As a Producer, you try to make all the right decisions. You find the material you think will make for an interesting film that people will want to see and those two instincts pull on you all the time. Will it be good or at least interesting, and will people want to see it? Of course you want to make the best possible film, but if nobody watches your work, there’s a feeling of failure. Aim for the greatest commercial success and you will stray far from what drew you to the material in the first place. The Truman Show has become something of an oddity. Highly acclaimed at the time, combining a celebrated director (Peter Weir) with an actor who was the hottest comedy star back in the 1990s (Jim Carrey).
The script by Andrew Niccol is speculative Science Fiction, that gets some right and quite a bit wrong, to the point where there were Media Ethics courses focusing on the characters of creator Christof, best friend Marlon and Truman’s wife, Meryl literally prostituting herself for fame. There’s a legendary screen test – that nobody can actually find – where Gary Oldman plays Truman as somebody who cracks in a more dangerous way that Carrey, who channels Jimmy Stewart to control his usual mania. Niccol was going to direct, but the Producers wanted someone more experienced. They considered Sam Raimi, which is when Carrey was cast, before going with Weir. Knowing a satire on reality TV in 1998 could date poorly, Weir focused on the steps made by Christof to present Truman’s world as absolutely real that clash with people behaving unnaturally simply because they know there’s a camera filming them. If a lie is truly believed, is it any different than the truth?
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