,” says Lange, “a wonderful fable, beautifully written, with interesting movement through time. And the setting was terrific, the wintry woods of Alabama, very haunted, very surreal.”

Spending time in Alabama, where she had shot her Oscar winning Blue Sky, Lange again found herself in the thrall of her environment. “There’s great mystery down here, it’s deeply unsettling and absolutely fascinating. That magic, mystery, and a kind of sorrow that exists in Alabama truly permeates the film.”

At its heart, beyond all the larger-than-life adventures, Lange sees Big Fish as essentially a love story. “I wanted the audience to be able to understand immediately that Edward and Sandra are still madly in love after 40 years, that this practical down-to-earth woman fulfills all his fantasies. Sandra is a wonderful character. She has a wonderful acceptance of the world, of letting things be.”

In portraying the young Sandra, Lohman was captivated by the romance of the story. She says she was overwhelmed by the depth and tenacity of Edward’s passionate courtship, which starts out when she receives 10,000 daffodils. “You just never imagine that love can be like that. This man would do anything for her,” says Lohman. “And I found that beautiful, poetic, like a fairytale.”

The romance in Big Fish was so palpable for Lohman that it has almost made a believer of her. “I hate to be pessimistic, but in real life you don’t really see that kind of love. You think it only happens in movies. But it’s almost like this film is so believable it makes you rise to the level of actually thinking it could happen. That’s what I think is so powerful about this movie. It gives you hope.”

The final significant casting challenge was the role of Will, the estranged son who lives in his father’s shadow, a character August developed from the novel’s abstract narrator. The actor Burton had in mind was Billy Crudup, who had received a Tony nomination for his performance as “The Elephant Man” and is best known to film audiences from his starring roles in Almost Famous and Without Limits.

Will is a journalist who has moved to Paris because in Ashton, Alabama and perhaps the entire South, he would always be Edward Bloom’s son. “So he escaped to carve out his own place in the world and claim his own identity,” says Burton.

One of the attractions for Crudup was to work with Burton. “It’s hard to find a director with such a unique voice who has been so consistent over a period of time,” he says. “In order to be prolific you have to be successful and it’s hard to be successful when you’re speaking in your own voice. I can’t think of any other director who has done that for so long.”

Crudup says he related to the story of Big Fish on several levels. “The fantastical elements of the story were exciting and I truly empathized with Will’s struggle to figure out his father. The stories Edward tells just take him further from the truth of who he is. There’s no common language. All Will really wants is for his father to tell the truth about himself so they can relate in some way. Unlike his father, who can’t live without embellishing life, Will is someone who is into the beauty of reality and the poetry that exists in everyday life.”

The originality and unpredictability of the story is what echoed with Helena Bonham Carter, who plays more than one role in Big Fish. “The story doesn’t fail you. It’s basically about a son who learns to let go of his father and, at the same time, to accept him, and it made me cry every time I read it. But it’s also quirky and delightful with great heart, and that suits Tim because he’s got great heart. I’ve always loved his aesthetic, his off-kilter vision. His character informs all his films, as does his sense of pathos, whimsy and humor. There’s a great love there for the peculiarities of human nature.”

For Danny DeVito, who took on the role of the circus owner, Big Fish was an offer he had no intention of refusing. “Tim called and said he wanted me to do this. He sent me a script and a sketch of this very Fellini-esque character. It had everything. The story is warm and wonderful and, best of all, I get to work with Tim again.”

FISH TALES: EVER HEAR THE ONE ABOUT…?

“As you grow up, you get to a point when you start to see your father as a separate human being and not just the man who gave you life,” says August. “And you realize he had this whole other life before you were born. Filling in the missing pieces of that life drive the story of Big Fish.”

Edward Bloom’s life consists of fantastic episodes. When the young Edward decides to leave home, he chooses an unpaved fork in the road outside of town and enters a forest of such dark dangers that he must call forth all his courage and determination to survive an onslaught of stinging bees, jumping spiders, violent ravens and attacking trees.

“Now you know you’ve truly entered Tim Burton’s universe,” says Cohen. “He dredges up the stuff of myth, of legend, of dreams, of nightmares - all the power of the things that made us hide under the bed when we were little kids - as well as all the dreams and ambitions we’ve secretly fostered.”

