Rocky highs in quake’s wake,

When director Brad Peyton pitched Dwayne Johnson on his new film San Andreas, a relentless thrill ride that brings the seismic Big One to the big screen for the first time in 40 years, he promised to redefine the disaster genre.

“I want to create shots that truly immerse the audience inside the earthquake, inside the tsunami,” Peyton told the action superstar. “And also I need to immerse you.”

Peyton described his vision this way: “Just like the event, I’m not letting you out, I’m not letting you off the hook. There’s no ‘Cut!’ coming.”

Movies become this metaphoric way of working out your own fears. We want to go through that hell and come out the other side and see the lessons that are learned.

San Andreas proves Peyton is as good as his word. The $US110 million ($140 million) film follows a search- and-rescue pilot (Johnson) as he and his estranged wife (Carla Gugino) rescue their stranded daughter (Alexandra Daddario) after a huge earthquake hits California. Paul Giamatti plays the Caltech seismologist who predicts it.

San Andreas joins a growing revival of the disaster genre that was all but abandoned in the years after the Twin Towers fell in 2001.

Real-life catastrophes are so commonplace it’s not surprising when a flu pandemic coincides with the release of 2011’s Contagion or a tsunami hits Japan just months after audiences watch one depicted in 2010’s The Hereafter.

Perhaps the success of films from Gravity and Godzilla to Noah and even This is the End has more to do with our need for catharsis than we thought.

“Movies become this metaphoric way of working out your own fears,” said San Andreas screenwriter Carlton Cuse, who was also head writer of TV’s Lost. “We want to go through that hell and come out the other side and see the lessons that are learnt.”

San Andreas comes after two big Nepal earthquakes and a spate of spring tremors in Southern California. The movie’s website now links to the American Red Cross, the Global Disaster Preparedness Centre and a website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who’s making a public seismic safety push, has plans to attend the premiere in Hollywood.

Even Johnson ran earthquake drills with his family after watching the finished movie. And Peyton, a Canadian who grew up with blizzards, has fully stocked quake-survival kits at the ready. They’re both hopeful the film will inspire more Californians to be prepared. “We thought we were prepared before our movie,” Johnson said. “Now we’re as prepared as we can be. We also have a new-found respect for Mother Nature, for the power and the wrath.”

For Johnson, that meant skydiving into a San Francisco’s ballpark with a terrified Gugino strapped to his stomach on one day, rappelling out of a suspended helicopter the next and then, on another, performing an underwater rescue scene inside a 1200sqm tank as 35,000-litre shipping containers of water were dumped around him.

Instead of the abstract “God’s eye view” favoured by “Master of Disaster” filmmaker Irwin Allen in his 1974 classic Earthquake, Peyton used more close- ups to enhance the claustrophobia and terror.

And though he had the budget to rely on the spectacle of special effects, Peyton said he wanted visceral performances too. For that, Johnson nicknamed him “The Method Director”.

“It was incredibly physical,” said the former WWF wrestler known as the Rock, with a dozen action films under his belt. “It all goes back to the idea of the audience experiencing it with me.”

While audiences will get a kick out of seeing some of California’s most recognisable landmarks obliterated (including, naturally, the Hollywood sign), San Andreas was shot mostly in Australia, with Brisbane, Ipswich, the Lockyer Valley and Elanora all doubling for those sun-drenched locales and the Village Roadshow studios on the Gold Coast employed for more technical scenes. The long shoot allowed Johnson to research his role by spending time with Australian search-and-rescue professionals.

“I spent a lot of time with helo pilots, trying to understand the mechanics of flying a helicopter and just getting into their heads,” said Johnson, who trained with CareFlight, a Queensland non-profit emergency-services helicopter company.

“I wanted to know how they look at their job, what they think, and how they’re able to separate their emotions from the job, because it’s just human nature when something like this happens to go into that fight-or-flight mode. These guys are incredible warriors and spending time with them was invaluable.”

Now a huge fan of Australia, he said: “The Gold Coast was the best location I’ve ever shot in.” Spending much of the time at his private rental home and at the gym, he even ventured out to the beach. “It was beautiful although we had to make it a little private for us.”

Johnson also fell in love with one of the local actresses who scored a small part in the movie, Kylie Minogue. “Dwayne came to set just because he wanted to meet her and took lots of pictures with her. She sent us an email after she saw the movie. She freaked out over it,” Peyton laughed.

Indeed, thanks to digital wizardry and a healthy budget, Peyton put the viewer inside every scene. In three months of shooting, producer Beau Flynn said, only two days were dialogue. “A lot of times you’re like ‘We don’t have the money to do that’,” producer Beau Flynn said. “That was never our problem. Our problem was ‘How are we going to do it? It’s never been done before.’”

They made what Peyton called a human “hamster wheel” and rolled it over a parking lot strewn with dirt to put the viewer inside a car as it plummets down the Santa Monica Mountains.

With visual effects, the audience climbs the crest of a 15-storey tsunami wave, ducking falling shipping containers as a nearby barge capsizes. In another scene, they’re trapped inside an underground parking garage as a building crumbles. And yet for all that effort (and money) to create the mind-blowing spectacle of San Andreas, Cuse, Peyton and Flynn said they made a deliberate attempt to root every scene in the characters, Spielberg style.

“The Method directing is trying to build an environment so that everyone can feel the reality of the situation,” Peyton said. And ultimately, he added. “San Andreas is going to stir up a conversation”.

San Andreas is now screening.