The music video for Across the Universe, originally used to promote i am sam (Jessie Nelson, 2001), was directed by Len Wiseman. He received a Best Art Direction nomination for Quarashi‘s Stick ‘Em Up at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards and a Best Director nomination for Rufus Wainwright‘s Across the Universe at the Music Video Production Association (MVPA) Awards.
It seems Wiseman drew inspiration from Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon), a 1956 fantasy featurette directed by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse and René Magritte‘s Golconda.
Movie still from Le Ballon Rouge.
It won numerous awards, including an Oscar for Lamorisse for writing the best original screenplay in 1956 and the Palme d’Or for short films at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. The film also became popular with children and educators. This is the only short film to win the Academy Award for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) and to receive a nomination for anything besides Best Live Action Short Film. Lamorisse used his children as actors in the film. His son, Pascal Lamorisse, plays Pascal in the main role, and his daughter Sabine portrays a little girl.
Golconde, René Magritte, 1953
As was often the case with Magritte’s works, the title Golconda was found by his poet friend Louis Scutenaire. Golkonda is a ruined city in the state of Telangana, India, near Hyderabad, which from the mid-14th century until the end of the 17th was the capital of two successive kingdoms; the fame it acquired through being the center of the region’s legendary diamond industry was such that its name remains, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “a synonym for ‘mine of wealth’.”
Magritte included a likeness of Scutenaire in the painting – his face is used for the large man by the chimney of the house on the right of the picture.
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