“The kind of wild, off-beat surrealism is what Tim does so exquisitely,” adds Zanuck. “He’s as totally at home with the eccentric and the exotic as he is transporting us to that world through the film’s hero Edward Bloom.”

Every step of Bloom’s journey is populated by wild and offbeat characters - the kind of people Edward always wanted to meet. Even as a child he knew he was going to have an exceptional life. A witch (Helena Bonham Carter) told him so. And when he hooks up with a giant named Karl (Matthew McGrory - who is featured in the Guinness Book of Records as having the largest feet in the world, requiring size 29 1/2 shoes) he knows he’s on his way. Another memorable encounter is the poet – and later bank robber and Wall Street honcho - Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi) in the idealized town of Spectre, which lies just at the other end of the foreboding forest. It’s such an amazing town that no one has ever wanted to leave – except Edward. The further he travels from his origins, the more exotic his adventures become. While fighting in Korea, he happens on an unforgettable musical performance by beautiful conjoined twins, Ping and Jing (played by identical twins Ada Tai and Arlene Tai).

Then there are Edward’s circus adventures with Danny DeVito aboard as the crafty and somewhat devious circus owner and ringmaster Amos Calloway.

And that’s only the beginning.

THE LURE OF ALABAMA, LAND OF RIVERS

Big Fish was set in Alabama, but the motion picture production scouted the entire South looking for a location that met the myriad of requirements for the epic story, which covers a vast amount of diverse geography and a 50-year time span, according to Oscar®-winning production designer Dennis Gassner (Bugsy).

Ironically, they found the ideal spot in central Alabama, near Montgomery, close to the location of Wallace’s stories.

After covering six states, Gassner finally found everything he needed in and around Wetumpka, a sleepy town that hasn’t changed much since the 1950s, when the story begins.

But it was the rivers of Alabama that finally sold Gassner and Burton on the state. “You can’t do a movie about a fish without water,” says Burton. “Our script had several key scenes that needed to be in a river, on a riverbank or within sight of a river. Alabama has plenty of rivers and we filmed on several of them - the Tallapoosa, the Coosa and the Alabama Rivers.”

Further, he continues, “Water is an important aesthetic in the movie. We have water in almost every scene. You know they say water holds sound even after years and years, that the actual sound is somehow trapped in the water. So in some odd way there is a magic and a mystery and a sorrow here that hopefully permeates this film.”

But a river can also be an uncontrollable force. Gassner says the production drew up agreements with several local dam operators to control the flow of the river for a scene where Edward goes to talk to the giant at the mouth of his cave. The scene requires a certain low-level camera angle to show prehistoric-looking rock formations at the river’s edge. The utility helped them maintain the level they needed.

Big Fish marks the first collaboration between Gassner and Burton. But because of his early career as an artist at Disney studios, Burton was easily able to communicate his vision to Gassner. “Tim had the ability to say, ‘This is what I’m thinking,’ and do a quick 30-second sketch on the back of an envelope that showed me exactly what he wanted. We quickly developed a kind of artistic shorthand.”

For Gassner, the mixture of reality and fantasy presented him with fresh and exciting new opportunities as a production designer. “It was quite a demanding project, with the largest number of sets that I’ve ever designed in my career.”

On a knoll above the center of Wetumpka (called Ashton in the film), Gassner built the Bloom family house, a three story, wood-sided structure that Edward buys for his family and lives in for the remaining 40 years of his life.

The jewel-like, ante-bellum home owned by Jenny (Bonham Carter), the other woman in Edward’s life, was constructed over a river, which can be seen flowing by in every window. Over the years, vines grow up and envelop the house, eventually swallowing it into the surrounding swamp.

The large, ominous forest Edward enters when he first leaves home had to be built, tree-by-tree to meet the story’s specifications, according to Gassner. “It ended up being very beautiful and ominously scary. And when he reaches the end of the eerie darkness, he enters the brilliant sunlight of the picture-perfect town of Spectre. It invokes memories of the Wizard of Oz.”

Spectre is an idealized place. Every house and shop on the main street is a heightened reality of small-town Americana, circa 1950 and particularly Southern in flavor. All the design elements echo the traditional architectural icons of the South. The inhabitants of Spectre are no less unique. For one thing, they’re all barefoot.

