Tagline: They said it was an accident, but the reality is it hasn’t happened yet.
Premonition movie storyline. Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) has a beautiful house, a loving husband and two adorable daughters. Her life is perfect, until the day she receives the devastating news that her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) has died in a car accident. When she wakes up the next morning to find him alive and well, she assumes it was all a dream, but is shaken by how vivid it felt.
She soon realizes it wasn’t a dream, and her world is turned upside down as the surreal circumstances lead her to discover that her perfect life may not have been all that it appeared. Desperate to save her family, Linda begins a furious race against time and fate to try everything.
When the first draft of PREMONITION was submitted to producer Ashok Amritraj and his company Hyde Park Entertainment, Amritraj thought the screenplay had all the ingredients of a terrifically twisty motion picture. What especially sparked Amritraj to the screenplay was not just the opportunity to mix a domestic drama with a time-shifting suspense movie, but the chance to keep an audience engaged without the liberal doses of violence so often associated with thrillers. “The movies that keep you on the edge of your seat aren’t about blood and gore, but have a psychological angle that really unnerves you, like old Hitchcock movies,” says producer Amritraj. “This is an extremely original story and script.”
As with all great stories, PREMONITION began as a very simple idea: how would it feel to lose the most important person in your life, only to wake up the next day and find them alive? Would you assume it was a dream or regard it as a foretelling of tragedy yet to come? When producer Sunil Perkash posed these questions to writer Bill Kelly, he took the idea a step further. “What if the days of that week were like playing cards – you throw them up in the air and however they land is how they play out?”
By taking the emotional tension of such an incredible loss, and adding this component of uncertainty, the story questions notions of fidelity, love and fate. “If Linda had become so complacent about her life, such that every day felt the same,” says writer Bill Kelly, “then this phenomenon she experiences becomes the conduit for making her realize what is important to her.”
Founded upon the premise of a woman unsure of her surroundings, torn between the complete control by which she has been leading her life, and accepting her fate, PREMONITION’s narrative was inherently cinematic. Equally important, it had a strong female protagonist who is placed in an extraordinary situation which she must solve in order to right her world. “It has this wonderful premise about an everyday housewife who is faced with the possibility of her husband dying and the power to prevent it,”
Having Visions
With the PREMONITION screenplay in hand, the filmmakers began the search for a director who could bring more than “conventional” genre elements to the project; someone who would have a sure touch with tone and actors yet show a flair for reality and un-reality. “I wanted a filmmaker who had new ideas for the genre,” says Amritraj, “so that PREMONITION would be more than just a thriller.”
The filmmakers met with at least 35 different directors before choosing German-born Mennan Yapo, who had made an unconventional, dreamlike thriller called “Soundless”, about a hit man at a crossroads. “We were really impressed by that film” explains Amritraj, “It was clearly the look and feel we were looking for. He had all the right ideas from casting to lighting.”
Perkash agreed, “Mennan’s movie was fresh, interesting and stylish. And, more importantly it didn’t feel Hollywoodized. Mennan has his own ideas, and his own un-Hollywood creative way of thinking.”
Yapo shared their enthusiasm for the project: “The non-linear structure of the story posed a distinctive technical as well as creative challenge that I couldn’t wait to get started!”
Premonitions
The word premonition comes from the Latin pramonere, meaning ‘to warn in advance’. In the scientific community the term “precognition” was coined to describe this type of “sixth sense.” Dr. Richard Broughton has dedicated his career to studying this kind of anomalous phenomena: “In the collection of cases we find there are natural groupings. And of course the largest grouping is dreams, the dreams that are frightening.
They have really rather dramatic characteristics that people recognize as being unusual, and they portray something that the person thinks is going to happen to them. And often it does. Often this changes behavior. People will alter their plans and it turns out to be a very beneficial decision.” Physicist Dean Radin has tried to understand how precognition might work, “There are two ways of thinking about it. One way is that the future is actually fixed – there is destiny – there is no way you can change it… The other way of thinking is that the future is probabilistic… that there are almost an infinite number of possibilities playing out each instant.”
The notion of seeing events before they happen has fascinated us for a long time, not only because it’s a nerve-inducing idea, but because it seems to keep happening to people from all walks of life. Tales of everything from disasters dreamed ahead of time to the solving of puzzling crimes to pre-envisioned stock market fluctuations have kept scientists, psychologists, dream analysts, law enforcement officials and a riveted, openminded populace in the thrall of this seemingly unexplainable phenomenon. Below are a few real-life stories:
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A young sales executive named Sunna Roulston had booked a trip to Thailand when she began having terrible premonitions, including the image of herself in a refugee camp surrounded by starved, soaked, and exhausted people. Although she went on the trip anyway, she left her family with a goodbye letter. It was while Sunna was on a small wooden boat off Thailand’s coast that the devastating tsunami of 2004 hit. After surviving an initial couple of waves, a large fishing boat arrived to take them back to shore.
When a voice told her to refuse the offer, to stay in their smaller boat, she demanded she and her friend not get on board. It sounded crazy, but the friend acquiesced to her seemingly crazy whim. The larger vessel left them behind, and as it pulled away an enormous wave capsized it, drowning everyone onboard.
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David Booth has had many dreams of airplane crashes, a number of which came true. This former pilot’s ability to see the future came to a climax in the late 1980’s when he had 10 days of recurring, vivid dreams in which an American Airlines flight flipped over, flew upside down over low buildings, and crashed into flames at an airport.
These terrifying dreams prompted him to call American Airlines, who referred him to the FAA. The FAA documented the details of his dreams, but were unable to take preventive measures because he didn’t have a flight number. Three days later, an American Airlines DC-10 jet, taking off from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, lost an engine, flipped upside down, flew over low buildings and exploded on the runway killing all 271 passengers. It was one of the worst air disasters in American aviation history.
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
Premonition (2007)
Directed by: Mennan Yapo
Starring: Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Jeff Galpin, Nia Long, Amber Valletta, Marcus Lyle Brown, Shyann McClure, Kate Nelligan, Irene Ziegler, Courtney Taylor Burness
Screenplay by: Bil Kelly
Production Design by: J. Dennis Washington
Cinematography by: Torsten Lippstock
Film Editing by: Neil Travis
Costume Design by: Jill M. Ohanneson
Set Decoration by: Raymond Pumilia
Art Direction by: Thomas T. Taylor
Music by: Klaus Badelt
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some violent content, disturbing images, thematic material, brief language.
Distributed by: Sony TriStar Pictures
Release Date: March 16, 2007
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