When director Alex Woo set out to make his feature debut, he wanted to conquer a subject that no animated movie had been able to crack: dreams. There were countless films that had tinkered with the idea, but aside from a brief slice of Pixar’s “Inside Out,” where dreams are treated like a Hollywood studio, a movie devoted to them remained out of reach. It was a massive goal. But with “In Your Dreams,” Woo pulled it off.
The movie’s young protagonists, Stevie (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) and her little brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen), traverse the dream world in an attempt to have the Sandman grant their wish. The kids’ mission is to repair the broken relationship of their parents (Simu Liu and Cristin Milioti). It’s an adventure with some dazzling, gently surreal imagery and a killer soundtrack.
One scene in particular is a showcase for all the brightest parts of “In Your Dreams:” a dream sequence set to the Eurythmics’ classic 1983 song “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” “That was actually one of the very first sequences that we came up with for the film, because I always wanted the Eurythmics in there,” Woo said. “And because there’s so much energy and there’s this hard-driving momentum to that song. Plus we knew that we wanted to feature a lot of different dreamscapes in the film.”
While the idea for a wild dream montage was a part of “In Your Dreams” from the beginning, it went through several iterations. At one point, Woo said, there were 25 or 30 different dreams that Stevie and Elliot would visit—but he had to keep a close eye on the runtime, along with more practical considerations. When he and his team showed the
full rundown to their partner studio, Sony Pictures Imageworks, they were told, “Yeah, there’s no way. We can’t do that many. We don’t have the time or budget for it.”
Throughout the production, they culled the sequence down to its final form, which includes 10 to 12 dreams. One of the casualties was a vignette that took place on a huge LEGO boat. “Elliot, in the real world, was building this LEGO pirate ship,” Woo said. “It was Elliot’s dream but Stevie’s nightmare.”
The director is thrilled with how the sequence came out, particularly because he was able to license the Eurythmics’ most famous tune. He used “Sweet Dreams” in two screenings before officially securing it. “Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart are quite protective of that song,” he said. “We were like, ‘What are we going to do if they say no? Let’s not entertain that; let’s just focus on trying to make the sequence play out as great as possible.’”
You might call it a dream come true.
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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