CAPTURING CHARACTER THROUGH COSTUMES

When Danny DeVito saw Colleen Atwood’s costume sketch for the circus ringmaster, he was hooked and knew he wanted to play Amos Calloway. “We envisioned Amos as a sort of demented ringmaster,” says Atwood, “with unevenly striped pants, the tall crooked hat. It all had that Tim Burton touch.”

Atwood, who won the Oscar® this year for her costume designs for Chicago, has that rare ability to effectively capture a character with just a costume concept, so much so that it becomes a key to the actor. In Big Fish, she accomplished this time and again, no mean feat considering the dozens of costumes she created for the film’s principal cast, as well as the thousands of extras who appear in scenes that span half a century.

“Colleen always thinks from a character’s point of view,” says Bonham Carter. “Playing a character is like adopting a different skin. Having your costume is yet another new skin, another layer of character. Because everybody from the town of Spectre is sort of semi-ghost-like, I wear this diaphanous sort of cream thing. But my favorite is the witch’s outfit. Not the five hours of makeup, but the dress, the shoes, the cane.”

Because of the epic scope of Big Fish, Atwood separated the story into different periods and themes - the present day story, the allegory part, the 50s and 70s, the circus, etc. “Each piece had its own nuance, then I tied everything together with color and texture.”

Comparing the magical realism of the tall tales and the emotional realism of the present day sequences, Atwood contends that, “They’re not really so separate. In a way, they’re both real. That’s the basis of the story. One is as real as the other. So I tried to make both a little hyper-real so they’d marry together visually.“

One of the only characters who runs all the way through the movie is Karl the Giant (Matthew McGrory). “The idea that Tim and I had with Karl,” reveals Atwood, “is that when we find him in the beginning he is living in a cave, basically like an animal, clothed in a shirt of pieced-together rat skins and god-knows-what living in his matted hair and beard. As he moves through the human world he slowly becomes normalized. At the start, when he and Edward leave Ashton, he is wearing a great tent of a canvas coat and sawed-off suitcases for shoes. But by the end of the movie he is in a suit and tie just like everyone else.

Adds actor McGrory “Karl initially has a very feral feel to him. Having him wear a shirt of skins is so imaginative, so cool as is the ZZ Top-like grooming. Getting rousted out of the cave by Edward turns out to be a great thing for him. I become Edward’s excuse to leave and I get to grow too. We finally reach a point where I’m ready to be on my own with a great job at the circus.”

The young Edward, played by McGregor has the most costume changes to reflect the adventures of his life, says Atwood. “He’s a football star, a baseball player, the school’s leading actor, a suitor, a husband, a young father, a salesman, businessman – and he’s heroic in all of these guises.”

“The women,” she continues, “are romantic straight through, which meant lots of soft, feminine dresses for Sandra, both in the ‘50s and the present day.”

For the scenes in Spectre, Atwood wanted to convey a romanticized, impressionistic nature of the idealized town. “That’s why we used light colors and soft fabrics. The citizens of the town are very pale, kind of ethereal. The costumes for young Jenny are made of light-colored vintage fabric because Jenny belongs to Spectre.”

In the sprawling former Cloverdale Junior High School where the Big Fish production workshops were housed, the Costume Department consumed the most space. Classrooms and hallways overflowed with racks of crinolines, girdles, bras and waist cinchers, the devices that made it possible for female extras to squeeze into the mid-century form-fitting fashions. The Alabama teenagers who played extras learned that the effortless look of the cool contained 50s was achieved through use of foundation garments, hair curlers and false eyelashes.

For the film’s circus scenes, Atwood did research at the Midwest Circus Museum, which has a small but detailed library. “After that, my main reference was the Mary Ellen Marks’ photo book Indian Circus, which Tim and I love for its feeling.”

The job of rounding up the circus acts and animals fell to Stunt Coordinator Charlie Croughwell, who recently worked with Burton to teach actors to move like primates in Planet of the Apes. “As a stunt coordinator, I already knew a lot of circus people, but this was a very specific search. We didn’t want Cirque de Soleil types. The performers and the equipment had to be authentic and they had to look like they came out of American circus and carnival life circa 1950 – which was not easy to find,” observes Croughwell.

For five months Croughwell and one of his stunt women Mika Saito, traveled the circus circuit through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, Nevada and Idaho looking for performers and period equipment. “I watched and met with every available traditional circus performer I could find. I also scoped out lion tamers, elephant tamers, dog trainers, fire-eaters, fire tumblers, jugglers, unicyclists, trapeze artists, high wire acts and clowns, because we needed sideshow talent as well.”

Croughwell and Saito then presented photos of what they’d found to Burton. One of Croughwell’s discoveries truly enchanted the director was a suicidal cat who jumped from the high wire onto a pillow. “For a cat,” says Croughwell, “that’s unbelievable.”

Cats were also needed for the character of Jenny, played by Bonham Carter. Jenny lives in a house with dozens of cats, all of which were supervised by Atlanta-based animal trainer Seina Phillips. “Controlling cats is entirely different from dogs,” observes Phillips. “Cats have no use for the word ‘no,’ so I had to furnish Jenny’s house with every other kind of cat - ‘hold’ cats, and ‘stay’ cats, ‘go to’ cats and ‘go with’ cats. There was even a ‘go crazy’ cat - but we didn’t use him.”

For a scene in which the young Edward rescues a dog from a burning house, Burton asked for a St. Bernard. “I think that’s pretty funny - rescuing a rescue dog,” says Phillips. “Anyway, I got a six-month-old female named Reva who already weighed 70 pounds. Edward had to carry her out of the fire upside-down, cradled in his arms like a baby. I trained Reva by carrying her everywhere she went. Pretty soon it got to be where she would just completely go limp in your arms. That’s unusual for a dog. But it worked. By the time we got to the scene she did exactly what we wanted.”

THE SOUND OF THE SOUTH

For the unique flavor of the dialogue in Big Fish, says dialect coach Carla Meyer, “We were trying to find a dialect that captures the language of the script, which is very colorful and very poetic. We settled on a sound that was slightly more old-fashioned than a contemporary Southern accent. It doesn’t all belong to a specific state. Even though the story is set in Alabama, it takes place in Ashton, which is the author’s fictional creation, as is the town of Spectre, which is definitely off-the-map. And Tim was looking for something that was lyrical but not overly pronounced because there’s so much narration in the film.

“Also, the characters are from various generations and live in many different time periods. So we had to find a marriage between an authentic dialect and the fictional characters. I played a number of sample dialects for Tim to give him a point of departure. Then I developed practice tools for the actors using, among other things, the writings of Mark Twain, such as his essay ‘How to Tell a Story.’

Meyer had previously worked with Finney in helping him customize American accents for his roles in Washington Square and Erin Brockovich and, briefly, with Ewan McGregor in Night Watch. “Albert is the storyteller, so his language in the script is more lyrical. The dialogue for the younger Edward is more conversational, slightly snappier, more interactive. But when Ewan, as the young Edward presents a prepared speech to Sandra, you can hear an echo of Albert as the older Edward in it. That’s the sign of a true ensemble.”

“I like working on accents,” says McGregor. “And what we were doing here was a very subtle, precise, slightly old-fashioned Southern accent that was really beautiful. It tasted very good in my mouth, soft yet powerful and very expressive.”

Lange has done many different Southern accents and quickly developed a voice for Sandra that is echoed in Lohman’s inflections as the younger Sandra. Crudup, on the other hand, “was playing a character who wants to separate himself from his roots,” says Meyer, “so he very consciously has almost no accent at all.”

The verbal showmanship of DeVito’s ringmaster is charged with Danny’s special kind of energy. In addition, when the film travels to Spectre, a town that is magically isolated from the rest of the world, the speech patterns shift gears, so the town mayor, the poet Norther Winslow and the other citizens have a slightly countrified inflection.

“Tim showed great foresight in giving the actors a great deal of time for preparation and a good rehearsal period,” says Meyer. “When you’re working with actors on an accent, you want the process to be fun and useful as a way into the character, very much like the right costume. An accent changes you in the same way as a corset changes the way you stand. When the actor is wearing the costume and owns the accent, the fit becomes seamless. “